Book Reviews: Something of His Art; Breaking Bread with the Dead
Something of His Art: Walking to Lübeck with J.S. Bach by Horatio Clare (Little Toller, 2018)
Someone once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. In other words, it’s hard. Having tried it a few times myself, I can vouch for that.
But you wouldn’t know it from reading Horatio Clare’s Something of His Art. In this enchanting little book, Clare writes about music so organically and beautifully that it seems the simplest, most natural thing in the world to do.
The book was born out of a BBC Radio special, for which Clare had been asked to retrace Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1705 walk from Arnstadt to Lübeck in present-day Germany. Bach made the 250-mile journey, which took him nearly a month, to meet and to listen to Dieterich Buxtehude, considered the greatest organist of his day. Not having quite as much time to devote to the trip, Clare and his companions did parts of it by train and car. But they did as much walking as they could, and while walking it was easy for Clare to picture the vigorous 20-year-old Bach striding alongside them, and to think along these lines:
Bach in a wood in the rain… I do not believe he was ever caught out by weather. Thorough preparation is part of who he is, the orphan boy, the nation of one; you can see him thinking in pieces like the duets as he pushes on under a light rain which vivifies rather than depresses a solitary walker. The duets are lines of lyric poetry, as if written to be played in solitude, as if near-empty rooms surround them. I see flowers in vases in sunlight.
Clare interweaves imagery and musical analysis and reflection in a way that . . . well, I was going to say in a way that infuses new life into Bach, but it’s hard to argue that anything can do that, when Bach already overflows with life. Still, I felt that I got to know and appreciate him—the man and the composer—in new ways. For instance, I had not thought of Bach as someone who would teach his students to play with emotion—being somewhat hidebound in my views of the Baroque era in music—but that knowledge has begun to change how I think about and listen to and play his music.
And that was just one of the many benefits of reading Something of His Art, with all its bright flashes of insight on nature and history and religion and more. At 100 pages, this isn’t a lengthy read, but it’s one that deserves to be savored.
Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs (Penguin Press, 2020).
This is one of those books I didn’t get around to until many of my friends, acquaintances, and fellow writers had already read it, so I fear that everything there is to say about it may have already been said. Still, let me put my oar in as well, because I can’t help saying how admirable and valuable it is.
Jacobs has the blessed gift of being able to discuss various points of view, including those that differ from his, reasonably and thoughtfully. In this case, he’s tackling presentism, the view that teaches us to celebrate our own age as morally enlightened and all past ages as not fit for consumption. You might say he’s tackling “cancel culture.” Ninety-nine out of a hundred authors, in my experience, would either remorselessly shred all presentists to pieces, or claim that “cancel culture” doesn’t exist and remorselessly shred all who believe in it to pieces.
Jacobs is not a shredder. He is a lover and a teacher of old books, believing that we need the distance they provide from our own preoccupations and problems, yet he doesn’t excuse the immoral views held by many great writers of the past. An example that hit home for me, as a fan of Edith Wharton, was a student who threw The House of Mirth in the trash because of anti-Semitic passages. I love The House of Mirth, but I can’t deny—and can’t endorse—the anti-Semitism. Neither can Jacobs. So what we do with that?
Well, not throw it in the trash, for a start. Jacobs wants us to be attuned to what’s wrong with the voices of the past, while simultaneously recognizing that some of those same voices gave us ideals that can guide and help us to make the world better than they made it. He asks us neither to turn a blind eye to their flaws, nor to fear “defilement” from encountering those flaws, but to read with generosity. This, he says, means “not simply assuming the best of some writer or text from the past. It is, rather, a kind of struggle: taking the past seriously enough to argue with it.” He warns us not “to think that struggle and demand are incompatible with reverence,” but to wrestle with our cultural legacy even as we appreciate it. And from his long experience as a reader, writer, and teacher, he offers practical tools to help us do this.
At a time when those at all points on the ideological spectrum keep shouting as loudly as they can to drown each other out, we need Jacobs’s quiet but clear voice reminding us to acknowledge what’s wrong and still keep looking for and laying claim to what’s right. I can’t think of a more timely or important book at our present moment.
Book Links:
Something of His Art on Amazon
Something of His Art on Bookshop
Breaking Bread with the Dead on Amazon
Breaking Bread with the Dead on Bookshop
Other Links:
My book Dorothy and Jack is now available as an audiobook, read by Pam Klein and released by Oasis Audio! You can get it at Audible and other audiobook retailers.
I reviewed Washington Stage Guild’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s one-act comedy How He Lied to Her Husband, for DC Metro Theater Arts.