Christopher Benfey on Rodin's foot, reading entrails, and writing about place

On the NYR Daily this week On Friday we published an essay by Christopher Benfey, “[How Rodin Kept His Feet on the Ground](.” Benfey has been a [professor of English]( since the late 1980s at Mount Holyoke, as well as a longtime contributor to our pages, but readers may not know that he is also a direct New York Review alum: “I worked for two years as one of Bob Silvers’s assistants, an amazing experience,” he told me over email this week. “Bob was unusually trusting of a writer’s instincts, a hallmark of the Review in general.” It’s easy to trust Chris, who seems constitutionally incapable of a bad sentence. His Rodin piece was archetypal: a sort of pensée that takes the reader on the writer’s journey through a series of richly associative artistic and literary connections that, by some alchemical magic, becomes more than the sum of its parts. And that was my starting point: How does he do it? “Pieces like this form like crystals; they accrete,” he said. “I had taken a photograph of the foot [a study by the sculptor in the Musée Rodin], which I found remarkable, over New Year’s, when my wife and I took our two sons to Paris. In pursuit of another project, I returned this summer to Rilke’s little book on Rodin, which reminded me of the foot. When I told a poet-friend what I was thinking about, he mentioned the mutilated, footless Thinker in Cleveland. I was off and running.” That physical metaphor of crystals precipitating, becoming something solid and new, is very typical Benfey—as I was reminded when this week I picked up again his 2012 book Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay. It’s a marvelous sui generis production that defies brief description other than, perhaps, to call it a Daily piece writ large. But besides family history and memoir, there’s a lot about clay, porcelain, and throwing pots and firing them in North Carolina, near Black Mountain College, where his father’s aunt and uncle, Anni and Josef Albers, taught and made art. Photo by Mercedes Jelinek A similar plasticity and process of transformation occurs in Benfey’s writing, but the short-form version of this genre he credits not to his own invention but to a piece by Charles Simic, “[Winter’s Philosophers](,” that he read on the Daily in 2011. It gave him a template for “a kind of jagged-edged personal essay, with bits of autobiography grafted onto things I’d read or thought or seen”—material over which he’d been puzzling how to give form. I was still curious about his actual process, so he explained: “I keep journals, very disorganized, almost never dated, drawing pads for words. Most of the pieces I’ve written for the Daily—on “[Pain and Parentheses](,” for example, or [Melville’s tragic son Stanwix](—have come out of journal jottings or stray reading. Occasionally, I’ve pursued something like a series, on divination, for example. I’ve written on [augury](, [Tarot](, [haruspicy](, and the like. But there, too, I waited—often for a long time—until something seemed to crystallize around one of these divinatory modes.” Fortunately, you don’t need to look too far—let alone into the entrails of sacrificial animals (haruspicy!)—to find the wellsprings of Benfey’s ideas: “The same thinkers keep walking through the doors of my pieces: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Stanley Cavell, Dickinson.” Dickinson was the subject of his first book; more followed, on Stephen Crane, Edgar Degas, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others. His most recent, just published, is If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. What had drawn him to a writer so identified with the British Empire, a seeming departure from his signature studies of Gilded Age American writers and artists? “It was the astonishing fact that Kipling wrote The Jungle Book on a hillside above Brattleboro, Vermont. I had gone to boarding school a few miles away, at the Putney School. It was all about the place, and my sense that Kipling—a problematic figure, to say the least—had been Americanized somehow, had deliberately Americanized himself. It dawned on me, later, that most of my books are about displaced persons: Degas in New Orleans; Henry Adams in Japan; Anni and Josef Albers in North Carolina.” I had noticed how much geography matters for Benfey, a cosmopolitan of Indiana, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Japan—or perhaps, going back to his piece on Rodin’s foot, it’s more a matter of groundedness. Where does he feel most at home? “Once a Hoosier, always a Hoosier,” he joked, but his real answer was: “I don’t feel rooted. And I’m happy that way.” For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And let us know what you think: send your comments on articles or this newsletter to Lucy McKeon and me at daily@nybooks.com; we do write back. Matt Seaton Editor, NYR Daily You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. [Update preferences]( The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](