Suggested reading

John Betjeman had the last laugh

By Jonathan Glancey

Le Corbusier — the bogusly matey “Corb” is to be resisted — grew up in the francophone Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds on, so far as he was concerned, the wrong side of the French border. Like Jean-Luc Godard some years later, he became a French citizen: both were mildly Helvetophobic, unattracted by ski-lifts, horology and rösti. Though Le Corbusier did not acknowledge it until much later the town made more impression on him than he did on it with a few prentice villas for family and friends which wave to art nouveau. La Chaux-de-Fonds was rebuilt after a fire in the late 18th century. Its grid pattern, unique in Switzerland, is omnipresent. It is a relentless rectilinear labyrinth which offers no relief, its axes are incarcerating. They lead to repetitive vanishing points. This would provide the template for the thwarted urbanistic projects which blighted Le Corbusier’s career. It fed the animus held by the enemies of modernism in the Twenties who failed to distinguish between Le Corbusier, architect of genius whose work shaped a century and — often apparently unrelated — Le Corbusier, utopian oddball (or hurluberlu). This wisenheimer’s megalomaniac schemes were not invariably recognized as the deadpan jests he partially intended, probably. Did he really expect to demolish much of Haussmannian Paris? Did he really expect to build 18 Cités Radieuses in a row in Marseille? He hid expressionlessly behind a prankster’s mask of the heaviest black-framed glasses that a human nose could support: frailer schnozzles have been defeated.

More from this author

Vladimir Nabokov: teasing trickster

By Jonathan Meades

It is indisputable that modernism in its various forms has won. Won what? Just look around you. (Unless, that is, you are in a British “housing” hutch or a “unit” of volume building.) Over half a century ago John Summerson noted that the architecture which demanded to be qualified by “modern” would soon no longer require a prefix. It would become architecture, tout court. Its debt to Le Corbusier would be immeasurably vast — and immeasurably third hand. A notion — playful or earnest, rational or fantastical or all of those, simultaneously — will, whatever its tenor, beget variations and dissipations, improvements and diminutions. Glasgow’s former Metropolitan College and Stirling and Gowan’s flats at Ham Common are obvious examples. Le Corbusier has been ripped off with abandon by the hackery which knows his work only from videos or low-quality images on a phone. Architecture can be represented in many ways, by far the worst of them is one dimensional.

A minor nuisance suffered by those, like me, whose home is Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille is the abundance of tourists who mill about the place. But at least they acquire some notion of the building as a living organism even if its inhabitants are exhibits in a freak show, ethnological samples who do things like drink coffee, laugh, look out to sea. We seldom pick lice out of our fur. Many of the guided tourists clearly have no idea why they are being directed though these corridors which are not so different from those in the blocks they live in. Now and again one of them dares to ask a passing exhibit why it lives here. What’s it like? What are those strange receptacles beside the front doors? (Ice boxes, daily refilled before the advent of the golden age of white goods.)

I guess this exhibit lives here because it can’t afford Blenheim or even Eastbury, the remaining wing of Vanbrugh’s third great house. But, generically there is a correspondence: the work of a supreme architect who was (in Vanbrugh’s case at least) a marvelously funny writer, the sense of being swaddled by concrete, cosseted by details realized with wit. The late Jim Cadbury Brown, whose wife Betty described Le Corbusier as an indefatigable groper, compared the Cité Radieuse’s solid clunkiness to a Bristol motor car. Piers Gough, whose work shares that quality, exclaimed, the first time he made a tour of the building: “This isn’t a modern work… this belongs to the arts and crafts.” That is one chasm which separates Le Corbusier from his followers, persons of blind goofy devotion who recall Eugène Burnand’s fanatics hurrying through a Millet-shaped landscape. “So they both ran together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter and came first to the sepulcher.” (St John 20.3)

Le Corbusier was, then, a magnet, a secular idol who, absolutely bereft of religion, created in his pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp near Belfort the supreme ecclesiastical structure of his age. But it might have been an eye-catcher, a stable, a sty, a bar. It belongs to refulgent architecture, to man’s craft and ingenuity, rather than to a clapped-out faith and its murky prescriptions, sick men’s dreams which demand no empirical validation.

Does it amplify what we already dread or anticipate? It is all exceptions and no rules, wobbly explanations and multiple vaguenesses which are seldom called upon when we usually subject artistic creation and its makers to scrutiny. A work can be described as, say, neo-realist, plangent, pastoral, melancholy, mauve, belligerent, mocking, cuddly, gormless, cyclopean, sickening, Biedermeyer… All these mean something more or less. They are devices for seeing, pigeon-holing, anatomizing screeches, distinguishing a willow’s bark from a Labrador’s.

These are veneers, a colorist’s province, chromatic patterns for the coming season, “styles” in the debased sense of an add-on, a surface superficiality, applied post hoc. And Late Style should on the face of it belong among them. But it doesn’t. This epithet belongs to a different gamut, determined by the calendar and the infirm body’s deliquescence — which are in tune. Beethoven’s late quartets were welcomed by his friends and admirers with “We knew he’d gone deaf… now he’s gone mad.” And when Op 131 turns into a jug band’s singalong of a century later we can see their point. So this is what he’s been hiding all these years.

Does “late” have any place in a variegated inventory of, inter alia, moods and passions, tempers and humors? Is it merely tagging along, clutching at an elbow as a reminder of its presence in a world sated with competing qualifiers? And can it be allied to such qualifiers? Is, for instance, “late pastoral” anything more than portmanteau clumsiness possibly representing mutton with scrapie, and a shepherd’s despair? The old have a lot to be frightened of — just look at them — just look at the face I see in the mirror.

Suggested reading

The God complex of Muriel Spark

By Kathleen Stock

It is surely Late Style which Buffon had in mind when he wrote “the Style is the very man / the man himself”. It is the quintessence of the artist arriving at the threshold of decrepitude, disintegrating. The earlier tendencies of the career are abandoned. They are not in terminal earnest. They derive from the Pantone guide to life or, for those that don’t drop their aitches, the Farrow and Ball Formula For Fulfillment. The Late Comer is different. Late Style works derive from its maker’s core. It is sooner identified by instances than by a generalized program. We can follow a maker’s creations over a career of many decades but never understand it till the four last things menace and it all becomes clear. Or not.

I can still summon the puzzlement of half a century ago. It was with delight that I realized I had been had. The sensation was electric. I had been Cruyffed by a double-take after a few sentences of Transparent Things. The septuagenarian author was heading apace into his Late Space, which had remained fallow since childhood and was now ready to be cultivated. This marvelous novella, a proxy amulet of a mere 100 pages, was the work of an old man impersonating the young man he once had been, a young man looking forward to being an old writer yet bereft of the old man’s achronic knack of whizzing forward and back though Time. Yet page after page proclaimed a lack of bereavement. And with it a mastery of legerdemain. Although he shared the name of the writer of the greatest novels of the century, this was a previously mute Vladimir Nabokov whose choice of Late Style was unfamiliar, may not even have been a choice… This was Late Style not just as reheated leitmotifs but as entire divergence from the great accumulated oeuvre which was now shed. The burdens of genius and high expectation could be abandoned without reference to them. In his and the century’s late Seventies it appeared that he was reinventing himself, almost provenantlessly, taking as his model without prior example the contemporary French writer he most admired, a generation his junior. He was all of a sudden dressed as Alain Robbe-Grillet. This was evidently a popular choice: Muriel Spark was kindredly togged at the same moment for The Driver’s Seat. Had they listened too attentively to their critics: Émigré purple… Lush and arid…

Transparent Things is a puzzle set, one guesses, by a teasing trickster who has already forgotten both the clues and the solution. It is dense with precise detail. Things happen: and then more things. It is quite unlike the bland featurelessnesses of the current fiction in which dull creative writing students chat to dull creative writing students (there is today a generalized fear of imaginative invention and giving offense). Transparent Things is a treasury of hotel fires, murders, mangled colloquial English, a heart attack caused by a struggle (probably unmatched in all literature) with trousers in a fitting booth, bogus allusions, the shadow of God, infidelities, unremembered strangulation, arch narration by a voice or voices whose owners are never fully disclosed — are they even human? The worst thing a great work can be accused of is that it has taught us something, like a self-help booklet. Don’t believe them, whoever they are — cassock, beard, hijab, forecourt suit etc. The more instructive and pedagogic art intends to be, the lesser its worth, for it is a sort of mental trap which gives the reader or spectator no option but to follow the writer. Transparent Things only rarely makes “sense”, only rarely vouchsafes any explanation of its protagonists’ behavior.

When it broaches the most profound of all matters it is skittish, evasive and improbably avuncular — as though this were not the most profound of all matters.

“….the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.”

“Easy, you know, does it. Son.”

The book suggests to me, upon my 15th or 20th reading, that it is a chalice void to the brim: the valley of the shadow of death where we laugh and dance in amity, not fearing the chummy hand that will, inevitably, grip our shoulder.

I rather fear that the hand is closing in.