BOOKS
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from [Delahaye's] intention ," the narrator of
The Monumental Sculptor
assures us, "was the impingement ofliterature upon the plastic arts ,"
but nowhere does Cohen lay down, or heed, the opposite proscrip–
tion.)
Cohen has written elsewhere that he saw no necessary conflicts
between his roles as novelist and as theologian . Usually , there were
none.
It
would seem from
Artists
&
Enemies,
however, that God took
a leave of absence , from the art world at least, to be replaced by a
Master of Narrative.
There are some vivid demises in these pages . Having wrestled
with poverty, wealth , fame, obscurity , sloth, ambition, disciples and
women, Cohen's artists face the ultimate enemy , and lose. Both
Delahaye and Karnovsky graphically check out, as I calculate, at
around fifty-eight years of age . There is no way of knowing for how
long their work, or even the work of the master, Malenov (who also
dies in living color), will survive them .
By now Cohen knows how the God business
really
works , and
probably also knows whether his own enormous versatility has
assured him of a readership a half-century down the road. I'm
reminded of a cartoon in
The New Yorker
some years ago, of two dons
at a bulletin board , noting the passing of a colleague: "Published and
published , and perished all the same. "
In
the short term, this is a very good book.
IVAN GOLD
MINIATURE PARNASSUS
ROBERT
GRAVES. 1895-1926.
THE ASSAULT HEROIC.
By
Richard Perceval Graves.
Viking Penguin, Inc. $24.95.
The first volume of Richard Graves's biography of his
uncle centers on Robert Graves's experience of the First World War.
There are two kinds of modern literati, the type that was disillu–
sioned by the First World War and the type disillusioned by the Sec–
ond . Captain Robert Graves, Royal Welch Fusiliers , was left for
dead on the Western front in 1916 : his family received official notice
that he had "died of wounds" and
The Times
had to retract its
obituary. "Robert was deeply ashamed that the British should be us-
