Book Review : Three Skillful Renderings of the European <i> Zeitgeist</i>

Artists & Enemies by Arthur A. Cohen (Godine: $17.95)

These three novellas are so suffused with the sensibility of Europe between the wars that they seem to be the newly unearthed work of a forgotten emigre writer rather than brand-new fiction by a contemporary American. Cohen has not merely written “historical novels,” he has become a historical person: living, thinking and recording events in cadences and rhythms unheard for half a century.

At the beginning of the first book, “Hans Cassebeer and the Virgin’s Rose,” a young art lecturer and copyist has barely recovered from a nervous collapse when he is offered the opportunity to restore a Giorgione Madonna. The assignment has been presented by a German count, who no sooner makes his request than he leaves Cassebeer’s side “to join a young cavalry officer in red-striped breeches and high black boots who bowed and clicked his leave.”

Reading such sentences, one checks the dust jacket again to make sure the author actually lives here and now in New York, because for the duration of this particular story, we’re in the Germany of chamber music concerts on Sunday afternoons, “the sounds of clinking glass and cups, riffles of fans, clucks of guttural contentment, and the swirling pleasure of a Mozart divertimento.”

None of this is overtly satiric or even meant to be--we’re merely transported to an age of perilous tranquillity, perfect order, prosperity and good manners; the events of the next decades as impossible to imagine as a moon walk to Copernicus.

Though there are intimations and hints, they’re as unobtrusive as they must have been to the people assembled in the county’s conservatory. In Cohen’s books, we are not only hearing about the past but innocently existing within it, hardly flinching at the count’s casually anti-Semitic remarks about the art dealer who sold him the Giorgione; these slurs are merely the conventions of the time and place, signifying nothing.

And so Cassebeer accepts the challenge of repairing the Madonna. After his breakdown, he had decided to devote himself to restoration instead of teaching and copying, and the job is precisely what he thinks he needs to complete his recovery. He is wrong, but the why and how of his wrongness form the plot of the story. The art dealer who provided the Giorgione has a beautiful, flirtatious mistress who heedlessly works her charms upon Cassebeer, complicating matters immeasurably. Infatuated with her, a certain German sentimentality inevitably creeps into his work on the Renaissance masterpiece.

When the count proudly exhibits the painting at the museum in his home province, the critics are vicious. Though the short cautionary tale ends right there, it continues in the reader’s mind, writing itself.

Supremely Gallic Tale

“The Monumental Sculptor” is about opportunism as demonstrated by an ambitious but only moderately gifted young French artist. Where the first story was thoroughly Teutonic, this one is supremely Gallic, pervaded by a fine ironic cynicism.

“The Monumental Sculptor” unfolds slowly, with a meandering digression into the Bohemian haunts of Paris, followed by an extended section on the academy for young ladies where the protagonist, Estienne Delahaye, teaches and falls in love with a Spanish student. We accompany the young couple on their wedding trip to Barcelona, then proceed to the country cottage lent to them by the famous sculptor Maillol, an idyllic sojourn made possible by a happenstance fully exploited by Delahaye.

Much of this novella takes place during and after World War II, a time when a young sculptor could be kept busy at monuments to fallen heroes of both sides, rationalizing that winners and losers alike are entitled to honor their dead. Once economic recovery begins, Delahaye’s particular kind of art lends itself perfectly to industrial and municipal projects, areas where avant-garde experiments would alienate the public.

Delahaye prospers, not particularly distressed by the fact that “he had passed over from sculptor to maker of sculptures. . . . He served society . . . to enhance its misconstruction of the past, and in the process acquired the styles, manners and habits of luxury that expressed his gratitude to the society for having favored him.”

Perhaps not an altogether admirable man, but fascinating to read about; Cohen proves again that vaulting ambition is one of the most versatile and enduring literary themes.

Enigmatic Piece

The longest piece in the book, “Malenov’s Revenge,” is also the most contradictory, complex and enigmatic: Russian traits are called up to define the personalities and temperaments of the two principals, Karnovsky and Malenov.

Karnovsky is the acolyte, an artistic young man smitten by the genius of the painter Malenov, a pioneering abstractionist living in exile from the Russian revolution. Malenov is a great bear of a man; a coarse, blustering peasant; Karnovsky is a bourgeois aesthete, favored by circumstance and education.

The novella is the chronicle of their long relationship with its constantly shifting patterns through decades of artistic ferment and general turmoil in Europe and America. “Malenov’s Revenge” is dense with detail and character, a psychological drama observed by a dispassionate third party.

The denouement is presented first, the events leading up to it retraced gradually. In less skillful hands, this technique could be exasperating; here it seems entirely natural, a study of obsession unwinding like a ball of string.