Welcome back to the Sunday culture edition of The Daily, where Atlantic Author or editor reveals what entertains them. Our special guest today is David Frum, a Atlantic Editor who wrote about the JD Vance he once knew, the dangers of American autocracy, and his daughter’s final gift.

A lifelong Talking Heads fan, a rehabilitated TS Eliot enthusiast and a critic of the writings of Alice Munro, David also plans to visit an Impressionist exhibition that will be in Washington, DC, this fall. It features a collection of French paintings that founded the art movement over a century ago by “revolutionizing art itself.”

Here are three Sunday readings from The Atlantic:

The Culture Survey: David Frum

The last debate I had about culture: This summer, one of writer Alice Munro’s daughters went public with allegations that Munro’s second husband – the daughter’s stepfather – repeatedly sexually abused her during her childhood. The daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, said that Munro remained loyal to the abuser even after she explicitly informed Munro of the full extent of the abuse – and even seemed to feel that Skinner had somehow wronged and betrayed her. The now-deceased abuser pleaded guilty to a charge related to the abuse in 2005 and received a two-year suspended sentence. The story was reportedly discussed in Canadian literary circles. But somehow it didn’t become public until this year.

It is nothing new that great artists are not always nice people – in fact, they are often very bad people. For me, however, the debate about Alice Munro was not How could a great artist do something so terrible? It was, This bad thing finally allows me to articulate why I never considered Alice Munro a great artist.. In my native Canada, Munro was considered not only a great talent but also a kind of moral witness. But her much-lauded short stories always struck me as bland and boring. Many of them deal with unspoken secrets, but the secrets and their consequences are never of great value: they simply hang in the air above a small Canadian town, leading nowhere and meaning little. Suddenly the insignificance of her stories makes sense; dismissing them as big news is, after all, how she dealt with her most important lifelong secret.

The poet John Keats claimed that all we need to know about art is that “beauty is truth and truth is beauty.” That may not be the whole truth, but I think I’m willing to argue over a beer in the artist’s bar that constant lying kills the soul of art in a way that other human weaknesses may not. I can resume the debate about her art with a new understanding of why her art always seemed so empty to me.

A cultural product that I loved as a teenager and still love, and something that I loved but don’t like anymore: I loved the music of the Talking Heads as a teenager, and I still love it. Has the terror of civil unrest ever been more danceable than in their “Life During Wartime”?

As a teenager, I also loved the poems of TS Eliot. Now I’m not so sure. Yes, The desert land still haunts me. Individual lines from other poems also stick in my mind: “Garlic and sapphires in the mud” from “Burnt Norton.” But many of Eliot’s serious mysteries, his oracle riddles – on which I wrote so many papers in high school and college! – seem to me now as attitudes rather than art. Oscar Wilde wrote a story called “The Sphinx Without a Secret.” I suspect that this damning apothegm might apply to my youthful literary hero as well. (Related: TS Eliot saw this all coming.)

The upcoming art event I am most looking forward to: A century and a half ago, a small group of Frenchmen – and a Frenchwoman – invited friends and colleagues to a group exhibition. A new style shown in the exhibition did not yet have a name, but would soon have one: Impressionism. The exhibition opened on April 15, 1874 in the former studio of a photographer on the Boulevard des Capucines.

In the spring of 2024, enterprising curators at Paris’ Musée d’Orsay collected many of the paintings that confronted the world a century and a half ago. In the fall, the exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

I attended the show in Paris and am now very much looking forward to seeing it again in Washington.

There is much to say about the show, but here is just one. Paris in 1874 was a city suffering the aftermath of siege and revolution. Famous buildings, including the Tuileries Palace and the great Renaissance-style Paris City Hall, had burned to the ground. Virtually every tree on every boulevard and in every park had been cut down for firewood. Thousands had starved to death during the German siege of September 1870 to January 1871; thousands more were killed during the subsequent uprising that became known as the Paris Commune. All of this followed nearly 20 years—less bloody but no less disorienting—of destruction and reconstruction of medieval Paris by Napoleon III and his chief architect, Baron Haussmann.

Yet this tumult went almost entirely unnoticed in the great Impressionist exhibition of 1874. At the official Paris Salon of that year—the government-sponsored exhibition that enforced official taste—artists exhibited paintings of battles. The Impressionists responded to revolutionary times not by editorializing on the revolution, but by revolutionizing art itself.

A poem that keeps coming back to me: My mother died young. She was only 54. I was not quite 32; my first child, a little girl, was only eight months old at the time. Soon after, a friend introduced me to a poem by Thomas Hardy, “The Voice.” It begins: “Woman, whom I miss dearly, as you call me, you call me.”

Hardy wrote “The Voice” after the death of his wife. In the key stanza, the poet wonders if his beloved is really “calling” him or if the sound is just an illusion caused by a rainy autumn day:

My first child, who was still a baby when his grandmother died, died suddenly this year at the age of 32. Now Hardy’s poem takes my breath away again.

The coming week

Essay

My criminal record somehow disappeared

By Mark O’Brien

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