Category: Great Books

I’d read a few reviews of this book before buying a copy; I don’t think I have ever seen a case where the reviewers so completely missed the point. 

To read the reviews, one would get the impression that this is one part Benfey’s family history, one part history of Black Mountain College, and one part discussion of pottery.  The reviews make it sound like it is a simple hodgepodge, a well-written hodgepodge to be sure, but nothing more than, at best, a wonderfully eclectic romp through history and art.

That description isn’t even close to what his book actually is.  The book is actually better described by the remark above made by Anni Albers (a 20^thcentury artist well known among those who know much about such things (and Benfey’s aunt)).  

There’s an even better blurb for the book in the book itself.  A reviewer writes: “This is not a Book of Travels, properly speaking, but a series of poems, chiefly descriptive, occasioned by the Objects which the Traveler observed—It is a delicious book; & like all delicious things, you must take but a little of it at a time.”  Coleridge (yes, that Coleridge) wrote that review.  Benfey throws in the quotation in an offhand manner in a chapter about William Bartram.  Coleridge thought he was describing Bartram’s book, but I daresay that Coleridge’s description is far better used on Benfey’s book than Bartram’s. 

In the Coleridge quotation lies the real description of this book:  it is a series of poems, chiefly descriptive.  It looks like a tale of, for example, the discovery of white clay in the Carolinas or a trip to Berlin or a visit to a Japanese village known for making pottery.  But the real story here has nothing to do with the superficial.  

The book is an act of taking a lump of clay, spinning it on a wheel, firing and glazing it, turning that lump into something unexpectedly beautiful.  All the stories and side notes are just so much salt, thrown into the furnace to add an interesting texture to the life being crafted, bit by bit, story by story.

So, what is going on here?  A curious book, to put it mildly.  Joyce wrote A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, a novel telling about how a poet (who is, of course, Joyce) was born.  Benfey is going Joyce one better; in this book he is not telling about how the artist was born, he is creating the artist who is none other than himself.  

It reminds me of nothing so much as an old joke about baseball umpires:

First Umpire:  I call them like I see them.
Second Umpire: I call them like they are.
Third Umpire: They aren’t anything until I call them.

Traditional autobiography tries to be one of the first two umpires.  This book is the third umpire.  We are watching the author make himself here in exactly the same way we would watch a potter make a jug or a bowl or a jar.  The author is both potter and clay.  The tales of his ancestors are really just so many flicks of the wrist to add shape here or there; the historical tidbits are there to add color. 

To see it another way (which is exactly what this book does endlessly), consider an anecdote from the book.  Benfey is relating his trip to find Cherokee Clay when he finds himself talking to Jerry, the owner of the Great Smoky Mountain Fish Camp & Safari.

As we sipped long-necked bottles of beer at Jerry’s bar, he dragged out a bucket of Cherokee pottery shards.  They were brown or gray, unglazed; whatever color they retained had come from the smoke of the kiln.  Each carried a pattern of some kind, scored with a pointed tool: zigzags in parallel or an array of tight spirals, like Van Gogh’s Starry Night.  I was fingering one gray fragment in my hand like a magical talisman. “Take it,” Jerry said. “No one will ever care for it more than you do.”

One way of looking at this book is that it is a collection of those fragments.  And at times, Benfey is encouraging us to see the isolated parts here as nothing more than interesting broken shards, like a scrap from a Van Gogh painting.  But, look again and note that parts are really just fragments when they are in others’ hands; when Benfey picks up the fragment it becomes a magical talisman.  And here again, we find the secret of the book.  It looks like a fragment to you, but Benfey is using it for another, magical, purpose. 

Benfey ends the book with this:

And every once in a while, a restless genius came along—a Bartram, a Wedgewood, a Coleridge—who wandered from the familiar trail, risking falls and failures, and fused the new possibilities in unexpected ways, leaving lasting art for posterity.

Exactly so.  This book is a gigantic gamble on the future.  Will it merit rereading in a few decades?  How well do the asides and stray notes cohere when one begins to take apart the book?  Or can the book even be dissected at all?  The closest parallel to this book I have ever read is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, but this book is much more crafted that Nabokov’s.  This book has an intentionality not only in the chapters themselves, but in the book as a whole.  So, I suppose I really can’t think of a comparison.

This is a book to be read in the same way one reads a book of poetry.  Nothing is stated directly, but as the ideas sift in memory, a pattern emerges.  I suspect, like all great poetry, as one reads it over and over, the picture takes on new hues.  Highly recommended for those who like to let their minds wander while reading.