Artists & Authors: A Life in Good Company

Scribner (Home by Another Route), an art scholar and descendant of the publishing family, serves up a hit-or-miss collection of essays on art, music, and literature. The pieces are divided into three sections: the first and most unified covers books and writers, focusing on great American authors published by Scribners & Sons—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, among others—and the men named “Charles Scribner” (“ours is a redundant family,” he writes) who facilitated their publication. The second centers on painting and sculpture, and, for the most part, comprises impersonal, lightly academic meditations on the lives and work of such artists as Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, and Michelangelo. (One exception is an essay in which Scribner relates playing a small part in an undercover operation to bust art thieves.) The final and shortest section covers opera singers and refreshingly returns to the personal, with a long, standout piece about a “pilgrimage” the author took to visit soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at her home in Austria. While Scribner’s scholarship is lucid, many of the essays appeared previously as book introductions, lectures, or magazine articles and can end abruptly or otherwise feel incomplete devoid of their original context. This has its moments, but doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts.