The Blind Bow-Boy by Carl Van VechtenKirsten MacLeod

Abstract

 Reviews in the opening lines of Casa Guidi Windows, the snatches of stornelli that distract the painter in ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’), James Joyce (the one-legged sailor who wanders through Dublin in Ulysses, growling out lines from ‘e Death of Nelson’), Virginia Woolf (the unintelligible singing of an ancient woman, heard by both Peter Walsh and Rezia Smith outside Regent’s Park Tube Station in Mrs. Dalloway), to Marcel Proust (early morning Paris street cries driing up to the windows of the narrator in La Prisonière, volume  of A la recherche du temps perdu). roughout, Karlin pursues complicated strands of meaning borne by street songs or cries to show an author’s triumphant use of them in a different literary design. e volume concludes with a final chapter on Walt Whitman (a knife-grinder in ‘Sparkles from the Wheel’)—the sole American example and the only instance where sight rather than sound provides the design for a literary composition. Perhaps the best way to read this book is simply to take pleasure in what it provides. But if one did want to use the evidence of these seven case studies to think about larger questions, what would these be? I have already suggested one: how do writers translate song (or sound) into a written text? In some chapters, Karlin attends to this question more than in others, where the role of song slips into that of the figure of the singer, on which he has written well elsewhere. Alternatively one might ask: can these studies tell us anything about the way people heard street songs and cries in the places and times covered—what they listened to but also what registered on their consciousness, how and why? One would need either to argue that these cases are particularly representative or to examine a lot more of them—including works by popular writers. But those are questions for other studies. is book concludes, with lovely structural circularity, where it began: with ‘the art of appropriation’ (p. ). Building on the work of his chapters, Karlin closes with a tribute to (at least some of) his writers: ‘Whitman—like Wordsworth, or Joyce, or Woolf, or Proust—can afford to be as generous as he is unscrupulous. Only the great artists pay such tribute to the treasure they plunder’ (p. ). U  C E H e Blind Bow-Boy. By C V V. Ed. by K ML. (MHRA Critical Texts) Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association. . xxviii+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. In the past decade, many modernist texts have become available as they move out of copyright and into the public domain. In addition, letters and archival material, also previously underused and kept out of print, have been allowed to become accessible to scholars. As a result, once popular and influential works can now be re-examined and new understandings of oen read and taught novels can be constructed, in turn illuminating the importance of an entire network of long forgotten modernist writers and artists. Because American modernism is so deeply connected to American nationalism, the re-emergence of these understudied and in many cases MLR, .,   suppressed texts forces a reassessment of deeply held scholarly beliefs about not just modernism, but the idea of a national literature as a whole. Kirsten MacLeod’s new edition of Carl Van Vechten’s e Blind Bow-Boy () does exactly that with its extensive and well-researched apparatus thoroughly demonstrating the importance of this once well-known novel. e Blind Bow-Boy follows Harold Prewett, ‘a naïve young man who has led a sheltered life, and his initiation into a life of pleasure-seeking’ (p. xi). His father, who le him to be raised by a harsh aunt, summons him at eighteen years old, presumably to take up the mantle of his cloak and suit business. When Harold blurts out that he has no interest in the business, his father, instead of being upset, praises him and agrees to finance his next years exploring New York with ‘worldly man-about-town Paul Moody’ (p. xi). In a complicated twist of reverse psychology, he expects his son to be so fed up with corruption and...