Word: poseur
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Back in Dublin, Beckett at first played the weary Continental poseur, then, to his parents' horror, degenerated quickly into a bum. The cause was a crippling depression that left him spending weeks bed, curled in the fetal position, his body racked with apparently psychosomatic symptoms: boils, cysts, headaches, flu, bursitis. Beckett tried to fight by drinking heavily and flying into periodic rages. When these attempts failed, he began cultivating an air of contemptuous indifference to the world and its pains. "All I want to do," he told a friend, "is sit on my ass and fart and think...
Apart from Hadrian the Seventh, a bitingly satirical novel about a destitute writer who becomes Pope, the books of Frederick Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, are little read. But his life as self-styled genius and unrepentant poseur continues to tantalize. In the 1930s, two decades after Rolfe's death, A.J.A. Symons made him the subject of a celebrated literary whodunit. The Quest for Corvo. In 1971, Donald Weeks wrote a more conventional biography, Corvo. Miriam Benkovitz, an English professor at Skidmore College, offers a new and exhaustive study. Her style is academic and sometimes awkward, but the Baron radiates...
Dostoyevsky thought him a haughty poseur; the Goncourt brothers found him an amiable giant. He wrangled with Tolstoy, befriended Zola, intrigued Carlyle, enchanted Henry James. He was at once a hunter of game and celebrity, a well-traveled man of letters, and a provincial Russian. Ivan Turgenev's life is several lives, and by now several biographies should have recounted them. Yet, as Critic V.S. Pritchett notes, there has not been a definitive biography of Turgenev in any language...
...when trying to impart lessons, what a poseur Ensor was! Every Christ he painted is trivialized by his narcissistic equation of the suffering God and the rejected artist. It is customary, at least in Belgium, to see Ensor as a man of the people. But Ensor's waterfront lumpenproletariat look just as subhuman as his judges and police officers. As a political artist, he was both strident and unfocused. The Good Judges, 1891, is a curdled parody of Daumier, without the master's swift economy of feeling. It is impossible to tell what Ensor thought about politics, except...
...best characters, however, Maggie keeps busy being clever. She complains that the "tempo" of her husband's lovemaking is all wrong: "He starts off adagio, adagio. Second phase, well, you might call it al legro ma non troppo and pretty nervy . . ." When she is offstage, Hubert the poseur can usually be counted on for verbal sprightliness. "What is opulence," he asks in his best Oscar Wilde manner, "but a semblance of opulence...