A Terrible Beauty: Moser's Bible

The bones do live.

There's a certain surprise in seeing intelligence and mercy operate at long range; generally it seems that only massive bureaucratic acts of displacement and destruction can affect many lives at once. We notice goodness, more likely, in the small-scale efforts of people within speaking and touching distance to make the world more habitable. At bad moments one can believe it impossible for any desirable gift to be widely given.

The publication of Barry Moser's illustrated Bible is one of the rare events that seem to reverse this law. Within two weeks of the book's release last October -- about the time it took for the first printing of fifty thousand to sell out -- it became clear that this was a work of art of genuine importance: an unmistakably serious work which nevertheless had a wide appeal, and which bridged the usual gaps of sympathy between Christians and Jews, black and white, popular culture and high culture, right-wing and liberal Christians. No artist since Rembrandt has handled biblical subjects with such intimate confidence and such trust in the unbeautified human face; no illustrated Bible has so rooted itself in the modern sensibility.

Moser is the foremost American master of wood engraving--a close and arduous process that uses the end grain of the wood as the printing surface -- and the first artist since Dor[acute{e}] in 1865 to illustrate the entire Christian Bible. Even Dor[acute{e}] did not undertake to illustrate every book, whereas Moser has produced over two hundred and thirty images and provided each book with at least one illustration. The sheer scope of the work is difficult to absorb; one keeps turning the pages and discovering new images, as if they multiplied on the sly while the book was shut. The work is as finely detailed, and as wonderfully inventive, as the illustrations of the Alice books, Frankenstein, Huckleberry Finn, The Wizard of Oz, and Moby Dick on which Moser made his reputation, but carries far greater emotional authority and moral weight. All the magnificent earlier work now appears as simply the technical apprenticeship for the emotional and moral ordeal of confronting the Bible. ("Life is more important than art, that's why art is so important," James Baldwin once said.)

The circumstances of the book's production are instructive. The project was underwritten by Bruce Kovner, chairman of the Caxton Corporation (an investment management company) and collector of Moser's and other fine bookmakers' work, who upon first meeting Moser several years ago asked, "What have you always wanted to do that you haven't done yet?" His patronage during the four years it took to do the illustrations -- one year of reading and three of twelve-hour days in the studio -- let Moser fulfill a desire of thirty years' standing. As the best patronage does, it also opened a crack in the world through which something that had not existed could escape the high pressure of oblivion on the other side and pour itself into existence.

Advance publicity in Newsweek, the New York Times and elsewhere tended to emphasize the price tag -- $10,000 -- of the hand-bound Pennyroyal Caxton edition of four hundred copies. There is also a $30,000 edition of fifty copies, on handmade paper with original drawings. Elegant and costly editions of this kind are the only way -- failing public support, and imagine the ideological and bureaucratic snafus of public support for an illustrated Bible--to finance work on this scale: living expenses, car payments, books, payments to models, meetings with a board of distinguished advisors, the purchase of tools and supplies. As it is, without computer typesetting and a plastic substitute for the traditional boxwood (Resingrave, a slight variation on the formula for lawn furniture) the project would have been prohibitively expensive. (The type is elegant and restrained, and Resingrave performed its function superbly. Even plastic has come of age.) In the end, all this expenditure also made possible the $65 trade edi tion from Viking Studio -- the one that sold out in two weeks; the price is steep for a Bible, but not bad for an art book, and a publisher that could never advance money to an illustrator on the necessary scale can go on reprinting ad infinitum at more or less reasonable cost. The accumulation of wealth, and its selective redistribution, are subjects into which one cannot inquire closely without grief and anger; at the same time, if there had been no one able to spend substantial amounts on art, the work could simply not have been done. Goodness doesn't come cheap; perhaps the greater prevalence of large-scale evil is due to the reluctance of the lovers of goodness to spend money on it.

The text is printed with chapters but no verses, which has the effect of presenting the King James Bible as readable prose; it also dispenses with the italics and syllabified names that distract so many readers in the attempt to read the translation as narrative and caution them to read it as Holy Writ. The relative ease of reading, along with the arresting liveliness of Moser's composition -- he is influenced by the camera angles, croppings and lighting effects of film and photography -- makes the text engrossing in the same way an illustrated book of Arthurian tales might be; it would be pointless to resent the archaisms (or even the real ineptitudes of translation) when the words are paired with those pictures. A book is a world, and one can savor it slowly.