Nicholas Delbanco's Blog, page 2

Fiction Writers Review: An Appreciation of Nicholas Delbanco by Dean Bakopoulos

In honor of Nicholas Delbanco’s retirement from the University of Michigan, Fiction Writers Review is dedicating this week’s content to a celebration of Delbanco’s influential career as both a writer and a teacher. On December 4th, a symposium entitled “The Janus-Faced Habit: The Art of Teaching and the Teaching of Art” took place in Ann Arbor as part of a tribute to his legacy.

Here’s an excerpt from Dean Bakopoulos on Nicholas Delbanco’s generosity as a mentor and a teacher, as well as the gift of being offered a place at the table:

I attended my first Hopwood Tea during the winter of my sophomore year at The University of Michigan, a supposedly simple occasion that filled me with colossal dread. I worried I’d wear the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, or spill my tea (I never drank tea, but assumed that’d be the only offering; the word “tea” used to describe an event had never been in my vocabulary before). I also wore a thrift store tweed blazer, assuming a jacket might be required.

I was there because my professor, Nicholas Delbanco, whom I’d just met, had told me that this was the place to meet all the other writers on campus, and I desperately wanted to be included in that group. I remember walking into the Hopwood Room on a Thursday afternoon and, upon seeing that rich woodwork, those epic bookshelves, that spiral of literary journals at the room’s epicenter, around which circles of writers—real writers—stood laughing and chatting and sipping tea, I promptly decided that I should turn around. Something in the air felt rarified and beyond my reach, and my chest burned with an anxious feeling of fraudulence I would probably now describe as a panic attack.

But then my darting eyes landed on Nicholas Delbanco, my professor, and, seemingly delighted to see me, he smiled and extended an arm in what I now call the “Delbanco Wave,” a kind of across-the-room hug—one hand on hip, one hand extended outward—that makes you feel as if you’re being ushered gently onto a warm stage, maybe to thunderous applause.

This was Nick, classic Nick, inviting another writer into the conversation, pulling yet another chair up to that crowded table. (I think that was the day he introduced me to Charlie Baxter, Eileen Pollack, and Elwood Reid, all of whom would also become important mentors and, later, friends.)

It’s widely known that Nick has many gifts as an author and teacher and leader, but the gift I remember most strongly, and with an emotion that can only be described as love, is that he welcomes in all of us who strive to create literature, and lets us know there is no scarcity at this particular feast. He makes the writing world into a world of loaves and fishes. Eat all you want. We’ll make more!

Read the full article: An Appreciation of Nicholas Delbanco by Dean Bakopoulos

Fiction Writers Review: An Appreciation of Nicholas Delbanco by Valerie Laken

In honor of Nicholas Delbanco’s retirement from the University of Michigan, Fiction Writers Review is dedicating this week’s content to a celebration of Delbanco’s influential career as both a writer and a teacher. On December 4th, a symposium entitled “The Janus-Faced Habit: The Art of Teaching and the Teaching of Art” took place in Ann Arbor as part of a tribute to his legacy.

Here’s an excerpt from Valerie Laken on Nicholas Delbanco’s role as a mentor, and giving young writers the permission to dream: “He’s made a career of bringing together, supporting, and celebrating writers, and in doing that he made them all believe—not just in themselves, but in the value of literature itself.”

“But do you think I can, like, do this?”

At least once or twice each semester a writing student turns up in my office to ask me this. In the enormous old armchair that sits in the corner, they look small, too much like children.

Today it’s a quiet brunette who has missed four classes (mono, maybe) and doesn’t seem to read very much but honestly does have a prose style that sometimes makes me close my eyes and thank the heavens. She’s juggling two jobs and creeping toward graduation and fielding questions about career paths from her father, who has read somewhere that no one reads any more.

“You are doing it,” I tell her, which is not the answer she wants.

“It’s just…” She hesitates, embarrassed by the seeming audacity of her question: “I mean, am I good enough?”

I wish for the thousandth time I had a poker face. The truth is, at her age, twenty-one, almost no one is “good enough” to make it as a writer. The best we can hope for is potential, but potential is a slippery, unreliable thing. I’ve seen too many wunderkinds run out of steam, and some talent-challenged worker bees exceed all expectations. So I’m just not very comfortable playing fortuneteller. What if something I say sends her down the wrong path, and twenty years later she’s miserable, bitter, and destitute? I’m not sure I can carry that kind of burden.

Read the full article: An Appreciation of Nicholas Delbanco by Valerie Laken

Fiction Writers Review: An Appreciation of Nicholas Delbanco by Travis Holland

In honor of Nicholas Delbanco’s retirement from the University of Michigan, Fiction Writers Review is dedicating this week’s content to a celebration of Delbanco’s influential career as both a writer and a teacher. On December 4th, a symposium entitled “The Janus-Faced Habit: The Art of Teaching and the Teaching of Art” took place in Ann Arbor as part of a tribute to his legacy.

Here’s an excerpt from Travis Holland on Nicholas Delbanco as a master teacher, as well as Delbanco’s approach to running a writing workshop that matters: ”This is good, now let’s make it better.”

It begins, I imagine, without our even knowing, in a room filled with books, at an enormous table so covered with poetry journals and literary magazines I can almost feel the weight of all those words around us as we cautiously file in for our first workshop. It is a mild September evening in 2002, and we have come to the University of Michigan’s MFA program for fiction to spend the next two years of our lives writing—a prospect which seems almost too good to be true. Part of me is in fact waiting for some purse-mouthed university factotum to gravely tap me on the shoulder and tell me there’s been a terrible mistake: the invitation has been rescinded, the welcome mat put away for some more worthy applicant, thank you, goodbye. Part of me is waiting to wake up back in my former life, in a barren office overlooking three parking lots and two interstate highways, where I’m paid to process software contracts but in fact spend most of my time gazing out the window at a particularly interesting tree. Instead of working, I write lapidary little passages on oversized post-it notes meticulously describing that tree: the way the fluttering leaves flash silver as the wind passes through them. One day it might be a school of darting fish, the next day hundreds of tiny flags frantically twitching out some semaphore distress signal meant just for me. It’s a difficult thing to exactly describe, that tree, but I keep trying.

I suppose we’re all feeling pretty uncertain as we quietly find our seats. We’re all in our own way waiting for that tap on the shoulder, which surprisingly never comes. Instead, the professor arrives, welcoming us to what will be our first writing workshop at the University of Michigan. His name is Nicholas Delbanco—Nick will do just fine, he tells us—and he is, as most of us by now know, the author of dozens of books of fiction and nonfiction, a prize-winning essayist and one-time director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. National Public Radio book critic Alan Cheuse has called him “one of our finest fiction writers,” adding: “He also happens to be one of our country’s finest master teachers.” I smile as Nick welcomes us, we’re all smiling. It’s what you do, right? You smile, and think, Is it warm in here? Am I having a heart attack? And go on smiling, through all the weeks and months to come, as the autumn days gutter out into early darkness, as the cold evening approaches when it will be my story on the chopping block.

Oh God, my story.

And God, it’s a mess, this story of mine. I just know it. Overwritten, or maybe underwritten, in every paragraph some giggly blue-eyed darling I’ve never quite had the guts to murder. It’s all middle and no end, all polish and no point, a boat without a rudder, lazily turning circles while the drooping sail drags in the water. Yes, I’ve worked like hell to get it this far, nights and days, but this far, it turns out, is still within spitting distance from the dock. And Nick will see the story for what it is—a dull, dismal failure—and then everyone else will see it, too, and that, as they say, will be that.

Read the full article: An Appreciation of Nicholas Delbanco by Travis Holland

Fiction Writers Review: An Appreciation of Nicholas Delbanco by Elizabeth Kostova

In honor of Nicholas Delbanco’s retirement from the University of Michigan, Fiction Writers Review is dedicating this week’s content to a celebration of Delbanco’s influential career as both a writer and a teacher. On December 4th, a symposium entitled “The Janus-Faced Habit: The Art of Teaching and the Teaching of Art” took place in Ann Arbor as part of a tribute to his legacy.

Here’s an excerpt from Elizabeth Kostova on the lasting influence of Nicholas Delbanco, both in her work and in developing the habits of a writer:

Nicholas Delbanco, author of a prodigious list of novels, essays long and short, short stories, reviews, and textbooks—have I missed anything?—was one of my several remarkable advisors and mentors at the University of Michigan a decade ago now. I didn’t meet him there, however. In one of those odd circular windings of life’s staircase, I met Nick when I was a seventeen-year-old freshman at Warren Wilson College, a desperately wannabe young writer with little to say. He was the first professional writer I’d ever actually met, an important occurrence in the life of every beginner; in fact, Nick himself would later regale his graduate seminars with the parallel encounter in his own childhood—pleasant family acquaintances who turned out to be H. A. and Margot Rey, the creators of Curious George.

On that occasion when he visited Warren Wilson for a week of readings and seminars, his coming was presaged by posters and library displays. I was fascinated by the idea that a live human being called himself a writer; up to that time, I’d been under the impression that they had all died by about 1940 (most of them, in fact, by 1895). He arrived, with his beautiful young family in tow, to critique our fledgling efforts, and his praise of my short story stayed with me for years as encouragement. I was thrilled that this elderly and distinguished writer (he was 40) seemed to think I had some kind of adroitness on the page.

I saw his teaching gifts again, many years—and for him, many books—later, when I arrived as a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 2002. Nick, while generous about our work, was tough in his teaching; we were writers-in-training. He required us to try hard, in our discussions, and in the stories we turned in. Most of all, he modeled a steadiness about writing. “I got up early this morning,” he’d say in our evening fiction workshop, which rolled around for him after a twelve-hour day of teaching and meetings, “and I wrote for an hour, first thing. An hour isn’t much, perhaps, but you can do a great deal in an hour.” If one of us exclaimed over Nick’s productivity, all those books in the midst of a busy teaching career, he would say, “It’s mostly habit. Years ago, I formed the habit of getting up early and writing.” We learned from him about the importance of persistence, as much as about prose style or character development.

Read the full article: An Appreciation of Nicholas Delbanco by Elizabeth Kostova

A conversation with the author on the making of the book

http://nickowchar.wordpress.com/

Best Books of 2013, NPR

NPR Book Review

Carrington, Gershwin, And The Nature Of First Acts

By Nicholas Delbanco

FILED UNDER: Biography & Memoir Science & Society For History LoversThe Dark Side NPR Staff Picks For Art Lovers

A writer, a painter, a composer. Two of them famous; the third not so much. All died before age 40, leaving masterpieces of art (well, the writer and composer anyway!). Nicholas Delbanco says that Stephen Crane, Dora Carrington and George Gershwin had certain characteristics in common as young creators: All were energetic, exuberant, passionate about their art and received early attention and praise. The book has an academic feel, with literary quotations and helpful analysis. I was moved, thinking about such disparate talents and ambitions emerging in a blaze, then, sadly, dying before their talents could mature.

— recommended by Susan Stamberg, special correspondent, Morning Edition

LA Times Book Critic David Ulin Reviews The Art of Youth

Nicholas Delbanco’s Art of Youth  studies talent cut short

Studying the output of Stephen Crane, Dora Carrington and George Gershwin, Nicholas Delbanco looks for commonalities among creative types who create great works at young ages, then die early.

Book review by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic

November 27, 2013 | 1:30 p.m.

Excerpt:

The book is a companion to the author’s “Lastingness: The Art of Old Age,” which came out in 2011 and looks at creativity through the other end of the telescope, invoking Monet, Yeats, Georgia O’Keeffe and Eubie Blake, all of whom kept producing until late in life. As it was there, Delbanco’s purpose in this new work is to investigate not only how art gets made but what it says about those who make it: their sensibility and their vision, yes, but also their “energy,” their “exuberance” and their “fluency.”

To read the full review please visit The LA Times: Jacket Copy.

Excerpt: The Art of Youth

The Art of Youth

Introduction

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

Searching for sugar man is a documentary about the singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez. I saw it weeks ago, and it has stayed with me since. Malik Bendjelloul’s film describes the musician’s career in the late 1960s and the early ’70s, his disappearance from his native Detroit, and his iconic stature in South Africa. A rising star to start with, Rodriguez—also known as Sugar Man—wrote and sang in the protest mode of the young Bob Dylan. Playing guitar in smoke-filled rooms, black-garbed and lean, he turned his back on the audience, chanting. Mystery attached to him; he had physical strength, a mournful demeanor, and no fixed address. He conducted his business meetings in alleys; he slept, it would seem, on the streets. Although the singer did have sponsors and a clutch of devotees, he failed to make an impact on the commercial music world; in the country of his birth, he remained almost wholly unknown. It was rumored that he shot himself during a concert, or doused himself with kerosene and struck a match, or simply jumped to his death . . .

In South Africa, his music mattered greatly; he was, said one of his admirers, “bigger than Elvis,” and his lyrics powered the antiapartheid movement as a kind of anthem of resistance. Hundreds of thousands sang his songs; no one knew the details of his life. Some years ago two fans of the performer set out to learn the truth of his death and found, to their astonishment, Rodriguez had survived. For decades he’d eked out a living as a construction and demolition worker in Detroit. He’d made no money from his album sales and had no knowledge that they sold; he had three daughters and an old guitar and no idea that half a world away he was a mythic figure, much revered.

Searching for Sugar Man reports on how the man was tracked down to his crumbling lair, then flown to Cape Town and Johannesburg, where he received a hero’s welcome and performed to sold-out houses and adoring multitudes—unchanged. The hair still black, the pockmarked face still suggestive of an Aztec warrior, the hands still nimble on the strings and ready, after anonymity, to sign autographs for hours—it was as though the forty intervening years made no difference in his stance. As in a fairy tale (think of Sleeping Beauty or Rip Van Winkle), the artist was restored.

We were born a month apart. In the time when I first heard Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, Odetta, and others, the music of Sugar Man vanished; now he’s an emblem of survival and the power of devotion. His youth is shadowed by old age; his age reprises youth. His tour in the fall of 2012 took him from Michigan to California, from Ontario to British Columbia, from the Royal Festival Hall, in England, to Scotland and Ireland. His acolytes have raised Rodriguez from, if not the dead, the disappeared.

All of us have once been young; some of us grow old. Imagine if the youthful dead could revisit their own pasts—to see, as Sixto Rodriguez has done, what happened to their early work and if and in what way it has endured. John Keats wrote for his tombstone: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” He was wrong. Others, greatly vaunted, have had reputations dwindle and their ashes turn to dust. When Sugar Man emerged from his—it’s fair to call it—cave in Detroit and blinkingly came out of hibernation to the spotlight’s glare, he was awakened from a lifelong sleep and asked to sing again. I cite him at book’s start because the image of an elderly performer striding out on stage reborn is part of the dear dream of youth: that it can continue. And though he’s not my subject here, he hovers in the wings, an old man reenacting what he did decades before. What had been lost is found.

“Prodigy.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word has little to do with chronological age. Its first definition is “something extraordinary from which omens are drawn: an omen, a portent.” The next usage is “an amazing or marvelous thing, esp. something out of the ordinary course of nature; something abnormal or monstrous.” Only a much later meaning associates that “amazing or marvelous thing” with youth, describing it as “a person endowed with some quality which excites wonder: esp. a child of precocious genius.” The words “precocity” and “prodigy” share no etymological root. By now, however, we routinely link the two. A prodigy is youthful; the prodigy at fifty seems a contradiction in terms.

Nor is such early achievement always and only artistic. There are prodigies in mathematics and skating, chess and foreign languages. “Prodigy” is the name of an English electronic dance music group and a computer service. To be “prodigal”—as in the Prodigal Son—is to be wasteful or extravagant; to be “prodigious” is to be “marvelous” but also “ominous, portentous.” The word itself comes from the Middle English “prodige” or “portent,” from the Latin “prodigium,” and its first known use was in a chronicle in the year 1494: “Many wonderfull prodyges & tokyns were shewed in Englonde, as ye swellying or rysyng of the water of Thamys.” We have traveled a fair distance from the notion of a rising tide to the notion of an artist in the first flush of youth.

The latter is my topic. The Art of Youth concerns itself with men and women—writers, painters, and musicians—dead before the age of forty. In one sense this is neither “out of the ordinary course of nature” nor “amazing” since many creative artists died by then and continue to do so today. They are legion in our history. Indeed, and though I’ve done no statistical survey, it’s safe to say that most of our acknowledged masters completed their lives’ labor by that age. The preponderance of what we honor as cultural achievements has been produced by the young. Much of this is a matter of actuarial tables and life expectancy; it’s only in the recent past that forty years old could seem young. Two score was once a full life span; not now.

But my artists started quickly and were accomplished in their chosen fields by their early twenties. What they did, they did fully and soon. A separate inquiry might consider those who toil on with diminished effect or those who simply choose to stop, since not all creative labor ends with diminution or death. There are those in their sixties and eighties whose best work was done first. For the sake of coherence, however, I examine youthful figures whose talent was extinguished with their final breaths.

It goes without saying, but needs to be said, that all of what follows applies as well to other forms of endeavor—neuroscience and basketball, for instance, or prowess on the battlefield and in aerospace. There are many ways of starting out, many fields in which to flourish early—think of mathematics or philosophy or political reform. Such a discussion might instead have dealt with the gymnast or entrepreneur or inventor. The notion of “first acts” is one that cuts across the board and need not be delimited by a historical moment; it outstrips place and time.

Yet my focus is, as the title suggests, on art. I confine myself to writing, painting, and music because they are the imaginative modes of which I have firsthand knowledge. The same could equally be argued of what we call, in general, the “lively arts”; our culture has been everywhere shaped and sustained by the young. This book, however, is less a survey than analysis of one woman, two men, and their achievements. A fourth figure—that of the author—will make an appearance as well.

How best to describe the art of youth; when does it start, when stop? What “tokyns” and “portents” indicate the prodigy; how crucial a role does apprenticeship play? We take for granted, somehow, that athletic ability, physical agility, and sexual exuberance belong to the young body; what of the young mind? Is there a stage of age in which talent takes flight; what enables its adventures, and when and how do they end? Is the pattern always the same? The headlong rush of the opening act—the hurtling intensity of the beginner—does have risks attached. My artists each knew failure as well as important success. So is the secondary meaning of my title phrase a truthful or empty assertion; do we consider “the art of youth” a distinctive achievement or simply a function of age? Is there, I mean, some way of being a beginner that’s not “wasted on the young”?

This book examines three creative personalities: a writer (Stephen Crane), a visual artist (Dora Carrington), and a musician (George Gershwin). Each was precociously gifted as well as prodigal; their trajectories were swift. One of my subjects died in his twenties; two lived till thirty-eight. Two succumbed to illness (one slowly advancing, one sudden); the third chose suicide. Two were American, one English; the first—the writer—was born in 1871, the last to die—the composer—did so in 1937. When Crane was young, America was in the painful aftermath of the Civil War; by the time of Gershwin’s death, storm clouds had gathered for World War II.

Extraordinary as individuals, they nonetheless are representative figures. As artists they were innovative and as characters iconoclastic, standing apart from society’s norms. None of them came from a family of practitioners or had been expected to make a life in art. Only the woman, Carrington, completed her studies in school. The painter distanced herself from the society she was born to; the writer died abroad. The composer stayed devoted to his family while traveling in social circles half a world away. Ambitious, all three sought recognition and, when it came, reacted strongly: Gershwin embraced the trappings of fame; Carrington withdrew. Stephen Crane did both.

People paid attention to these people, writing reminiscences, so their behavior can be monitored by an audience today. Self-invented, they broke rules—sexual as well as social—yet set standards for behavior in the years to come. Atypically for the period, the two men did not marry, and none of the trio had children (with the possible exception of an illegitimate child fathered by Gershwin). Companionship bulked large, however, in the lives of the writer and painter, and their consorts were notable; the composer too was known by the company he kept.

The difference in their histories is, however, finally as telling as the similarities. And that’s an additional reason I picked these three out of the thirty or three hundred figures I might instead have discussed. Together they cover the terrain this book attempts to map. What they did and didn’t do remains, I think, remarkable, and to delineate their efforts is to look collectively at the art of youth. Not every aspect of these histories entails increase and plenty; there’s grief and loss here too. As with so many men and women cut off in their early prime, one asks the unanswerable question: What more might they have done? Unlike the drama of Sixto Rodriguez, my brief lives have no second acts. Yet the work survives.

 

For more information, please visit NPR.org.

C-SPAN Book Discussion on The Art of Youth

Recently Nicholas Delbanco was interviewed by C-SPAN about his new book The Art of Youth. 

Video footage of this interview can be found at the  C-SPAN Video Library.

The Art of Youth, Review by Donna Seaman

In his nuanced and haunting “speculative inquiry” into the chronology of creativity, Delbanco considered prolonged productivity in Lastingness: The Art of Old Age (2011) and now investigates the opposite, profiling three very different artists who died young. Seeking to inhabit the inner and outer worlds of his intriguing subjects, Delbanco bridges indisputable facts and persistent mysteries. He ponders writer Stephen Crane’s (1871–1900) distinguished lineage and self-immolating ways as he wrote indelible literature (The Red Badge of Courage) and hack work until tuberculosis claimed his life. British painter Dora Carrington (1893–1932) evinced tremendous capability even as a student, but her inexplicable selfcensoring impulse smothered her artistic impetus, and then, after the death of her dear companion, writer Lytton Strachey, she committed suicide. Delbanco’s zestfully incisive profile of exuberantly creative and prolific composer George Gershwin (1898–1937) proves that precocity can be a happy state. If only Gershwin’s brain tumor had been detected in time. Delbanco ends with a bittersweet account of his own meteoric start, complicating assumptions about his place, as the author of more than two dozen books, in the “lasting” category. —Donna Seaman

Review provided by Booklist Review.