THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 15, 1995 TAG: 9501110381
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
THE RANSOM OF RUSSIAN ART
JOHN MCPHEE
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 181 pp. $20.
FOR THE PAST quarter of a century, John McPhee has produced the highest order of nonfiction with a consistency, variety and prolificacy that have gone unmatched by his contemporaries. The hallmarks of a McPhee book are a lucid style - graceful, meticulous and often subtly comic - and a complex sense of narrative structure. His work is both informative and dramatic, bound by the ethical dictates of journalism but in carefully cumulative ways always creative.
His latest work, The Ransom of Russian Art, echoes his earliest books and at the same time sounds many of the themes that readers have come to associate with McPhee's reportage. The Ransom of Russian Art, like his first two books (A Sense of Where You Are and The Headmaster), is a slim, elegant profile of a singular man, in this case Norton Dodge, professor, connoisseur, art collector, smuggler.
Readers have come to expect that the McPhee hero is a man or woman of unusual skill or knowledge, a person engaged fully in the world - as environmentalist, canoe builder, geologist or tennis player. What these heroes do is, frankly, not as important as how they attend to their craft or activity.
At first glance, Norton Dodge may not seem to be the typical McPhee protagonist: He is not Bill Bradley or Arthur Ashe. With his ``grand odobene mustache,'' his inveterate sloppiness (``Various friends have likened him to an unmade bed''), and his perpetual absentmindedness, Dodge seems more Marx brother than James Bond. Nevertheless, he is the man who, as one art critic put it, ``singlehandedly saved contemporary Russian art from total oblivion. This makes him an evangelical figure.''
From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, Dodge smuggled more than 9,000 works of unofficial art from Russia, worth more than $3 million, at a risk to his personal safety and that of others. During the height of the Cold War, Dodge roamed the unlit streets of strange cities throughout Russia, a flashlight in hand, meeting dissident artists when he was supposed to be touring the Kremlin or other such sights. His ostensible mission was to study Russian history, but his real mission was, perhaps, to aid the intellectual rebellion in a totalitarian state.
``It was interesting,'' he said, ``to see your assets giving support to those who were undermining the monolithic thought-control apparatus of the Soviet Union.''
Somehow, Dodge was able to accomplish his aim and make a smart investment at the same time. He spent a fortune over those years, but he came back to the United States with a museum's worth of art, and he was able to purchase a 960-acre farm in Maryland.
McPhee amusingly describes his struggle with Dodge, who is by turns garrulous and secretive about his past, to get him to explain how he secured the finances or specifically how he smuggled some of the paintings out of Russia. This dialogue between McPhee and Dodge takes on the power of a sort of reflexive subplot, focusing attention on the tension between subject and writer, a tension that is an implicit part of all such nonfiction works.
The two main plots that make up the essence of the book, however, are Dodge's story and the story of the underground Russian artists. One has the resonance of a spy thriller and the other a dark mystery. In particular, the story of Evgeny Rukhin, a bohemian legend who died under strange circumstances, reads like a collaboration between Agatha Christie and Feodor Doestoevsky. Finally, though, this book is unmistakable John McPhee, a story of an admirable eccentric, written with skill, clarity and intelligence. MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches journalism and English at Old Dominion
University and is the author of ``Imagined Places: Journeys into
Literary America'' and ``A Place That's Known.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
John McPhee's latest recalls his earliest works - slim, elegant
profiles of a single protagonist.
by CNB