Evan S Connell:
Goya's World of Turmoil

From the very beginning, Evan S. Connell has viewed the dolorous aspects of modern life with a mordant glee that’s more European than American in temper. His touch has always been humane and light—more Chekovian that Kafkaesque. For example, his depiction of the bourgeois milieu of post-war Kansas City in Mrs. Bridge is pitiless, but also affectionate; and his Pulitzer Prize winning study of Custer, Son of the Morning Star, maintains a literary standard we seldom meet up with in books about the West. Connell’s early essays, recently reprinted in the volume The Aztec Treasure House, exhibit a boyish fascination with the arcana of lost cultures, death-defying exploration, and other slightly juvenile subjects; and his book-length poem Points for a Compass Rose, (which appeared during the Vietnam War) makes use of similar material to weave a subtle critique of the vanity and fruitlessness of imperialist braggadoggio. Connell has had a few misfires (The Alchymist’s Journal), but the quality of his work is almost invariably high, and because he attends not only to the content, but also to the cadence of his sentences, the musicality of his prose sustains us during those patches when the references threaten to become truly obscure.

In short, Connell is a writer for whom every word counts.

In Francisco Goya he’s once again chosen a subject well-suited to his temperament. Of peasant stock and vaguely liberal ideals, Goya rose within the ranks of painters, and eventually distinguished himself to a degree that brought him to the attention of the Spanish court. By early middle age, Goya was the most famous painter in Spain, receiving generous commissions from wealthy patrons and ecclesiastics while also serving the King’s family. Goya was an individual of penetrating vision, however, and he depicted the superstition and violence of the times no less effectively than the fragile beauty of its gilded upper crust—often within the scope of a single canvas. His renderings of the irrationality and fanaticism of the masses have never been surpassed. Goya’s shaky position in the art pantheon—a few critics of every age have found his technique shoddy and his subject-matter disgusting—further enhances his appeal as an object of the kind of extended meditation at which Connell has proven himself adept.

Yet Connell’s brief biography isn’t a book for everyone. In the first place, it lacks illustrations. Readers without an appropriate coffee-table book near at hand may, at times, find Connell’s descriptions of the paintings and lithographs more frustrating than insightful. Then again, the economy of Connell’s prose, and the obvious pleasure he takes in unanswered questions, may leave some readers with the unpleasant sense that he’s failed to bring the “real” Goya fully to life. To those who are familiar with his style, on the other hand, the book offers all the pleasures we’ve come to expect from the master story-teller and literary high-priest of history’s curiosities and conundrums.

Connell begins with characteristic obliqueness, introducing us on the first page to the vastly wealthy and irresistibly beautiful Duchess of Alba, whom Goya not only painted several times, but lived with for seven months. Connell doesn’t describe the Duchess, however, so much as he relates what others have said about her, and we’ve read no more than a page before we come upon the following passage:

Connell relishes such evident contradictions, and he’s clearly fascinated by this woman who possesses them. In the space of a few pages he passes that interest on to us, establishing an emotional anchor for the unconventional story that follows.

In the course of tracing the trajectory of Goya’s own life, Connell examines the man’s paintings, discusses his friends and court appointments, speculates on the sources and significance of his imagery, and analyses his correspondence. He also sifts avidly through the comments of other biographers and art-historians, weighing opinion against opinion, while only occasionally offering one himself. “One critic thinks the composition stilted, satirical, family members anemic...Another critic thinks it an affectionate family portrait.” What does Connell think? He doesn’t say.

Connell recognizes that in order to provide an effective portrait of the artist who executed "The Caprichos", "The Disasters of War", the famously equivocal portrait of King Charles and his family, and "The Third of May", he’ll have to make the historical background comprehensible to those of us who know little of Spanish history. It’s not an easy task. The protagonists in that story are mediocre, and the moral valences are anything but clear. Napoleon, his brother Joseph, the Duke of Wellington and various other foreigners offer striking personalities, and they’re all liberal in one way or another, but they’re intruders. Meanwhile Charles III, Charles IV, Godoy, and Queen Maria Teresa are distinguished largely by their venality, lack of vision, superstitious religiosity, and vice. Connell’s story-telling skills come fully into play here, and his rendering of the times is vivid. In fact, Goya drops from sight repeatedly as we follow one or another thread of the Peninsular campaigns, only to reappear a few pages later, moving in lofty social circles or in service to the king.

Although Connell has steeped himself in his subject, his tone remains light rather than scholarly throughout, and he doesn’t hesitate to get personal from time to time. He compares Goya’s wife, who seemed to care about nothing but frilly clothes, to the housekeeper Connell’s family had when he was a child, and in his efforts to explain why many Spaniards seem so sympathetic to authoritarian institutions, he offers an affectionate portrait of some members of the Guardia Civil with whom he travelled on a train during his student days, their machine-guns stacked casually on the seats beside them.

In his analysis of the return of repression to Spain following the downfall of the Napoleonic regime, Connell relates matter-of-factly:

“Some people think so...” but it’s pretty obvious Connell doesn’t. All the same, he’s intrigued by the fanaticism of those dark times, and he admires Goya’s ability to enter into it and convey its force. Yet he’s chosen Goya as a subject because Goya’s depiction of that fanaticism is also a rejection of its cruelty and blindness. In the pages of this marvelous book Connell too has summoned such forces, and given them their due. He’s given us the opportunity to look squarely at the irrationality and violence—a grim reality of those times, and of our own—while also convincing us that from the midst of such a mire, both then and now, works of great beauty and significance do occasionally emerge.

(A shorter version of this review appeared in Rain Taxi Magazine.)