T.J. Clark teaches art history at the University of California, Berkeley. His book about Courbet, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution, was published in 1973. His study of two Poussin landscapes, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, is out in paperback.
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Vol. 22 No. 12 · 22 June 2000
pages 3-9 | 9166 words
Reservations of the Marvellous
T.J. Clark
- The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland
Harvard, 1073 pp, £24.95, December 1999, ISBN 0 06 740432 4
‘There are the Alps,’ Basil Bunting is supposed to have scribbled on his copy of the Cantos. ‘What is there to say about them?’ Mainly this, in the brief poem that follows:
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[*] The quotations are from Benjamin’s Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 13 · 6 July 2000
From Agnes Grunwald-Spier
I was struck by the serendipity of T.J. Clark's article on Walter Benjamin appearing in the same issue as the review of Andy Marino's book about Varian Fry (LRB, 22 June). It was Varian Fry who was responsible for organising the expedition over the mountains in which Walter Benjamin attempted to leave occupied France. But his group was refused entry at the Spanish border on 26 September 1940, and fearing repatriation to an internment camp, Benjamin killed himself with morphine that night. The next day the group crossed the border safely. He had already been interned in September 1939, in the Colombes stadium in Paris and his sister Dora had been sent to the Gurs internment camp. Arthur Koestler had also been detained in Colombes and knew that Benjamin had been carrying morphine pills since the burning of the Reichstag. Koestler wrote in Scum of the Earth:
Walter Benjamin, author and critic, my neighbour in 10, rue Dombasle in Paris, fourth at our Saturday poker parties, one of the most bizarre and witty persons I have known. Last time I had met him was in Marseilles … and he had asked me: 'If anything goes wrong, have you got anything to take?' For in those days we all carried some stuff in our pockets like conspirators in a penny dreadful, only reality was more dreadful. I had none, and he shared what he had with me, 62 tablets of a sedative … He did it reluctantly, for he did not know whether the 31 tablets left him would be enough. It was enough.
Agnes Grunwald-Spier
Sheffield
