Book Review: Nat Tate An American Artist: 1928-1960, by William Boyd (1998)

Author William Boyd with his book Nat Tate An American Artist: 1928-1960, 1998.

David Bowie at the launch party for Nat Tate, April 1, 1998. Critic Matthew Collings is at the right, and Jeff Koons is lurking behind Bowie's right shoulder.

Portrait of K, by Nat Tate, 1958. The Sander-Lynde Institute, Philadelphia. (Don't go looking for this painting, because it's not real. Also, don't waste time in Philadelphia searching for the Sander-Lynde Institute, it's not real either.)

There are several reasons why you probably haven’t heard of Nat Tate, an Abstract Expressionist artist active in New York City art scene of the 1950’s. The first is that Tate destroyed nearly all of his own work shortly before his suicide in 1960. Another reason why you haven’t heard of Nat Tate is because he didn’t actually exist. 

Tate was the brainchild of author William Boyd, who had the idea to create the biography of a fake artist and try to pass him off as the real thing. Boyd was on the editorial board for the magazine Modern Painters, and his fellow board member David Bowie (yes, that David Bowie) told him that he should turn this idea into a book, as that would make the hoax more convincing. Boyd wrote a short monograph, detailing how he had seen one of Tate’s drawings in a gallery and been inspired to dig into his story. 

Inventing Tate, whose name is a portmanteau of two of the most well-known art museums in England, the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, meant that Boyd had to invent other fictional characters to support his story. So Boyd created a wealthy patron who adopted Tate and financed his artwork, a gallery dealer who showed his drawings and paintings, and a British author, Logan Mountstuart. It’s through Mountstuart’s diary and letters that we see glimpses of Tate’s personality. Mountstuart became the subject of Boyd’s 2002 novel Any Human Heart. I wonder if Boyd had the idea for the novel about Mountstuart before the idea of Nat Tate, and then folded Tate into Mountstuart’s story, or if he created Mountstuart to support Tate’s story and then decided to expand Mountstuart’s story into a novel? 

When the book Nat Tate was published, it featured supporting blurbs from Bowie and Gore Vidal. A launch party was held in New York City on April 1, 1998. Bowie read excerpts from the book, and people in attendance claimed to recall Tate and his unfulfilled talent. Unfortunately, soon after that the hoax was revealed by a reporter. 

The story behind the Nat Tate hoax is more interesting than the book itself, which remains a fascinating curio. I can imagine if someone knew nothing of the backstory you could pick up the book and be convinced that Tate was a real artist. The book is full of photos—mostly of people other than Tate, of course. And the three works of Tate’s reproduced in the book look authentic enough to be real 1950’s Abstract Expressionist pieces. 

With the proliferation of the internet, it’s hard to imagine such a hoax being attempted now. Not to say that a hoax like this couldn’t happen, but someone would have to work very hard to create a convincing digital footprint for the fictitious person. 

Boyd kept Mountstuart’s diary entries about Tate in his novel Any Human Heart. As Mountstuart recounts a visit to Tate’s studio in 1959, an asterisk draws our attention to a footnote at the bottom of the page: “For a fuller account of Nat Tate’s life, see Nat Tate: An American Artist, by William Boyd.” (Any Human Heart, p.334) 

If nothing else, the Nat Tate book and hoax are continuing reminders of David Bowie’s everlasting coolness.

Book Review: Reagan: The Life, by H.W. Brands (2015)

Paperback cover of Reagan: The Life, by H.W. Brands, 2015.

Historian and author H.W. Brands.

Deified by conservatives and demonized by liberals, Ronald Reagan was one of the most significant presidents of the 20^th century. H.W. Brands’ 2015 biography Reagan: The Life is a cradle to grave examination of Ronald Reagan’s extraordinary life. 

Most of Brands’ book focuses on Reagan’s eight years in the White House, but he does a good job of outlining Reagan’s unlikely path to the presidency. Reagan started out as a radio announcer, and then became a film actor. In 1953, as Reagan’s career in the movies was tapering off, he accepted a job on television as the host of General Electric Theater. Reagan also became a spokesman for GE, and at the end of nine years, he estimated that he had toured 135 GE plants and spoken in front of 250,000 people. Reagan’s time at GE proved to be the perfect training ground for his next career move. 

Originally a New Deal Democrat, Reagan had gradually moved to the right politically during the 1950’s and early 60’s. In 1964, Reagan gave a televised, 30-minute speech in support of conservative Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. Titled “A Time for Choosing,” the speech did little to aid Goldwater’s hopeless campaign, but it boosted Reagan’s standing considerably. For the first time, people began to talk about the 53-year-old Ronald Reagan as a possible political candidate. Reagan was elected Governor of California in 1966, and re-elected in 1970. Ten years later, he won the presidency.

Reagan was “an intuitive student of history and politics rather than an analytical one.” (p.424) Long policy discussions were not Reagan’s forte. Reagan dealt in the factual rather than the theoretical. Brands compares Reagan to FDR, and makes the point that they were not strict ideologues. They both had strong ideological beliefs, but both men were willing to be pragmatic and compromise when they had to. Reagan wasn’t quiet about his admiration for FDR, saying in 1989, “Franklin Roosevelt was the first president I ever voted for, the first to serve in my lifetime that I regarded as a hero.” (p.706) 

Reagan’s leadership style was laid-back in the extreme. Since he was a big-picture visionary and not a detail person, he was more than happy to cede the management of those details to his staff. While that can work fine if you’re delegating tasks to, say, Secretary of State George Shultz, trouble might ensue if you’re delegating things to people like National Security Advisors Bud McFarlane and John Poindexter, two of the major figures in the Iran-contra scandal. 

Reagan had a fascinating personality for someone who became President. Non-confrontational in the extreme, Reagan was carried through life to a large degree by his considerable charm and charisma. Brands explained some of Reagan’s appeal, writing: “People could disagree with Reagan, but rarely did they find him disagreeable.” (p.209) I think people are sometimes tempted to read more into Reagan’s personality than was really there. You might think there must have been some hidden depths to this man who seemed so nice and positive and so untroubled by life. But I’m not sure there were any turbulent waters in the psyche of Ronald Reagan. Donald Regan, Secretary of the Treasury and later Chief of Staff for Reagan, wrote of his boss: “Never—absolutely never in my experience—did President Reagan really lose his temper or utter a rude or unkind word. Never did he issue a direct order, although I, at least, sometimes devoutly wished that he would.” (p.487) Unlike politicians who constantly curse, in the diary that Reagan kept during his Presidency, he wrote dashes in swear words, so hell and damn become “h—l” and “d—n.” (p.564) I can’t imagine Richard Nixon doing that.

A key to Reagan’s appeal was his relentless optimism. As Brands writes: “Reagan focused on the positive parts of any experience, convinced they held the key to its meaning. This habit constituted one of his great personal strengths, making him almost unsinkable emotionally. It was also central to his political success. Pessimism pervades the thinking of conservatives, who tend to believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket. They might be right, but they aren’t fun to be around.” (p.630) 

For me, one of the highlights of the book was Brands’ recounting of the October 1986 Reykjavik Summit, where Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev almost agreed to the elimination of all nuclear weapons. The two leaders came heartbreakingly close to an agreement, but Reagan’s refusal to agree to any limitations on the Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known in the media as “Star Wars,” scotched the deal. However, the talks at Reykjavik led to the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, one of the highlights of Reagan’s foreign policy. 

Brands is a sympathetic biographer of Reagan, and there are times when he gives Reagan perhaps more of the benefit of the doubt than he deserves. Brands doesn’t dwell on the parts of Iran-contra that Reagan didn’t play a part in—like Oliver North shredding documents. And Brands isn’t critical of Reagan’s light schedule as president, never mentioning that Reagan spent 345 days of his presidency at his California ranch, Rancho del Cielo. (President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, by Lou Cannon, p.465)

Unless you’re a detailed student of history, most presidents are reduced in the collective memory to a few sound bites. John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have a few more sound bites in the collective memory than most other presidents. Kennedy and Reagan don’t have the longest list of legislative accomplishments from their terms in office. However, both these men have inspired countless people, in large part because they were such excellent public speakers. As Brands writes, “Reagan communicated effectively not least because he gave essentially the same speech again and again. The particulars and the anecdotes varied, but the message never did.” (p.734) That might be Ronald Reagan’s ultimate gift: that he made people feel good about America again.

Book Review: Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1981, Second Revised Edition 2002)

Paperback cover of the 2002 updated edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, by Matthew J. Bruccoli. On the Fitzgerald book shelf, of course. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1931-2008.

Matthew J. Bruccoli was the leading scholar on the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During his long career, Bruccoli wrote or edited over 30 books related to Fitzgerald. Bruccoli’s biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Lift of F. Scott Fitzgerald was originally published in 1981. Bruccoli updated the book in 1991 and again in 2002. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur is the definitive biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in part because of Bruccoli’s masterful command of the facts of Fitzgerald’s life. 

Bruccoli traces Fitzgerald’s life from his birth in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1896, to his death in Hollywood in 1940. He keeps track of Fitzgerald’s peripatetic lifestyle, and one of the most useful tools is the chronology in the beginning of the book that traces Scott and Zelda’s movements from one place to another.  

Some Sort of Epic Grandeur is a sympathetic biography of Fitzgerald, but that doesn’t mean that Bruccoli makes excuses for Scott’s behavior. By all accounts, Fitzgerald was a charming man when sober. When he drank, however, his personality totally changed and he was often aggressive and belligerent. Bruccoli doesn’t revel in stories about Scott’s alcoholic dissipation, but he doesn’t downplay it either. 

Bruccoli has a deep appreciation for Fitzgerald’s writing, and he’s a good judge of the highs and lows of Fitzgerald’s work. Bruccoli is no fanboy apologist telling you that this obscure short story from 1936 is actually the best thing Scott ever wrote. In fact, Bruccoli is quite critical of Fitzgerald’s short fiction of the mid-1930’s, as Fitzgerald had seemingly lost his creative spark. 

Although today Fitzgerald is best-known for his novels The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, during his lifetime his short stories made him a lot more money. For example, in 1929, Fitzgerald earned $27,000 for eight short stories that he sold to The Saturday Evening Post but he earned just $31.71 in book royalties! Fitzgerald hoped that the money he earned from short stories would buy him time to work on his novels. However, it didn’t always work out that way. As Bruccoli writes, “He was a methodical planner all his professional life, preparing schedules and charts for his work; that he rarely kept to these plans did not discourage him from making them.” (p.143) 

One of the enduring myths about Fitzgerald was that he was a “natural writer,” someone who had an abundance of God-given talent, but not the intelligence to make the most out of that talent. Bruccoli soundly punctures that myth, in part by showing what a dedicated editor Fitzgerald was. Fitzgerald made significant changes to The Great Gatsby when it was in galley form, and he persevered through seventeen drafts of Tender Is the Night. (Bruccoli’s very first book about Fitzgerald was The Composition of Tender Is the Night.) 

Bruccoli also shows us how Fitzgerald’s own friends and contemporaries denigrated his intelligence. Edmund Wilson, who met Fitzgerald at Princeton, “never broke the habit of patronizing Fitzgerald. Although his affection was genuine, Wilson was unable to believe Fitzgerald was a major writer—in fact, a greater figure than himself.” (p.169)  

The Great Gatsby failed to meet Scott’s hopes for a blockbuster best-seller. It sold about 20,000 copies, less than 10% of what it now sells in a year in the United States, and Fitzgerald made more money from selling the movie rights to the novel than he did on royalties. Scott and Zelda’s life, never a model of stability, now took a darker turn. Scott began introducing himself as an alcoholic to people he was meeting for the first time. (p.251) When Zelda felt that Scott was flirting too much with the ballerina Isadora Duncan she threw herself down a flight of stone steps. (p.252) Bruccoli writes of the Fitzgeralds: “Having gone to France to escape the distractions of New York, they now returned to America to escape the dissipations of France.” (p.254) This reminded me of what Scott prophetically wrote in a 1926 letter: “Wherever you go, you take yourselves and your faults with you. In the mountains or in the city, you make the same things happen.” (Fool for Love, by Scott Donaldson, p.172) 

Bruccoli writes of Fitzgerald in 1933-4, as he was struggling to finish Tender Is the Night: 

“Heretofore, despite his self-indulgences, he had believed in his destiny and in his ability to preserve the best part of his genius. Now, struggling with his novel and grinding out unfelt stories, he came to feel that he was starting out all over again without the confident illusions that had sustained him in 1920.” (p.355) 

After Zelda’s third mental breakdown in 1934, Scott knew that it was extremely unlikely they would ever live together again. I think that contributed to Scott’s depression during these years and was part of the reason why Fitzgerald’s mid-1930’s short stories are so uneven. Fitzgerald was clearly floundering, searching for material anywhere he could possibly get it. In the same year he published the beautiful and heartfelt novel Tender Is the Night, he was also writing a mediocre and hackneyed screen treatment for George Burns and Gracie Allen titled “Gracie at Sea.” (“Gracie at Sea” was eventually published in the 2017 collection I’d Die for You.) 

Bruccoli continually unearths interesting tidbits about Fitzgerald. For example: just before Fitzgerald went to Hollywood in 1937 to work as a screenwriter for M-G-M, he briefly considered an offer to host a radio show that toured college campuses. (p.416) If Fitzgerald could have remained sober, it might have been a decent job for him, since he was funny, intelligent, and charming, but if had been drinking, it would have been a total train wreck. 

Fitzgerald worked hard in Hollywood, but he found screenwriting challenging. During the last year of his life, he planned and began writing a novel about a movie producer. At the time of Fitzgerald’s death in December of 1940, he had accumulated more than 1,100 pages of drafts, along with 200 pages of background material. “None of the episodes was regarded as final,” showing again what a painstaking reviser Fitzgerald was. (p.472) The unfinished novel, published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon, was the very beginning of the Fitzgerald revival and reevaluation of his talent. 

Fitzgerald was a true artist of remarkable grace and skill, and it seems fitting to let him have the final word. In an April, 1934 letter to H.L. Mencken, Fitzgerald wrote: “It is simply that having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.” (p.368)

Book Review: The Reckoning, by Edith Wharton (Originally published in 1902, Penguin Little Black Classics edition 2015)

The Penguin Little Black Classics edition of The Reckoning, by Edith Wharton. You can see my other Edith Wharton books in the background. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Edith Wharton, 1862-1937.

Edith Wharton’s 1902 short story “The Reckoning” was re-issued as part of Penguin’s “Little Black Classics” series in 2015. (I reviewed Joseph Conrad’s “To-morrow,” another title in that series here.) “The Reckoning” is paired with Wharton’s first published short story “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” which appeared in 1891. Both stories highlight Wharton’s depth as a writer.

In “Mrs. Manstey’s View,” we follow an aged widow, the titular Mrs. Manstey, who derives all of her enjoyment in life from looking out of her window and noticing the changes that occur slowly, day by day. The story is a deft little character study, and already it’s clear that Wharton has a real talent for describing people. I especially enjoyed this sentence:

“She loved, at twilight, when the distant brown-stone spire seemed melting in the fluid yellow of the west, to lose herself in vague memories of a trip to Europe, made years ago, and now reduced in her mind’s eye to a pale phantasmagoria of indistinct steeples and dreamy skies.” (p.4) 

“The Reckoning” is the tale of Julia and Clement Westall, who have founded their marriage on the intellectual understanding that it is not a bond for life, it’s merely an arrangement made until it no longer suits one of them, at which time they can break it off. Needless to say, what sounds fine in theory might not work so well in practice. One of my favorite quotes from “The Reckoning” is when Julia is describing her drawing-room:

“The prints, the flowers, the subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed to typify a superficial refinement which had no relation to the deeper significances of life.” (p.24)

Wharton is always superb when writing about marriage, and I thought this passage was marvelous:

“Her husband’s personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes. A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.” (p.29-30)

“The Reckoning” is another excellent piece of writing from Edith Wharton.