Valerie Martin
from the short story His Blue Period:
For anyone who has met Meyer Anspach since his success, his occasional lyrical outbursts on the subject of his blue period may be merely tedious, but for those of us who actually remember the ceaseless whine of paranoia that constituted his utterances at that time, Anspach’s rhapsodies on the character-building properties of poverty are infuriating. Most of what he says about those days is sheer fabrication, but two things are true: he was poor — we all were — and he was painting all the time. He never mentions, perhaps he doesn’t know, a detail I find most salient, which is that his painting actually was better than it is now. Like so many famous artists, these days Anspach does an excellent imitation of Anspach. He’s in control, nothing slips by him, he has spent the last twenty years attending to Anspach’s painting, and he has no desire ever to attend to anything else. But when he was young, when he was with Maria, no one, including Anspach, had any idea what an Anspach was. He was brash, intense, never satisfied, feeling his way into a wilderness. He had no character to speak of, or rather he had already the character he has now, which is entirely self-absorbed and egotistical. He cared for no one, certainly not for Maria, though he liked to proclaim that he could not live without her, that she was his inspiration, his muse, that she was absolutely essential to his life as an artist. Pursuing every other woman who caught his attention was also essential, and making no effort to conceal those often sleazy and heartless affairs was, well, part of his character.
(The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories; Vintage; $13)
