Abstract
Until his illness Heller’s normal working rhythm had been to produce a novel every six to ten years. Now, however, everything changed. Within a comparatively short period he had completed both God Knows and his sections of No Laughing Matter, and had written an article on his illness for McCalls to introduce excerpts from the latter book.1 He returned to the Gourmet Club and pursued his interest in food by contributing an article on the Theatercafeen, an Oslo restaurant, for the New York Times ‘Sophis-ticated Traveller’ series.2 He was reported to be working on his new novel in November 1986 and apparently expecting to complete it the following February.3 Considering how recently some of the source materials for this novel were published (a study of Dutch culture in 1987, for instance) Heller must have managed his research, drafting and revision in a remarkably short time. Picture This (1988) marks a second new departure in his career. No Laughing Matter was his first attempt at non-fiction; Picture This does not quite return to fiction, as we shall see, but it is clearly a very carefully researched work. The novel has a double subject —
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Notes
Jakob Rosenberg, Rembrandt: Life and Work, revised ed. (London: Phaidon Press, 1964) p. 3.
Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (New York: Viking Press, 1985) p. 79.
Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (London: Collins, 1987) p. 165. Heller’s other main source on Rembrandt’s social context was Paul Zumthor’s Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland.
John Lothrop Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (London: Routledge, 1897) p. 897.
C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1977) p.99. The standard study of the Anglo-Dutch wars (v. chapter 14) is Charles Wilson’s Profit and Power (1957).
Aristotle, ‘Poetics’, translated by Ingram Bywater, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941) p. 1470.
Humphry House, Aristotle’s Poetics (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964) p. 125.
Plato, Phaedrus, translated by W. C. Helmbold and W. G. Rabinowitz (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956) p. 69.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) p. 110.
Plutarch (Life of Pericles) suggests that Pericles was responsible for the war because of his grudge against the Megarians. Thucydides spreads the responsibility and declares: ‘what made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta’ (The Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974] p. 49). Heller follows the latter interpretation explicitly and implicitly by quoting long passages verbatim from Thucydides’ account.
One of Heller’s sources of information on the painting was Theodore Rousseau’s ‘Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 20 (1962) 149–56.
This passage puts together quotations from W. Hamilton’s transla-tion of The Symposium (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959) pp. 102, 103, 111.
Stephen Fender, ‘Ezra Pound and the Words Off the Page; Historical Allusions in Some American Long Poems’, Yearbook of English Studies 8 (1978) 105.
Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Pan, 1985) p. 90. I am grateful to Brian Nellist for drawing this novel to my attention.
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© 1989 David Seed
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Seed, D. (1989). Picture This. In: The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Againts the Grain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20007-8_9
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