Rachel Cusk, _Second Place_

ODD TO SAY, but this novel seemed to me like a long-delayed sequel to Wyndham Lewis’s Apes of God (1930). 

As Lewis saw the history of western art, for long centuries artists—painters, composers, sculptors, poets—had been seen as skilled craftsmen whose main work was to celebrate whatever those rich enough to hire them—the church and the nobility—wished to have celebrated (mainly themselves, their learning, their piety, etc.). This may not have been exactly the work the artists would have chosen to do, but they at least made a living.

Along came the French Revolution, the Romantic cult of the genius, etc. Now the bourgeois have all the money; they are the ones who can afford to award commissions to produce artistic celebrations of whatever they want celebrated. In the meantime, though, the cultural prestige of art has risen considerably.   Being Shakespeare or Michelangelo or Beethoven is a much bigger deal than being a pope, or the earl of something, or even a king, and certainly a bigger deal than being a railroad magnate. 

So, according to Lewis, by the 1920s the bourgeoisie don’t want to commission art. They want to be artists. They want to hang out with artists, be recognized by artists as artists, have their work exhibited or published or performed alongside those of real artists. In the 600-something pages of The Apes of God, he dissects how dire a situation this bourgeois envy of creativity produces for actual art and actual artists.

Cusk’s novel is a good deal more focused, at 180 pages, and a good deal more sympathetic to the bourgeois desire to connect to art, but it describes the same situation. In a brief note at the end, Cusk explains that the novel was inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir, Lorenzo in Taos, about a short but dreadful period of providing D. H. Lawrence with a place to live and work.

Luhan may have been hoping for some kind of recognition of her intellectual acumen from Lawrence, or gratitude, or just a feeling of being taken seriously. She gets nothing of the kind—nor does the narrator of Second Place get anything of the kind from L, the painter whom she allows to take up residence in a small extra house on her property. L. seems to resent the narrator’s wealth, or his dependence upon it, or perhaps is frustrated by the ebbing of his own career, but however we account for the tension, it goes from bad to worse to horrible.

As in a Wyndham Lewis novel, no one comes off well. The narrator does at least get to something that sounds like self-understanding near the end:

I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator, and I saw that I had summoned L across the continents intuitively believing that he could perform that transformative function for me, could release me into creative action. Well, he had obeyed, and apparently nothing significant had come of it, beyond the momentary flashes of insight between us that had been interspersed by so many hours of frustration and blankness and pain.

Even those “momentary flashes of insight” may be just wishful thinking, though. And L—though we may well be a brilliant painter—just seems like a grouchy, entitled pain in the ass.