Book Review: Sacred Muse: A Preface to Christian Art & Music, by Charles Scribner III (2023)

The cover of Sacred Muse: A Preface to Christian Art & Music, by Charles Scribner III, 2023. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Charles Scribner III published two books in 2023, and they both reflect his different passions. One book is Scribners Five Generations in Publishing, which details the history of his family’s publishing company, Charles Scribner’s Sons. The other book is Sacred Muse: A Preface to Christian Art & Music, which explores Scribner’s passion for Baroque art and music. Scribner has a PhD in art history and has written monographs on Bernini and Rubens.  

Sacred Muse is a slim volume, meant as an introduction and overview rather than a definitive compendium. The book focuses on Scribner’s favorite artists, like Rubens, Bernini, and Caravaggio. One can hardly quibble with Scribner’s choices when he picks such masterful artists as these.  

I minored in Art History in college, and the class I took on the Baroque period was one of my favorites, so I enjoyed returning to Caravaggio, Rubens, and Bernini’s artworks in the pages of Sacred Muse. Scribner proves a more than able guide through these artworks, as he describes the Biblical scenes they depict, and examines the context in which these artworks were created. 

Scribner reminds us that because the Calvinist Reformed Church forbade paintings of religious subjects, “ecclesiastical commissions that engaged Rubens were unavailable to the Protestant Rembrandt.” (p.69) This fact tells us that Rembrandt’s many paintings with Biblical themes came not out of commissions, but of his own personal interest in depicting these scenes. This was something I hadn’t thought of before.  

Scribner devotes a good amount of time to Verdi’s Requiem, and he uses a wonderful quote from the music author George Marek: “The Requiem is one of those rare religious compositions which are loved by both the faithful and the agnostic. It is also one of those pieces of music which appeal both to the musically literate and the musical beginner. Its beauty lies deep and on the surface.” (p.105) I loved the last sentence of that quote, and it made me think of Miles Davis's album Kind of Blue, which is regularly acclaimed as the “Best Jazz Album” and is also a best-seller and often listeners’ entry point to the jazz genre. There are those rare works of art that are immediately accessible and reward repeated attention.  

Sacred Muse is an interesting reflection on art and faith, and it’s a pleasure to read a book that is so well-illustrated with full color reproductions of many of the masterpieces that Scribner describes in the text.  

Book Review: After Dark, by Haruki Murakami (2004, English translation 2007)

My paperback copy of After Dark, by Haruki Murakami, 2004, English translation 2007. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Night. It can be scary, romantic, sexy, all sorts of things. Darkness can reveal strong emotions and passions, and novelist Haruki Murakami knows this well. Murakami’s 2004 novel After Dark takes place between midnight and dawn on a single evening.  

The main character of After Dark is 19-year-old Mari Asai, who is reading a book at a Denny’s when the novel begins. This Denny’s plays a lot of 1960’s easy listening music, which I found unlikely, but hey, it’s Murakami’s Denny’s, so they can play whatever he wants them to. Mari is eventually approached by Tetsuya Takahashi, an awkward college student a little older than Mari who plays jazz trombone. Tetsuya tells Mari that he knows her older sister, Eri. From my limited knowledge of Murakami, Tetsuya seems to fit the pattern of other male Murakami protagonists: nice, awkward, a little goofy, with lots of pop culture knowledge.  

To reveal more about the plot seems, as usual with Murakami, superfluous. It’s less about the specifics of what is revealed and more about the journey Mari goes on over the course of this evening. There were things I didn’t quite understand in After Dark, but that’s sort of par for the course with Murakami, isn’t it?  

I like art that compresses the time frame, as it generally heightens tension and moves the plot along. After Dark is a bit of an exception to this rule, as the time frame is very compressed, but for me there wasn’t much tension in the plot. That’s not really meant as a criticism, as I don’t think After Dark is trying to be a page-turning thriller. I read After Dark very quickly, but I wasn’t breathlessly wondering what came next. I know, that sounds like a contradiction, doesn’t it? Hopefully Murakami would appreciate the contradiction.  

There are some great quotes throughout After Dark. One of my favorites is from a bartender who tells Mari, “Time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night.” (p.78) That’s so true, as time can speed up or slow down at will after night falls. One of my other favorite quotes was this: “In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.” (p.204)  

If you’re a night owl like me, go ahead and add After Dark to your nighttime reading list.  

Book Review: Scribners Five Generations in Publishing, by Charles Scribner III (2023)

The lovely cover of Scribners Five Generations in Publishing, by Charles Scribner III, 2023. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The inscription from Charles Scribner III inside my copy. We connected over F. Scott Fitzgerald's play The Vegetable, surprisingly enough! (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The distinguished publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons was founded in 1846. For fans of Jazz Age literature, Scribners is probably best known as being the publishing home of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. In 2023, Charles Scribner III published Scribners Five Generations of Publishing, a history of the company. Charles Scribner III is the fifth Charles Scribner to work for the family firm, and he and his father oversaw the merger of Scribner’s with Macmillan in 1984. (The Scribner imprint is now a division of Simon & Schuster.) 

Scribners Five Generations of Publishing is a fascinating look at the challenges and rewards of book publishing. Scribners has had more than its fair share of famous authors, from Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, J.M. Barrie, Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, the aforementioned triumvirate of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe, to Charles Lindbergh and P.D. James. Scribner shares personal stories about many of these authors, passed down from his father and grandfather.  

I knew I would enjoy reading this book when I read Charles’ description of Henry James: “James is a difficult author to read—beyond my patience—but of towering importance to the history of literature.” (p.29) My sentiments exactly.  

Charles Scribner III is a great admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing, as am I, and I found his paragraph about Fitzgerald to be an excellent summary of Fitzgerald’s brilliance: 

“There is something magical about Fitzgerald...the real magic lies embedded in the prose, and reveals itself in his amazing range and versatility. Each novel or story partakes of its creator’s poetic imagination, his dramatic vision, his painstaking (if virtuoso and seemingly effortless) craftsmanship. Each bears Fitzgerald’s hallmark: the indelible stamp of grace. He is my literary candidate to stand beside the demigods Bernini, Rubens, and Mozart as artists of divine transfigurations.” (p.45)  

Needless to say, I concur with Scribner’s assessment of Fitzgerald. There is indeed a magic that surrounds his sparkling prose. Scribner also aptly describes Fitzgerald’s duality: “Just as his life bridged two centuries, so does his work have a Janus-like aspect, looking back to the Romantic lyricism and epic dreams of nineteenth-century America and forward to the syncopated jazz of the twentieth.” (p.43)  

Thanks to his family connections, Scribner provides us with a portrait of Ernest Hemingway that allows us a glimpse at another side of this literary legend. Scribner quotes from the moving letter that Hemingway wrote to his father after his grandfather’s death. Hemingway called Charles’s grandfather “the best and closest friend that I had.” Shortly before Hemingway’s own death, he entrusted Charles’s father with his last will and testament, a tribute that speaks volumes about the close relationship between the author and his publisher.  

There are other fascinating tidbits as well: Charles’s father considered Charles Lindbergh “the fussiest author he ever had to deal with.” (p.97) Lindbergh was so controlling that he measured the space around punctuation marks! Although I guess that isn’t too surprising, given Lindbergh’s notorious attention to detail. When he was preparing for his historic solo flight across the Atlantic, Lindbergh trimmed all of the white space off of his maps and papers, in an effort to save as much weight as possible.  

Throughout the book, one feels something of the sense of obligation and duty that the Scribner family did to keep the publishing house going. There’s an admirable lack of ego that runs through all 5 of the Charles Scribner’s, and the other Scribners who led the firm. Charles Scribner II had a deep disdain for “the vertical pronoun,” as he called it, once circling all the capital I’s on a memo. (p.31)  

Charles’s father is an excellent example of putting family duty over personal glory. A brilliant academic, he had to turn away from academia when the family business needed him after World War II. Ultimately, he turned his commitment to scholarly work into editing many of the reference works that Scribner’s published during his leadership.  

Charles’s father is also the source of two of my own favorite quotations from the book: “You can always tell a moral question because it makes you feel so rotten.” (p.100) And his bon mot when author James Jones left Scribners for another publisher: “My disappointment is under control.” (p.117) 

We also learn from Charles that his piano playing skills might have contributed to Scottie Fitzgerald’s decision to keep Scribner’s as the publisher of her father’s works. In the late 1970’s, thanks to changes in copyright laws, Scottie and her adviser, Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, were looking at the possibility of changing publishers. When Scottie arrived at the Scribner’s office for a meeting with Charles and his father, she saw the piano in Charles’s office and asked him to play her something. He played his favorite Chopin waltz. “Halfway through it, I had the chilling thought that Fitzgerald’s future at Scribners might depend on this waltz.” After Charles finished playing, Scottie sighed and said, “It’s all so romantic.” (p.153) And so the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald remained with Scribners, his only publisher in the United States.  

Scribners Five Generations in Publishing is a lovely testament to books and literature, and it is a reminder of a bygone era, when a book publisher made decisions based not just on how many units they could sell, but on the talent of young, unproven authors. If you love the world of books, you’ll enjoy Scribners Five Generations in Publishing.  

Book Review: Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, by Marsha Gordon (2023)

The cover of Becoming the Ex-Wife: the Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott, by Marsha Gordon, 2023. That's such a cool photo of Ursula on the cover.

Professor and author Marsha Gordon

I recently had the good fortune to speak at the “Zelda Days” festival in Asheville, North Carolina. One of the other speakers that weekend was Marsha Gordon, a professor of film studies at North Carolina State University. Gordon is the author of the 2023 biography Becoming the Ex-Wife: the Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott. I had never heard of Ursula Parrott before, even though she was a highly successful Jazz Age author. My first thought was “Okay, Ursula Parrott is the coolest name I’ve ever heard.” Hearing Gordon lecture about Parrott’s life and writings just whetted my appetite to read her book. Now that I’ve finished reading Becoming the Ex-Wife, I can report to you that Ursula Parrott more than lived up to the coolness of her name. 

Ursula Parrott was born Katherine Ursula Towle in 1899, in Boston. She married Lindesay Mark Parrott in 1922, and when she began publishing, her publisher suggested she should use the name Ursula Parrott. Parrott’s first novel was Ex-Wife, which quickly became a sensation after it was published in 1929. Ex-Wife launched Parrott on a successful career writing novels, short stories, and working on screenplays in Hollywood. Parrott was in great demand as an author, earning huge sums for her work. But as quickly as the money came in, it went out. Like other Jazz Age authors (paging F. Scott Fitzgerald!) Parrott was unable to live within her means, and she was constantly in debt.  

Parrott’s life and career had several parallels with that of F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a Fitzgerald fan, I’m always on the lookout for Fitzgerald parallels. There’s no direct evidence that Parrott and Fitzgerald ever met, but he spent several months in 1938 working on a screenplay of her short story “Infidelity.” The plan was that “Infidelity” would be a vehicle for Joan Crawford at MGM, but there was no way a story about infidelity was going to make it past the censors in 1938. The fact that “Infidelity” was not produced was a disappointment for Fitzgerald. If Parrott and Fitzgerald ever met, they would have had a lot to talk about, and I can imagine them becoming friends and trading witty banter.  

Some of the parallels between Parrott and Fitzgerald: they were both raised Catholic, they both had two sisters who died in infancy, they were both obsessed with car crashes, and they both struggled with their grades in college, being smart people who didn’t “apply themselves” in school. Another connection was that Ursula’s first husband, Lindesay Parrott, was a Princeton alum. Although he and Fitzgerald didn’t overlap at Princeton, they probably had friends in common, and Lindesay’s father was a professor in the English department at Princeton.  

Parrott’s novels and short stories dealt with women entering the workforce, getting married, getting divorced, having affairs, being a single parent, and balancing work and life. She is a writer whose themes are still deeply relevant to American society today, nearly 100 years later. Unfortunately, nearly all of Parrott’s novels have long been out of print. Thankfully, Ex-Wife was published in a new edition in 2023, and it’s now next on my reading list. Gordon’s synopses of Parrott’s work will have you wanting to read more of Parrott’s work. 

Parrott was married and divorced four times, and she raised her son Marc largely with the help of her sister Lucy. Parrott’s private life was sometimes messy, and the chapter that discusses her four abortions is harrowing, offering a grim reminder of the aftermath of the fabulous Jazz Age parties.  

Throughout the book, Gordon is sympathetic to Parrott’s difficulties, as she struggled to meet her writing deadlines and stay afloat financially. Unfortunately, the last chapter of Parrott’s life was a tragic one, as she published nothing during the final 10 years of her life, and she died penniless in a New York hospital in 1957.  

Gordon’s excellent work at chronicling Parrott’s colorful life and writings will hopefully lead to a deeper appreciation of Parrott’s work, and a fuller understanding of how she fit into the writers of her era.