The Highest Human Accomplishment
by Jim Henderson
Coffee House Press, 160pp, ISBN 9781566896368, £12.99
‘I am turning toward a kind of aesthetic mysticism,’ wrote Flaubert in one of his letters. ‘When there is no encouragement to be derived from one’s fellows, when the exterior world is disgusting, enervating, corruptive, and brutalizing, honest and sensitive people are forced to seek somewhere within themselves a more suitable place to live.’ Nobody would say anything like that today; it would be too embarrassing. Treating art as a substitute religion — as something absolute that transcends a debased world and is pursued for its own sake, in a spirit of ascetic renunciation — is no longer fashionable. Over the past century and a half such ideas have been ousted by notions of the artist as explicator of social problems, as votary of the cult of the self, as brand. So one striking feature of Mark Haber’s excellent new novel, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, is that it takes up ‘aesthetic mysticism’ in the context of the present. It looks at what it costs to give yourself over to art when even this secularised religion is subject to disenchantment.
At the heart of the novel is a 16th-century painting, also called Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, by an artist named Count Hugo Beckenbauer. Neither is real, although in the book the painting hangs in Barcelona’s Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, and such fictional artworks are mentioned alongside actual ones. Sporadic details come out about the painting: it shows five apostles ascending to the heavens, a bolt of lightning, a flaming sword, a donkey on a cliff. For his part, Beckenbauer was interested mostly in sex, which he would try to purchase with his paintings; he caught syphilis, was haunted by visions of the apocalypse, and died young. Two other paintings of his survive; they are terrible. For the narrator of the novel (who is never named) and his best friend, Schmidt, Beckenbauer was a suffering art martyr, and discovering Saint Sebastian’s Abyss was the central event of their lives and the whole fulcrum of their relationship. They first see it as students at Oxford and go on to write scores of books about it, which make their names as critics. (Their titles make for some of the best jokes in this very funny book: Harlequin’s Affection and Turbulent Incoherence are two examples.) Schmidt calls it ‘the most glorious and effulgent painting in human history.’
At the start of the novel, Schmidt and the narrator have not spoken for 13 years. One day the narrator gets an email from Schmidt, who is dying. The narrator goes to Berlin to see him, and his account switches between this trip and recollections of their time together. In the prime of their friendship Schmidt and the narrator looked down on their colleagues as fakers and careerists — a snobbish judgment, but the novel’s portrayal of the world of art criticism mostly bears them out. Having cut themselves off from other people, they worked out an aesthetic doctrine, mostly through Schmidt issuing ex cathedra pronouncements and the narrator agreeing. For them art must be treated as ‘the highest human accomplishment’; anyone who thinks otherwise is not worth the trouble of getting to know. But it's also no longer possible to make art, which according to Schmidt ended in 1906, the year Cézanne died. Everything that came afterward is ‘trash’ or at best ‘not art’. Truly great art induces ‘wordless communion with the infinite.’ They regard Saint Sebastian’s Abyss as the one painting that really succeeds on this front, and although Schmidt and the narrator stress they are avowed nonbelievers, they fall back on religious language to describe its effect on them. They say it’s ‘like looking into the eyes of God’ or hearing a choir of angels. Gazing at the canvas, they feel their souls begging to be set free from ‘the mediocrity of the world.’
Underneath all these high-flown pronouncements is continual one-upmanship between the two men. Schmidt, a sickly Austrian who takes rest cures in spa towns, tells the narrator, an American, that he lacks historical grounding and can’t possibly understand art. He stages phoney emotional transports to prove that he’s the one most profoundly affected by Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. The tension mounts until Schmidt loses respect for the narrator when, at a panel, he demurs on the question of whether all post-1906 art is worthless. Instead, he says that art means different things to different people, none of which is more valid than any other.
Saint Sebastian’s Abyss begins by saying the same thing twice: ‘After reading the email from Schmidt I knew I would have to fly to see Schmidt on his deathbed in Berlin. After rereading and reflecting on the more emphatic passages of his relatively short email, I was convinced I’d have to visit Schmidt one last time as he lay, in his words, dying in Berlin.’ The first thing to note is all the uses of ‘after’, ‘Schmidt’, ‘Berlin’ and so on that proliferate over more or less the same sentence structure. But some transformations occur too: ‘reading’ becomes ‘rereading’, the email’s tone and length are brought in, the narrator’s words are exchanged for Schmidt’s.
Haber’s style is characterised by this mix of reiteration and variation. Certain keywords resound throughout the book; the narrator’s thoughts are looping and obsessive. The novel progresses through the narrator saying something, then saying it again with qualifiers and details added in, sometimes to the point of retelling whole scenes; gradually a fuller picture emerges. Eventually Haber’s sentences snowball into bigger and bigger agglomerations of these repeated phrases, like the narrator’s account of the panel incident:
I was asked if I agreed with my great friend and colleague Schmidt in his assertion that all art after 1906 was trash, an opinion that had become notorious as well as fashionable as conversational currency, specifically in art circles, a seamless way of bringing up debates about art, especially art after 1906 and the question of whether it was good or trash and people, specifically in art circles, approached one another at galleries and exhibitions and conferences, functions all equally tedious and overrun by the petulant, asking if they agreed with Schmidt and often that was all it took, the interlocutor knowing their listener understood what it meant to agree or disagree with Schmidt, meaning what was their opinion regarding art after 1906 and did they think it was trash?
It’s a stylistic approach that suits Schmidt’s and the narrator’s lives, which are marked by stasis. Haber’s evocation of them is funny and eerily nebulous. A lot of the book is written in the imperfect: phrases like ‘Schmidt would say’ and ‘Schmidt would stand’ are all over. What is being described are not discrete events but repeated actions that are not bound to any one instant. Everything seems to take place suspended outside of time. That quality makes sense if you consider that the lives of the two main characters have consisted mostly of going to Barcelona over and over again to look at Saint Sebastian’s Abyss. A large portion of the novel deals with these exercitations, which get increasingly monomaniacal as it goes on. In the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss is displayed in a gallery with Beckenbauer’s other work and some Renaissance paintings. This placement is the great affront to their lives. Schmidt and the narrator regard just the presence of these other artworks as a desecration of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss: the Renaissance stuff because it’s not as good, and Beckenbauer’s other paintings because they undermine their perception of him as a singular genius. Communion with Saint Sebastian’s Abyss is impossible in this setting, which brings it down from its transcendent plane to the disappointment of worldly life. At first they have fantasies of putting the painting in its own gallery, or even its own museum. Then Schmidt wonders about destroying Beckenbauer’s other works. In later visits, they take to cupping their hands around their eyes to block out the other paintings and avoiding looking to the left or right, even when stopping to tie their shoes. Eventually Schmidt starts writing indignant letters to the museum administration, which claim that Saint Sebastian’s Abyss is being ‘bullied and crowded and suffocated’ by the other paintings.
The focus throughout Saint Sebastian’s Abyss is on the hothouse that Schmidt and the narrator inhabit, away from the ‘torturously self-satisfied art critics’ they hate and pretty much everyone else. The rest of the world barely figures in the novel, so some of its most startling scenes, aided by Haber’s skilful manipulation of perspective and command of irony, occur when their narrow worldview is shown up. There are suggestions that Saint Sebastian’s Abyss is not as good as they think. When they discover the painting stuck somewhere in the back pages of their textbook, they excitedly ask their professor about it; he doesn’t care. Beckenbauer’s other paintings are so inept that some critics argue that Saint Sebastian’s Abyss was an accident. It’s a plausible theory, but Schmidt and the narrator are so hung up on their worship of the painting that the idea is inconceivable to them.
Their perception of themselves as brilliant intellectuals is also undercut. At dinner with the narrator and his then-wife (one of the novel’s running jokes is that the narrator’s relationships with women always fail, either through Schmidt’s resentful interference or through the narrator’s own absorption in Saint Sebastian’s Abyss), Schmidt remarks that Beckenbauer’s ‘utter indifference to royalty in his three surviving works was progressive.’ The narrator’s wife starts laughing uncontrollably, but they can’t figure out why. Later, when the narrator asks what was so funny, she says — ‘as if it were the most natural thing in the world’ — ‘Him! Him! He’s an absurd man.’ Moments like these puncture Schmidt and the narrator’s shared certainties and give rise to other questions. Are the two men the secularists they claim to be, or have they turned Saint Sebastian’s Abyss into a fetish object for some disavowed religious impulse? Was Beckenbauer really a visionary artist, or only someone suffering from syphilitic hallucinations? Does Schmidt revere art, or is it just what he uses to puff himself up?
None of these questions can be definitively answered, so they create doubt. Sociologist and Flaubert fan Pierre Bourdieu wrote that ‘the work of art is an object which exists as such only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art.’ He meant that quasi-magic acts — the signature of a painter, the imprimatur of a publisher, the benediction of a critic — could induce this conviction and transfigure the status seeking of everyone involved. I don’t want to give away too much, but Saint Sebastian’s Abyss's climactic scenes, a deathbed exchange between Schmidt and the narrator and its aftermath, show that this belief can waver. Following Schmidt’s death, the narrator wonders whether ‘all of it was meaningless or, worse even, replete with a meaning that was misconstrued and never understood.’ Like many believers, he’s left with agony, self-abnegation, and an unsteady commitment to something that might not be there.