David Bromwich

Post-Modernism entered the public mind as a fast-value currency in the late Seventies and early Eighties, in the field of architecture, where its association with gimmicky tropes of visual play (the logo-in-the-sky of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, the phonejack-in-the-sky of the AT&T Building in New York) gave plausibility to the promotional prose. AT&T was the work of Philip Johnson, the friend of Andy Warhol, and so the publicity came with a background story ready to hand. The Post-Modern would be the art-historical movement that went beyond art by stopping short of art. Where Modernism was enchanted by affinities with the art of the past, and offered itself as a climactic annunciation, Post-Modernism would be ‘traditionalesque’: a little of this tradition, a little of that, whatever pleases the eye (but not too demandingly), or diverts the mind (but not into thought).‘

After a decade or more dominated by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer. It aims to look freshly at these artists and to ask again why their originality matters. Names like Stevens, Eliot and Ashbery are frequently dropped and sometimes deployed, as well as Jasper Johns, for his painting of the United States that is and is not a map. If the book has a single thesis, it appears to be that American culture is identical with the culture of modernity. In the arts, technology and its social arrangements, America is pictured here as the key to all modernities. Such a thesis cannot be proved, it can only be ‘sketched’ – a favourite word of Fisher’s, and a favourite procedure. He sketches the radical modernity of America in pages on the rise of new forms of representation and commerce, and backs the historical claim by an analysis of aspects of poems, novels and paintings.’‘

Julius was the original name, but one may as well call him Groucho, from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s. All of the Marxes appear to have been clever with...

Stewart has the weakness of a man who can be wounded. He absorbs many moods: self-pity, cynicism, a compulsion that does not know its name – and always there is a disturbing something left over. It is strange to find such susceptibility in so definite a face.

At 8 o’clock on the night of 30 October 1938, listeners to Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater on the Air might have noticed a short announcement: the show that evening was going to be an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. A lead-in paragraph followed: ‘We know now that in the early years of the 20th century, this world was being watched closely by intelligences...