Anyone who dares to delve into the condition of 20th century American life is most probably doing it to earn a doctorate. Not so author Alexander Eliot, 43, an out-of-place, out-of-sorts, self-styled recluse who, on the pine-clad slopes of Mount Pentelikon, near Athens, pondered the question, put down his answer in the dozen meditations of this new book.

Winds of Legend. Anxiety in Americans, says Eliot, stems from their “basically sound awareness that pleasure is not joy.” Money can buy pleasure but joy costs more, and can be gained only through “creative work and love.” In his personal search for these elusive commodities, Eliot
quit his job after 15 years as Art editor at TIME, and fled the U.S. for the Mediterranean littoral.

Descended from a long line of scholars headed by his great-grandfather, who was president of Harvard and editor of the five-foot shelf, Eliot ignores headlines and the cold war and makes his study nature. What he finds—from the eagle-hung abyss below Delphi to the song of the local vegetable man—delights him, and he passes on his delight to the reader in prose that is sometimes eloquent, sometimes merely latter-day inspirational. “The stars rained down their incandescent spears in sharply patterned salvos upon Mount Pentelikon and me. Staggering a little with my face uplifted, rapt in the ringing of a dark-silver gong, I felt the winds of legend sweep between my ribs, and the fires of yearning and the tongues of dread.”

His eye ranges widely and perceptively over ideas and legend. It may light on the aging Admiral Christopher Columbus, appearing on deck in the darkest watch of night “hollow-eyed and crumpled, like a dry, wind-driven, scurrying leaf.” Or on Diogenes: “His castle was an upended wine vat by the gates of Corinth. Alexander the Great called on him there. All radiant, the Conqueror leaned down across the neck of his white charger, doffed his golden helmet and inquired what he might do for Diogenes. ‘Move on,’ Apollo’s man suggested. ‘You’re in my light.’ ”

Secret Heart. In trying to prove his thesis that ancient myths embody intuitive wisdom that is only now being proved out, Eliot indulges himself in many a long reach. Aphrodite, goddess of love, was able to renew her virginity simply by bathing in the sea. Now “astrophysicists relate that our life-giving sun renews its virginity also, by dint of a circular chain reaction. Every nucleus of carbon and nitrogen in the sun returns to its pure state once in five million years.” This is ingenious rather than convincing, provocative rather than wise. And in his secret heart, Eliot knows it for the word game it is. But like the juggler who danced before the altar, Eliot is giving praise to the wonder of creation in his own way.

“American art matters,” declared Eliot in his pitch to write the definitive history of American painting. His compelling anecdotes about the artists, as well as over 1,000 superb color plates, proves that it does. In 1962 John F. Kennedy selected Eliot’s extraordinary and complete history of American painting as one of his favorite books of the year.

In a memo to his colleagues, after fifteen years of serving as the Art Editor at Time, Inc., Eliot wrote: “We now have the opportunity of producing the first really handsome historical survey of American art ever published. The raw material for such a book is already ours.” By raw material, Eliot meant an impressive collection of 1,069 color plates printed in the Art section since 1951, when he began regular use of full-color pages to illustrate the section.

“On the Time-honored principle that human beings are interested primarily in other humans,” he wrote, “chief emphasis of the text would be on the artists themselves—their lives, philosophies and working methods. The next emphasis would be on their work, describing the qualities that made each picture alive and unique. Finally the time, place and spirit surrounding the artists and inspiring their art should be evoked.”

From the Time Inc. Press Release:

Three Hundred years of American Painting (328 pp.; 250 full-color plates) rolled off the Chicago presses of R. R. Donnelley & Sons in 1962.  Author Eliot, 38, is an art editor with deep roots and long training in his field. A child dauber, he was ten when he first became aware of others’ paintings. Borrowing his father’s bicycle one day to visit a cubist exhibition at Smith College, where his father is a professor, he promised to be back in two hours, so father could ride to his English class. When Professor Eliot stormed into the gallery five hours later, his son was staring at an early Picasso “with the gaze small boys usually reserve for double banana splits. A fatherly swat brought Alex to, but it also woke him, he recalls, to the sudden awareness that for him a painting might be more important than a bicycle.”

“Yes, I met Matisse in the south of France in his later years,” Alex says. “He wasn’t well and Matisse was making those vibrant paper collages while confined to his bed. Well, I was given an audience with Matisse and as I was leaving something got into my head. There was a question I needed to ask. I had made it to the top of the mountain as it were and I was not going to leave without finding out the answer. I had gone to Black Mountain to learn to be an artist and then on to the Boston School of Fine Arts but I needed to know from the master. So I turned back to Matisse and asked, “What should I do next?” In response Matisse propped himself up on his bed and like a mantra repeated one word -”Draw, draw, draw …”

Read the entire press release.

Born April 28, 1919, in Northampton, Massachusetts, Alexander Eliot has published eighteen books – including books on art, mythology, history, and novels. He is also the author of hundreds of published essays in magazines as varied as The Eastern Buddhist and England’s Systematics.

From age 26 Eliot was the art editor at Time Magazine. He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960, and he took his wife and two small children to Spain, where he wrote Sight and Insight – on how to truly see and appreciate art. While he was there he visited Delphi in Greece, and wondered why anyone would want to raise a family anywhere else.

He took early retirement from Time Inc. at age 42, moved to Greece with his beloved wife and children, stayed several years, took his family on a freighter trip around the world when his children were seven and eight years old, lived in Rome, Italy, and then moved to Sussex, England. When his children attended college, he and Jane received a fellowship to study Zen Buddhism in Kyoto, Japan.

Although Harvard was a tradition in the Eliot family -Alexander Eliot’s great-grandfather Charles W. Eliot was Harvard president for almost fifty years, and pretty much invented our current liberal arts educational system – Alex Eliot decided to take a different course. He had heard about Black Mountain – and knew that Abstract artist Josef Albers taught there. He took Albers’s drawing, color and Werklehre courses, and on Friday evenings Albers gave him private drawing critiques.

At the end of his second year at Black Mountain, Eliot left to attend the Boston Museum School. He and his first wife Ann Dick set up a gallery, the Pinckney Street Artists’ Alliance. When it made no money, the Eliots moved to New York where he joined the Associated American Artists Gallery and then worked for the March of Time Newsreel. During World War II, Eliot worked for the Office of War Information.

After the war Eliot became art editor (1945-60) at Time. The success of his book Three Hundred Years of American Painting plus a Guggenheim Fellowship for “Studies of Greece and the Middle East as Spiritual Cradles of the Western World” enabled him and his second wife Jane Winslow Eliot to fulfill their wish to rear their children abroad, where they would be exposed to different languages and cultures. His book Sight and Insight (1959) concerned masterpieces of European art.

To prepare for an ABC documentary film The Secret of Michelangelo, a wheeled, sixty-foot tower was constructed in the Sistine Chapel so that Alex and Jane Eliot could spend hundreds of hours studying the ceiling from within touching distance. The film was shown on prime time in December 1968. Eliot demanded that the film had to be shown without any advertisements – and ABC complied. The film was made two decades before its later “disastrous” cleaning, and is one of the rare photographic history remaining of the original paintings. “So-called art restoration is at least as tricky as brain surgery. Most pictures expire under scalpel and sponge,” Eliot wrote.

Alexander Eliot ALEXANDER ELIOT is a pilgrim mythologist, contemplative traveler, and author of The Timeless Myths, The Global Myths, and The Universal Myths…

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“A big, fat, lewd, philosophic work of fiction, pure and impure … a free-for-all with Rabelais as a referee.” Thus Alexander Eliot describes Love Play, a work of dazzling verbal pyrotechnics, razor-keen wit, and outrageously hilarious (and to some readers, no doubt, (simply outrageous) sexual high jinks.

Love Play is the title of this novel in play form and the spirit of play animates its pages: the soaring lyric play of delightfully divergent ideas, and the ribald, earthy play of the bodily passions. Leading the list of players is the books wondrous heroine, Ellen Freeman, a girl of high ideals and fervent desires, with a golden voice and a golden body, equally generous with both. Ellen is a Lolita past the age of consent, a Candy sans illusions: she is an all-American fantasy come true.

For these and other vivid characters, both male and female, young, middle-aged and old, the author has created a magnificently entertaining divertissement. Scintillating, shocking, wildly funny by turns, Love Play is the most original book of the year.

Three Hundred Years of American Painting

In 1962 John F. Kennedy selected Eliot’s extraordinary and complete history of American painting as one of his favorite books of the year. Eliot’s compelling anecdotes about the artists, as well as over 1,000 superb color plates, proved what he set out to prove by writing the book, namely, that “American art matters.”

In 1960 he wrote a memo to his colleagues: “We now have the opportunity of producing the first really handsome historical survey of American art ever published. The raw material for such a book is already ours.” By raw material, Eliot meant an impressive collection of 1,069 color plates printed in the Art section since 1951, when he began regular use of full-color pages to illustrate the section.

“On the Time-honored principle that human beings are interested primarily in other humans,” he wrote, “chief emphasis of the text would be on the artists themselves-their lives, philosophies and working methods. The next emphasis would be on their work, describing the qualities that made each picture alive and unique. Finally the time, place and spirit surrounding the artists and inspiring their art should be evoked.”

From the Time Inc. Press Release:

Three Hundred years of American Painting (328 pp.; 250 full-color plates) rolled off the Chicago presses of R. R. Donnelley & Sons in 1962. Author Eliot, 38, is an art editor with deep roots and long training in his field. A child dauber, he was ten when he first became aware of others’ paintings. Borrowing his father’s bicycle one day to visit a cubist exhibition at Smith College, where his father is a professor, he promised to be back in two hours, so father could ride to his English class. When Professor Eliot stormed into the gallery five hours later, his son was staring at an early Picasso “with the gaze small boys usually reserve for double banana splits. A fatherly swat brought Alex to, but it also woke him, he recalls, to the sudden awareness that for him a painting might be more important than a bicycle.”

“Yes, I met Matisse in the south of France in his later years,” Alex says. “He wasn’t well and Matisse was making those vibrant paper collages while confined to his bed. Well, I was given an audience with Matisse and as I was leaving something got into my head. There was a question I needed to ask. I had made it to the top of the mountain as it were and I was not going to leave without finding out the answer. I had gone to Black Mountain to learn to be an artist and then on to the Boston School of Fine Arts but I needed to know from the master. So I turned back to Matisse and asked, “What should I do next?” In response Matisse propped himself up on his bed and like a mantra repeated one word -”Draw, draw, draw …”

For some seven years, TIME Art Editor Alexander Eliot has climbed out of bed at 6:30 in the morning, spun a few fictional situations through his mind while strolling through Central Park, and arrived at the T & L Bldg. by eight o’clock for a session behind his typewriter before staring this regular day’s work.

Result: his first novel, Proud Youth, published this week by Farrar, Straus and Young. Written with strong poetic undercurrents and a Gide-like simplicity of style, Proud Youth explores the spiritual and physical impulses of a young brother and sister in love with each other. Says the Saturday Review: “Because of TIME’s belief in, and practice of, anonymous journalism, Eliot has spent seven years on this break for anonymity and is just about prepared for anything. Which he had better be, since one of the themes of Proud Youth is brother-sister incest.” Another subject for controversy in Eliot’s novel: one of the major characters, a Roman Catholic priest, who as the family’s friend and confessor pits his conviction and authority “against the enormous energy, flexibility and daring of youth.”

A descendant of many illustrious New Englanders, including Harvard President Charles William Eliot, Novelist Eliot was born in Cambridge, educated as North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, once worked in the promotion and sales department of the Associated American Artists. In 1942, he came to Time Inc in MOT’s Cinema Production Department , left the company the following year, and returned in 1945 as a TIME writer. Artist as well as critic, Eliot designed the dust jacket for his book after completing the nine drafts of his novel (“I had to learn to write fiction, but Ihope my second novel won’t take quite so long”). Meanwhile, there is still the question of his first novel, which may become a fall conversation piece “Its main theme, I believe,” says Eliot, “is not adolescence or incest or religion, but a struggle between the forces of life and those of death in the soul of the hero.”

Jacket photo by Diane & Alan Arbus