The New York Times-20080127-The Art of War- -Review-
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The Art of War; [Review]
Full Text (1186 words)[Author Affiliation] Christopher Benfey is Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His new book, A Summer of Hummingbirds, about writers and artists in Gilded Age America, will be published in April.LIFE CLASS
By Pat Barker.
311 pp. Doubleday. $23.95.
When German gunners flattened the city of Ypres in World War I, they destroyed, along with thousands of innocent lives, the famous Cloth Hall, a landmark of medieval Flemish architecture. That ruined masterpiece, as Paul Fussell wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory, served as an eloquent emblem of what happens when war collides with art. That same collision is central to Pat Barker's new novel, Life Class, which follows a group of British artists -- loosely based on gifted figures like Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Dora Carrington -- from the comfortable confines of the Slade School of Fine Art in London to the carnage of the Western Front.
While the novel covers some of the same ground -- including battleground -- as Barker's superb Regeneration Trilogy, with historical figures again mingling with invented ones and artists substituted for the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Life Class is lighter fare. Concentrating more on the turmoil of love than the trauma of war, it is rendered with the quick hand of a sketch rather than the textured layering of an oil painting.
Life Class opens with two temper tantrums. Paul Tarrant, a Slade student raised in the shadow of the ironworks for whom Art had always been Somewhere Else, storms out of Henry Tonks's life drawing class. Tonks, a formidable teacher (and a historical figure who trained as a surgeon before becoming an artist), is disappointed with Paul's skilled but emotionally detached sketches of nude women. I don't get any feeling that they're yours, he tells him. You seem to have nothing to say. Blowing off steam in Hyde Park, Paul comes across a drunken, disheveled girl being stalked by an older man. All Paul's long frustration in the life class -- a frustration which could never be vented on Professor Tonks ... boiled over into hatred of this man with his florid cheeks and his expensive suit and his silver-topped cane.
Stray themes sounded in these opening scenes -- the quest for authentic artistic expression, the tensions of social class and erotic triangles based on the rescue of vulnerable women -- resonate throughout Life Class. Paul first falls in love with Teresa Halliday, a hard-luck artist's model, herself victimized by a creepy estranged husband. Then he is drawn to a fellow student, Elinor Brooke, a doctor's daughter, who is partly in love with a successful Slade dropout named Kit Neville, who in turn is attracted to Paul. The upper-middle-class Neville slums in Paul's old neighborhood, introducing into his paintings the same smoking terraces and looming ironworks that Paul had turned his back on every Sunday, cycling off into the countryside in search of 'Art.' The ensuing complications among the mismatched lovers -- No, it was impossible. He couldn't still be attracted to Elinor, not now, when all his thoughts were focused on Teresa -- sometimes sound like an episode of Friends set in 1914.
War interrupts this hothouse vie de boheme. Always the rescuer, Paul, rejected by the army, joins the Belgian Red Cross and is stationed at a makeshift hospital on the outskirts of Ypres. Elinor, who will eventually quit the Slade to become a decorator of teapots at Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, drifts into the pacifist Bloomsbury circle -- I've been to tea with Lady Ottoline Morrell! -- where Sassoon, in Barker's Regeneration, found confirmation for his own disgust with the war. Disguised as a nurse, Elinor travels to Ypres, only to find that Paul has become emotionally involved with a fellow medic. In the aftermath, Neville drunkenly attempts to make Paul understand why he calls Elinor Our Lady of Triangles. For her, as Neville puts it, men come in twos. ... she wouldn't fancy either of us if it wasn't for the other.
As she did in the Regeneration Trilogy, Barker documents the way the war cut through Britain's genteel propriety, releasing something visceral in British culture and society. But here she also tries to feel her way into the perceptions of visual artists. Elinor, newly arrived in Ypres, rides through cobblestone streets filled with soldiers: For a time the cab ran along by the side of a canal with tethered barges and tall spindly trees that had begun to strip for the winter, their bright yellow leaves twirling down to lie on the brown, smooth, reflecting surface of the water. Later she watches as the white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup. Once the shelling starts, however, Barker falls back on stereotyped images -- a screaming horse straight out of Guernica; boarded-up buildings like black teeth in a smile.
She wants her Bloomsbury-inflected romance to carry both emotional and historical heft. At least twice we hear of artists making a Faustian pact, sacrificing ordinary happiness for the claims of art. There is much talk of the proper function of art in wartime, painting while Rome burns. While a subplot follows a London dentist's family that's been ostracized for its German background, for the most part the plotting is too light, too airy. I also kept imagining Emma Thompson playing the tomboy Elinor, just as she played the tomboy Carrington, another, more tragic, lady of triangles.
The shelling of Ypres sends Elinor back to London; Paul, meanwhile, finally finishes a picture he's proud of. The painting (perhaps partly based on Stanley Spencer's Travoys Arriving With Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia) had an authority that he didn't associate with his stumbling, uncertain, inadequate self. Its subject is an orderly applying hydrogen peroxide to a gangrenous wound: No ministering angel, this. A white-swaddled mummy intent on causing pain.
At this intersection of medicine and art, Barker might have constructed a narrative comparable in emotional and aesthetic complexity to that of William Rivers, the real-life neurologist who treated Siegfried Sassoon in the Regeneration Trilogy. We learn from her acknowledgments that Henry Tonks worked closely with a pioneering plastic surgeon, making drawings before, during and after surgery had been performed on the mutilated faces of war victims. Tonks also produced, Barker notes, a series of 69 portraits of facially mutilated men which are among the most moving images to have come out of any war.
Almost none of this disturbing material has made its way into Life Class, where romance ultimately outweighs both the claims of art and the horrors of war. As they bicker about what art should be about, we are left wondering whether Elinor and Paul will get back together, not whether either will paint anything enduring. Henry Tonks makes a late appearance, thinner, gloomier, snappier, merely to express approval of Paul's breakthrough work, along with a warning, I don't see how you could ever show that anywhere. When will we get Tonks's story? In a sequel, perhaps?
[Illustration]DRAWING (DRAWING BY EDEL RODRIGUEZ)