(Jack Robinson for Vogue) “ALMOST PATHETICALLY SERIOUS”—so Vogue wrote of the thirty-two-year-old novelist whose photograph appeared in the August 15, 1970, issue of the magazine. The writer went on to note that the novelist, whose fourth novel, them, had received the National Book Award for 1970, was “tentative, hush-voiced, with the fixed brown eyes of a sleepwalker” and that “daydreaming” had given to her writing a “peculiar floating quality” somewhat at odds with the violence of her subject. An excerpt from the novelist’s National Book Award acceptance speech was quoted: “What an artist has to resist and turn to his advantage is violence.” The photo-replica of the novelist’s face of 1970, strangely without expression, masklike and dreamy and “serene,” ironically gave no indication of the maelstrom of emotions she was feeling at the time of the photo-shoot: excitement, wonderment, stress, a kind of chronic ontological anxiety. Photographed for Vogue! The most elegant, as it was the most daunting and mysterious, of the several glossy magazines my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, herself a somewhat mysterious woman, brought to our house in Millersport, New York, when I was growing up in the 1950s.
What do You think about The Lost Landscape (2015)?
