Fairfield Porter was not only a maverick, deliberately out of step with his time, but a heretic who dissented from the central tenet of the credo of the age. A realist who found his inspiration in the realm of external appearances, Porter developed his distinctive and mature style in the last 25 years of his life, a period coinciding exactly with the triumph of the New York school of painting. Abstract art was king. Radical new methods of composition had found acceptance, and artists exercised unprecedented freedom in their conception of what a painting could look like, how big it could be, and how little relation it needed to have to the traditional ways and means of representational art.
Being an amateur student of history like many of your readers, I enjoyed Harry Miles Muheim’s piece on Charles Lindbergh, especially his forgiving treatment of Lindbergh’s perceived political blunders and subsequent fall from public grace. Would that all historians could treat their subjects with equal compassion.
It takes away nothing from the moving and beautifully written personal tribute that Harry Miles Muheim has paid to Charles Lindbergh (“My Life With the Lone Eagle,” May/ June issue) to try to straighten out the record on the transfer, at a private dinner in Berlin in 1938, of a medal thrust on the American aviator by Hermann Göring.
Mr. Muheim is distressed that the hero’s image was “tarnished” when he “accepted” the award. In fact, Hugh Wilson, the American ambassador in Berlin, had enlisted his famous guest to help persuade the German leader to allow emigrating Jews to take property out with them. When one is engaged in such a delicate negotiation, one does not kick sand in the face of the person one is trying to persuade.
It must also be remembered that the horrendous anti-Semitic pogroms had not yet started. Three weeks later, outraged at the nightmare known as Kristallnacht, Lindbergh canceled his plans to stay on in Germany, saying he would not remain in a country that treated its own people that way.
Thank you for the article on the National Basketball Association (“The First Season,” May/June issue); it certainly does give a bit of much needed perspective about our “roots.” If I tried to convince some folks that N.B.A. basketball and its precursors were accurately described there (as I know they were), people would assume that I was hallucinating. It was a great read.
I’m glad Frederic Schwarz chose a lightheartedly satirical approach to note the fiftieth anniversary of the very first flying-saucer sighting (“The Time Machine,” May/June issue). His mention of the glowing airship allegedly seen drifting over California a full century ago seems to illustrate how we create our alien visitors in our own image. Whereas those late-Victorian Martians could afford the luxury of time, floating majestically above our puzzled heads, the twentieth-century Martians flashed about, in aerodynamic dishes, at “incredible speed.” In A Midsummer Night’s Dream ,
act V, scene 1, Theseus says it all: “Such
tricks hath strong imagination, / That,
if it would but apprehend some joy, / It
comprehends some bringer of that joy; /
Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear?”
The biggest roadside attraction along I-40 is the row of ten classic Cadillacs half buried, at the angle of the Great Pyramid, with tail fins upthrust, at Stanley Marsh’s Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. The models range from 1946 to 1964. Marsh told me he wanted them to look as if they had been planted by members of some high civilization.
I’ve done The Education of Henry Adams.
You might think that this should go without saying for someone in my job, and you’d be right. But I’m afraid that more than once, I told people I’d read The Education of Henry Adams, when, in fact, I hadn’t. The first of these was the college history professor who assigned me the book; I gave it a mildly diligent try, only to be scared off by the levels of irony I sensed. They disturbed the transparent prose the way that heat rising from the hood of a car ripples a summer vista. This guy was too smart for me.
Several times in recent years, I resolved to go back to it, but by then, like every other middle-aged person I’d regarded with amused condescension from the spacious afternoons of my late adolescence, I had become “too busy to read as much as I’d like.”
Touring an exhibit of historic video games can inspire many different reactions in those who remember when they first came out. Wistful types may reflect on the days when wasting a few Martians was all it took to make them happy, while folks of a more practical bent will wish they had saved up all those quarters and bought stock in the company instead. But someone who grew up spending his spare change on baseball cards, who was so ignorant that he had to be told who Mario was, will end up feeling like George Bush at the supermarket checkout counter. In every direction, as far as the eye can see, spaceships explode in a hail of fireworks, libidinous blinking dots chase gyrating asterisks like satyrs pursuing nymphs, and abstract geometric shapes permute and change color in a riotous opium dream. And on the rare occasions when voices become audible above the cacophonous sound effects, all that anyone talks about is how primitive it all is.