668
PARTISAN REVIEW
Spurling remains vivid to the finish. Even when, at last, Matisse was
accepted by dealers, his career still wasn't smooth. He endured the incon–
sistent Berthe Weill, and the legendary Ambroise Vollard, who had an
enviable inventory of Cezanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Moreover, the
committed and calculating Vollard could also appear perversely spaced-out.
He even had Matisse baby-sit his own exhibition, with instructions to
show the work of other artists to prospective buyers! Woe to the artist left
at the mercy of a dealer.
In Spurling, however, Matisse has a clear-headed biographer. His work
is accessible and magnificent, as anyone lucky to spend time with it quick–
ly ascertains. Originality, as slippery a notion as any, finds effortless
definition there. And thanks to Spurling's work, Matisse comes across in
1999 as being more original than ever.
LELDE MUEHLENBACHS
Cities of the Mind
THE
CITY IN LITERATURE:
AN
INTELLECTUAL AND CULTURAL
HISTORY.
By
Richard Lehan.
University of California Press. $45.00
Studies on the city in literature seem generally to wander back and forth
over the same ground, cons trained on one hand by the physical ci ty as a
tangle of cultural and social complexities, and on the other by the city as
an ambiguous literary image in the canonical works of a number of canon–
ical authors. Lewis Mumford was the Grand Father of this branch of
scholarly endeavor, although in
The City in History
and
The Culture
if
Cities
Mumford used literary cities jucliciously from time to time as paradigmat–
ic illustrations of a cultural thesis rather than as load-bearing pillars of his
argument. The followers of Mumford have shifted the emphasis, with
results that raise more methodological questions than they answer.
Richard Lehan's respectable book follows this well-traveled route. He
concentrates for the most part on English and American literature and cul–
ture, except for discussions of Balzac and Zola and sketches of the notions
of some continental thinkers. This book is an
omnium gatfterum.
Containing
too much material, it lacks sufficient method and focus: it reads like a suc–
cession of encyclopedia entries, a sequence of cliscrete blocks rather than
an unfolding argument.
The author wants to differentiate his study from others by concen–
trating on "the city in terms of its functions-as a commercial, industrial,
