Volume 30, Number 8 · May 12, 1983
The Man Who Wasn't There
By Gert Schiff
Marbot: Eine Biographie Crampton, will be published in September by Braziller.)
by Wolfgang Hildesheimer
Suhrkamp Verlag, 326 pp., $20.90 (The American edition of Marbot, translated by Patricia
In this book Wolfgang Hildesheimer, the German novelist and author of a recent biography of Mozart, purports to resuscitate a forgotten figure in English nineteenth-century art and letters; a writer whose achievement—as was the case with Beckford, Byron, Swinburne, Wilde, and many others—was in some way linked to sexual 'deviation.' According to Hildesheimer, the work of Andrew Marbot has passed largely unnoticed because his ideas were too novel and radical for his own time. For this short-lived amateur art historian was the first scholar ever to have searched for the psychological roots of artistic creation, thus anticipating some of the discoveries of the psychoanalytical theory of art.
Review, 2362 words
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