Just 33 days after the appearance of Blast, war was declared. This did not initially seem a threat to vorticism and its fellow movements, but rather an opportunity. As Rupert Brooke, a very different kind of sensibility, put it, many artists welcomed the onset of war “as swimmers into cleanness leaping”. A short and sharply brutal conflict was just what art needed finally to euthanise the past and slough off the fusty clutter of landscapes, nudes and the strictures of the academy. A new and modern art lay just on the other side.
Of course, as it turned out, these brave new movements turned out to be just another casualty of the trenches. Dissolving and faceting the human form was all very well on canvas but it didn’t look so clever in the light of the evisceration and vaporising caused by bullets and high explosives. The machine age promised a utopia in abstract but in practice the machine gun rendered humans merely a bloody and deliquescing smear. Blast was an early war victim: the second and final issue was published in 1915.
At some point in my youth, I learned the art of cruising a library. I hungered to satisfy my gnawing curiosities. I sought something that would make my queerness less unsettled and unsettling. Books, for years, stood in for men. I wandered silently through the stacks, a catalog number in hand, scribbled hastily on a sheet of paper, and delighted in reading books like Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance in the back corner of the library’s second floor. A borrowing card, tucked neatly at the back of the book, stamped with dates from decades ago, made me wonder how many others had wandered these stacks like me, like Ariadne in the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Literature that reflected the queer experience seemed to me a shared resource, and a public one for those who knew how to look for it. What’s more, the books I came upon made my queerness a cultural, historical phenomenon rather than simply a freakish feeling to be hidden away.
But the knowledge of my own sense of difference should have attuned me to the ways in which reading could illuminate the differences of others. Books could act as more than a mirror—weren’t they also a window?
If literature, as William Giraldi writes in “American Audacity,” is “the one religion worth having,” then Giraldi is our most tenacious revivalist preacher, his sermons galvanized by a righteous exhortative energy, a mastery of the sacred texts and — unique in contemporary literary criticism — an enthusiasm for moralizing in defense of high standards. “Do I really expect Americans to sit down with ‘Adam Bede’ or ‘Clarissa’ after all the professional and domestic hurly-burly of their day?” he asks in an essay bemoaning “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “Pardon me, but yes, I do.” The only insincerity there is the request for pardon: Giraldi is defiantly, lavishly unforgiving.
“American Audacity” is the rare example of a collection that coheres into a manifesto. Its essays were published during the last seven years, many in The New Republic and The Daily Beast, on topics as various as the art of hate mail, Herman Melville’s life and the Boston Marathon bombing (Giraldi, the author of two novels and a memoir, teaches at Boston University and is fiction editor of the literary journal AGNI). But every piece possesses the same moral urgency, which is to say that each advances the same critical argument. A clue to Giraldi’s sensibility can be found in the chapter headings. Literature’s actuarial tables dictate that a younger critic will tend to review, on balance, more elders than youngers. Giraldi is 44, still rosy-cheeked in critic years, but all of his subjects are older than he is, or dead.
The Incendiaries is an extraordinary novel in so many ways: the finely hewn beauty of its language, the layering of its themes, the ways that it reveals truth through narrative unreliability, and the remarkable way it makes one uncomfortable with one’s sympathies. I marveled at its efficiency, that it could do all of this in just over 200 pages, and I very much look forward to Kwon’s next book.
The Politics of Parody is a valuable study that shows how these satires were read, and may still be read, and also demonstrates their importance as cultural signifiers.
Alexiou, the author of books on Jane Jacobs and the Flatiron Building, fills her story with colorful sketches of Bowery luminaries, from the Calvinist martinet Stuyvesant, with his disdain for other faiths, to Thomas “Daddy” Rice, the white song-and-dance man whose “Jump Jim Crow” act became a synonym for brutal racism, to the punk diva Debbie Harry, a mainstay of the lamented nightclub CBGB, a Bowery fixture from 1973 to 2006.