RSS

Contact us

Friday 5 December 2008

Magnifico

A true Renaissance man

Sarah Bradford reviews Miles J. Unger's life of Lorenzo de' Medici

Living writers elbow dead ones out of the way, and will themselves be pushed aside in time. Brian Moore, another who has received that elbow in the ribs, has his novelist-hero of An Answer from Limbo say: ‘ “Aschenbach’s whole soul, from the very beginning, was bent on fame.” That sentence from Thomas Mann now strikes me as false. Fame is not the prize; the prize is the doing of the thing itself.’ No doubt, no doubt. Nevertheless, a little later: ‘Kierkegaard and Camus, Dostoevsky and Gide — I spun the circular racks at the bus terminal paperback stand. Would there be room for me?’, he asks. Good question, the sort of one we all put, though today’s novelists may well wonder, enviously, at a bus terminal bookstand where books by Gide and Camus were to be found. Perhaps Callimachus is fortunate that as many as 64 of his epigrams survive. One of them at least does more than just survive in an English version: ‘They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead…’ A pleasant voice, a nightingale, still awake, after almost two and a half thousand years. ‘Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession’, as Malcolm Lowry put it.

Allan Massie

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved