Word: chatterton
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...exhibition of the works of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat that opened at Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art last month is billed as a retrospective. It does cover the artist's working life: about nine years. But since it aims to present the deceased as the black Chatterton of Postmodernism -- the "marvellous boy," cut off in his prime by a drug overdose at the age of 27 -- it more resembles a parody of a funeral rite, performed over a slender talent encased in a sarcophagus grossly too large for it. There had to be room in that...
...turns out, has plagiarized her books. His wife works for an art gallery where the paintings are palpable forgeries. Meanwhile, as the narrative flashes forward and back, parallel lies are occurring in other times and places. Meredith is being deceived; so are those who subscribe to the Chatterton myth...
Ackroyd sometimes overstates his satire of scholarship and art -- Chatterton's death by poison comes not out of despair but in the hope of finding a cure for the clap. Yet the poet himself is a poignant re-creation, and the supporting cast of irrepressible eccentrics might have tumbled from a chapter of Pickwick Papers. On a train, Wychwood literally devours a novel, rolling the pages into balls and popping them into his mouth...
...fate has added an even more bizarre twist to the story of the poet's death and afterlife. Ackroyd is cited in a new nonfiction work, The Family Romance of the Impostor-Poet Thomas Chatterton, by Psychologist Louise J. Kaplan. Examining the causes of plagiarism, she quotes Eliot's biographer: "As Ackroyd says, there is a 'continual oscillation between what is remembered and what is introduced, the movement of other poets' words just below the surface...
...just as Meredith plays a part in Ackroyd's book about Chatterton, Ackroyd has a walk-on in Kaplan's. If the accretion of historical detail were + all, this would be a superlative evocation of the England of George III. But Kaplan's aim is psychobiography, and her narrative attempts to press a free spirit into a Freudian mold. She rings in a psychoanalyst to testify on mind and motive: "Those who have not been able to project their Ego Ideal onto their father . . . grant themselves their missing identity by different means, creation being one among others. The work thus...