Some time ago I wrote a short post on reasons to love Mark Helprin. My opinion of him has not changed, but there are also reasons to mourn when reading him. He is so close to being great that the sense of loss at his failure often outweighs the admitted beauty of his writing.
There are two reasons for this. The first is simply a matter of form. Because his sentences are often beautiful and always literate, he seems to have exempted himself from the need to edit. At times he seems to believe that if 3 yards of brocade on a lovely woman make a gorgeous evening dress, 30 yards of brocade ought to be ten times more beautiful.
But the second reason is much more grievous. From the quality of the language to the preoccupation of the main characters, his books attempt to be an homage to beauty. And a person able to write so well clearly does have some understanding of beauty. Yet he explicitly divorces beauty and truth. The falling off here is tragic. He of anyone ought to know that beauty must be true. Beauty demands not just a response, but love. And love is a relationship, a calling forth of the self to the other, refreshing and ennobling the returning self. If beauty is not true, not real, it is not other, and cannot be loved. It is not beauty but merely a chimera of false self-love.
If beauty is not true, we are trapped:
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
- I Wake and Feel, Gerard Manley Hopkins
