Constellation of Genius: A Review

Kevin Jackson has written a generous and amazingly insightful account of a year that defined a movement, and sets the benchmark for how good academic writing could be

When reviewing books I generally read up on other sites for stylistic guidance. I'm fine with my own pretensions of critique; I occasionally struggle to convey them in approachable English (that might be self-evident of course). I knew after I'd read Constellation of Genius that I wanted to talk about the success Kevin Jackson had achieved in weaving a discourse in modernism through the tapestry of characters, plots, subplots, cultural events and such that the year 1922 presented to the world.

Imagine my displeasure upon discovering Will Self had more or less done the same. What room was there now? A man whose work is itself an ode to the movement that dominated the early 20th century, I guess it now falls to me to pick up the leaves that Self has shaken from the tree. You can find the review here, incidentally.

Razor sharp elucidations aside, Self's essay does (obviously) prove a great jumping-off point for anyone wishing to know more about an era that gave us Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, James Joyce (the unholy trinity of Jackson's diary) and Virginia Woolf as well as those living through it - Ernest Hemingway, Edith Wharton Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker plus dozens more. Comprehension and accessibility are not, per se, terms you typically associate with the movement, particularly if your entry point was Ulysses, discussed by numerous writers and reviewers throughout CoG.

Yet the humility constantly evident in Jackson's writing demolishes preconceptions; his generous, anonymous style has obviously been well honed in the day job (as a journalist for the BBC amongst others for the last twenty years) and although the depth and subtlety of what conjecture there is point to a writer who has thoroughly researched his subject, at no point does he intrude superfluously.

The great unrecognised ego of the academic writer is something Gore Vidal mercilessly ribbed in his heyday (app. the last half century), and if only more subjects were plucked from the dust jacket preserve with such a light touch I feel subjects as inherently interesting as this one would bear out a great deal more inspection. Jackson does have form here - his playful engagement with heavyweights like Dante and Ruskin bear the watermarks of substance through style of a mass media lexicon rather than university texts, and it all points to a lovely ambitious scope. It's also got a really nice cover - classic monochrome colour scheme and all Jazz Age fonts. Random House deserve much credit for doing their bit.

Jackson also recognises the slightly voyeuristic element present in all works documenting the perambulations of really, really famous people and ladles great dollops of backstory on many of his major players, even providing a potted history to those characters in the outer reaches of his 'constellation'. Harry Kessler, the son of an a prosperous Hamburg banker who became a patron to such luminaries of modern art as Edvard Munch was my favourite, but Jackson seasons the pot with delicious tidbits on Raymond Radiguet, Constantin Brâncuși, the former disciples of Dada, and even Charlie Chaplin.

Of equal merit is Jackson's quiet characterisation of the major players - Woolf in particular is done no disservice by the author but mere diligence and preparation of her life over the 12 months dissected lifts her off the page and presents her as a person inhabiting a sphere of intellectualism inhabited by very few, yet her temperament for her position is portrayed as almost snobbish, particularly after she reads Ulysses - or attempts to.

Constellation is a superb example of the right blend of wisdom, research, objective fact and an eye for a story coming together to chronicle a group of incredible individuals in a very human manner. 'Insanely readable' is how Self puts it in his review. He's the writer - who am I to disagree?

Feed The Animals (Music)

The Rite of Spring is a century old this year. Does contemporary music have the same ability to shock its audience?

One hundred years ago in Paris saw the opening night of Stravinsky's seminal Rite of Spring, in which a young Russian woman uncomplainingly danced herself to death to ensure a good harvest for the coming year. The music appeared to forewarn of the impending crashes and booms of war a year later. Subtle violence was to be found in its pounding rhythmic propulsion and predictably the reaction was one of outrage, hostility and fury, with many in the audience loudly complaining throughout.

Leaving aside even that reaction, which as far as I can recall has not happened in high art for 28 years (I'm 28 now. And I'm backing my baby memory and toddler years) and reading of Skandalkonzert in Vienna months before the uproar in Paris, I was struck by the thought that this particular form has effectively lost the ability to shock when put into historical context.

A bold statement, one I don't wish to extrapolate upon in huge detail right now (I'll return to it again) but I feel a true one when comparing notes in Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise (which now appears to be running a festival at the Southbank in London for an entire year) and Kevin Jackson's Constellation of Genius, which both point to a fomentation and a formal displeasure with the status quo amongst a significant number of composers, painters, writers etc.

It seems that music now occupies a different sphere. There's plenty of irony in making music as ubiquitous as an advert via online streaming and leaving aside the democratic element of that it also partially why shock factor has been diminished.

I'd argue many record executives - pragmatists at heart, naturally - recognise the hand they have been dealt and understand what not to play. The simple challenge of currency in an insane warp-speed environment is the overriding impulse of production and release, which goes a long way to explaining the lack of Stravinsky moments. Heidegger no doubt has something to say here arguably and ironically the death of archaic movements like Romanticism served to further undermine (although this particular position may never have offered anything outside the wilfully conservative - speculation is disingenuous and fun)

But how to explain the lack of artists willing to undertake what, in 1913, was recognised as outrageous chance? That's another blog.

If you're ever interested, TRiN and CoG are both fantasic reads. More on them another time but as a jumping-off point for seismic cultural events you'd do worse than read these two. Ross chews over all the A listers and many more; he also 'does' Wagner as a sort of origin story in typically erudite detail and deftly weaves the threads linking many of the greatest composers and their relationships. He's also very good at clearly showing where the bend in the road took place with modern composition when discussing Berg, Webern et al.

In CoG Jackson chooses Joyce and Eliot as his progenitors of a modernist revolution in 20th century Europe but lets the political and artistic community of 1922 - Hemingway, Matisse, Radiguet and Cocteau, Brancusi, Lenin, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence - even Aleister Crowley - intermingle on the page as if it were a Parisian café. Format helps - it is written as sort of world diary checking in at some of the hubs of culture and delivers fascinating morsels alongside judicious commentary with regular aplomb.

As a final note, interesting that that historically much of the great works in art appear to have been formed from the bloodiest decades as civilisation moved at a head-spinning pace (Jackson's regular check-ins on an increasingly sickly/exhausted Lenin throughout 1922 offer a neat microcosm here) from 1914-1922 saw a Soviet revolution, WW1, Irish unrest at it's colonial cousin, wars in Peking (now Beijing) the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the independence of Egypt, the gradual crumbling of colonial rule in India, amongst dozens of other events. There's more in that...

ANYWAY
My album of the year = Frank Ocean's Channel Orange. Considering the themes, a record that feels really intimate and places the listener at the centre of the experience - it's hard to get that right without still coming across as a narcissist but this is a wonderful effort.