Visionaries

The opening chapter alone is worth the price of admission: Alixe Van Kuyp sits in a concert hall, heart in throat, waiting for her husband Richard to premiere his tone-poem 'Sordello' between two established classical works. She knows what the critics will say before they say it. She knows the harsh Elvard Rentgen is in the audience, sharpening his blade. What makes Huneker's 1900 collection remarkable is his willingness to sit inside the creative person's anxiety rather than glorify it or dismiss it. These are stories about people who have gambled everything on art and must now watch the dice roll. Huneker, himself one of America's most feared cultural critics, understood exactly what it feels like to hold the pen that can destroy and to be the one destroyed by it. The prose has the coiled tension of chamber music. The composers, painters, and dreamers who populate these pages are neither saints nor fools. They are something more unsettling: people who might fail spectacularly, publicly, and still find they cannot stop creating. This is not a celebration of genius. It is an examination of what art costs, and whether the price is worth paying.