The tension between precocity and experience occupies The Art of Youth: Crane, Carrington, Gershwin, and the Nature of First Acts.
Nicholas Delbanco uses the lives of three artists — writer Stephen Crane, painter Dora Carrington and composer George Gershwin — to make his points.
That all three died early (Crane at 28, Carrington and Gershwin at 38) is key to Delbanco’s argument. As he writes: “Young Icarus, who flew too high ... is an emblem both of youthful aspiration and the risks attached.”
The book is a companion to the author’s Lastingness: The Art of Old Age (2011), which looks at creativity through the other end of the telescope, invoking Monet, Yeats, Georgia O’Keeffe and Eubie Blake, all of whom produced until late in life.
As in that book, Delbanco’s purpose in the new work is to investigate how art gets made and what it says about those who make it: their sensibility and vision, but also their “energy,” their “ exuberance” and their “fluency.”
Delbanco uses these signifiers to describe Gershwin in particular; he is, perhaps, the one truly unadulterated genius in The Art of Youth.
But they apply across the board because his intent is less to write a set of parallel mini-biographies than to draw out a series of echoes and resonances.
“Although theirs are separate stories,” he explains, “certain shared motifs emerge,” including “ a need to produce that borders on compulsion.”
Crane, for instance, became a reporter at 16 and self-published his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, when he was 21. His masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, appeared two years later and “sits stage center on any shelf of American literature, and has kept its place.”
Gershwin famously wrote Swanee in 1919 at age 20. Four years later, he composed Rhapsody in Blue for Paul Whiteman; written in three weeks, it premiered in February 1924 and changed American popular music.
Carrington remains lesser known, partly because of her own self-criticism and partly because, as a member of the Bloomsbury set of English writers, philosophers and artists (she was founding member Lytton Strachey’s longtime companion and took her own life less than two months after he died), she was overshadowed by fellow members Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Still, she inspired Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence, and her paintings, especially her portraits of Strachey and E.M. Forster, are “masterpieces of psychological acuity,” Delbanco writes.
What makes the book more than the stuff of a group portrait is Delbanco’s sense of destiny. A professor at the University of Michigan, he is interested how these artists reflect an idea bigger than themselves.
All three pushed themselves relentlessly, seduced by the possibilities of the work.
“What did they see,” Delbanco asks, “this trio of young artists; what sort of vista was opening out, and did they envision a sequel to their auspicious debuts?
“I think they must have imagined picture after picture, book after book, and tune after tune.
“The sky’s the limit for each Icarus until wings start to melt.”