Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on Vice)

“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”—Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle Two (1734)

Quote of the Day (Lord Byron, on Jealous Husbands)

“A real husband always is suspicious,
But still no less suspects in the wrong place,
Jealous of some one who had no such wishes,
Or pandering blindly to his own disgrace,
By harbouring some dear friend extremely vicious;
The last indeed's infallibly the case:
And when the spouse and friend are gone off wholly,
He wonders at their vice, and not his folly.”—George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the First

This Day in Art History (Caravaggio Gains 1st Public Commission)

July 23, 1599—A 28-year-old painter with a stormy personal life, Michangelo Merisi a Caravaggio (better known to history as simply Caravaggio), gained his first public commission: chapel side-panels depicting dramatic events in the life of St. Matthew.

The Italian Baroque master was intensely religious, and well he might be: he got into so many serious scrapes with the law that sometimes, it seemed, only serious divine intervention could extricate him.

In the 1980s, Todd Rundgren released the puckishly titled The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect. Caravaggio knew all about this syndrome, from first to last.

Even before his St. Matthew commission, the painter’s explosive temper led to trouble. In 1592, with his father dead for a decade and his mother having just recently passed on, he was so boiling over with hurt and grievances that he had to flee Milan—certain “violent quarrels” and the wounding of a police officer had made him a marked man.

Even after his St. Matthew commission brought him recognition and work, Caravaggio was in hot water continually. From 1600 to 1606, he went to trial at least 11 times, for crimes that included assault, libel and murder. 

(A good thing that none of those charges related to sexual orientation: the painter is now assumed to be gay or bisexual, which, if proven in court, would have been a capital offense in the Italy of his time.)

An artist of such turbulent emotion was made for drama, and that element winds up in his paintings time and again.

It wasn’t as if such moments were unknown in Italian religious painting before—Leonardo’s The Last Supper, for instance, deals with the moment when Christ has just announced that one of his Apostles will betray him. 

But Caravaggio’s startling realism brought the viewer into the moment depicted on canvass in a manner seldom if ever seen before.

It started with chiaroscuro—his use of light and dark elements for dramatic contrast. You can see it at work in one of his panels for that first commission, The Calling of St. Matthew, where the dark world of tax collector Levi (the apostle’s name before his ministry) is illuminated suddenly from the right by the entrance of Christ and St. Peter. 

The tax collector, surrounded by four assistants, is startled to see Christ’s outstretched hand. He points to himself as if to say, “You mean me?”

Ironically, though the painter’s namesake and great forebear Michelangelo, inspired by ancient artists, had focused on the human body, his successors had gotten away from that. Caravaggio brought a renewed interest in bodily realism. 

He dispensed with the lengthy preparation that had become increasingly common, opting instead for working quickly and directly from the subject with his works on oils.

The Calling of St. Matthew and its great companion piece, The Martyrdom of St. Matthew (shown in the image accompanying this post), were created for the Contarelli chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. The chapel had been built with funds left over by the man who gave his name to it, the French Cardinal Matteo Contarelli.

Caravaggio was paid for the two paintings in 1600, but his work in the chapel wasn’t over. 

When a statue by another artist of St. Matthew and an angel was rejected, Caravaggio was approached about filling the space with another oil on campus. He complied, but his patrons must have been picky, because they rejected his, too.

No matter. Caravaggio might have had his faults, but unlike Leonardo, once he received a commission, despite his personal troubles, he followed through on the assignment. He completed his second try at the altarpiece swiftly, being paid on September 22, 1602, more than three years after his first commission.

Caravaggio’s work was rapturously welcomed by his patrons, the common people who passed through the churches where they were housed, and other artists, who were mightily influenced by his work. Unfortunately the painter, forever on the run, had little time to enjoy his acclaim.

In May 1606, Caravaggio killed a man in a brawl arising from, of all things, a game of royal tennis. At one point, he had sought refuge in Malta, where yet another quarrel with a senior knight made him a desperately hunted man.

There is a painting of Pope Paul V that has been attributed to Caravaggio. The pontiff must have liked it, and perhaps the artist as well, because he was ready to extend a pardon to the beleaguered Caravaggio. Caravaggio was on his way back to the Eternal City when he caught fever and died on the beach at Port'Ercole in Tuscany on July 18, 1610, not even 40 yet.

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on Time’s Indifference to Beauty)

“Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and the innocent,

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons him for writing well.”—W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

I had been meaning to use this poem ever since the news broke of Farrah Fawcett’s final hours. Something in the way that, three decades after her great fame as a ‘70s pinup and Charlie’s Angels star, she continued to spark the longings of men of a certain age fascinated me, reminding me inevitably of the Auden couplet about time being “indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique.”

But the event that served as the excuse for looking at this poem—the hook, if you will—occurred 25 years ago today: Vanessa Williams’ reluctant resignation as the first black Miss America, because of explicit photos taken of her and later published in Bob Guccione’s rag, Penthouse.

Leave aside, hard as it might be, the question of Williams as a racial pioneer. A part of me still wonders why so much attention was paid to mistakes made by this young woman that forced the premature end of her beauty-queen reign, just as I shake my head now when I think about the hullabaloo over Carrie Prejean’s views on same-sex marriage.

Why care about what is done or said by a twentysomething female with not much life experience, whose major accomplishment to date is parading across a stage in a swimsuit?

(Let me hasten to add right here that Williams demonstrates one positive aspect of the decline of shame in America: the generosity involved in giving someone a second chance. She worked enormously hard to build and sustain her subsequent career as actress and singer. In the end, her career might have taken off anyway, because of her youthful glamour, but to her credit it did not end there, nor with the notoriety unfairly tagged on her by the egregious Bob Guccione.)

Some with a scientific bent think that interest in beauty is genetically hard-wired into us, an outgrowth of evolution—nature’s signal that the object of our gaze is healthy, a mate ideal for maintaining the species.

(Of course, this line of speculation has elements of the pseudo-scientific, too, as it can be extended to justify the likes of Mark Sanford, Ted Kennedy, John Ensign, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and John Edwards straying from their wives. If that’s science, I’m sure that spouses of these wayward politicos, for all their other ideological and personal differences, will gladly opt for any pre-Darwinian explanation for the existence of the male species, thank you very much.)

Maybe there’s a different element at work here, though—a mythological one.

Among the ancient Romans, the deities that seemed to hold the most interest were Venus and Adonis. Their looks made them seem especially fortunate (aside, of course, from Adonis’ fatal encounter with a boar).

Perhaps that’s one reason why Hollywood actresses of particular distance and allure—the Ava Gardners of the world—are known as goddesses. And perhaps that’s why the decline and destruction of beauty appalls and mesmerizes us. If even these people, unfairly blessed with an extra-long youth and health, are subject to the laws of decay, what hopes do the rest of us have?

When the media engage in overkill about vapid celebrities—models who think no great thoughts or accomplish no great deeds, such as Paris Hilton—our inner Jack Nicholson springs out of nowhere, like his vulpine alter ego in Wolf growling at Michelle Pfeiffer: “The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you’re not very interesting.” It’s only a short leap from that to say, “All that beauty isn’t very interesting.”

The fate of the beautiful, in these cases, becomes a warning to us, delivered with the matter-of-fact, Audenesque indifference of Bob Dylan in “Buckets of Rain”: “I’ve seen pretty people disappear like smoke.”

The past century might be one in which the whole notion of human—evolutionary—progress might have been overturned—not just because the struggle to overcome war, poverty and disease suffered repeated serious reversals, but because the rise of mass culture turned beauty into a far more exploitable, delusive, and even dangerous commodity than ever before.

The need to extend the period of one’s good looks—even to create the illusion of it over the course of a lifetime—proved once again that the business of beauty can be singularly ugly. Plastic surgery might as well be a tax writeoff in Hollywood, it’s so common. (For all I know, it already is.)

And yet, the drawbacks of it all are becoming more and more apparent. To start with, it’s unnatural.

Several years ago, I saw a picture of Gloria Vanderbilt with son Anderson Cooper in Vanity Fair. She’s eight-five; he’s half her age. Guess who looked younger? A mite freakish, wouldn't you say?

Submitting to the surgeon’s scalpel might not even be a Faustian bargain, let alone a real one. Even if done reasonably well, plastic surgery and Botox can leave an inert expression on the face—not good if you want to demonstrate emotions, as actors are called on to do. And there’s always a chance of a mistake—one that can make you look oddly different from what you were before, or simply dead.

And yet, for all that, we continue to worship our gods and goddesses, helplessly in thrall to beauty. Few epitomized that dilemma, for all the studied indifference of this poem and its self-evident confidence in his profession, more than W.H. Auden himself.

During the Weimar Republic, Auden and close friend Christopher Isherwood flocked to Germany’s capital because, in the latter’s summation, “Berlin meant Boys”—invariably beautiful ones.

It was Auden’s misfortune to take up with 17-year-old Chester Kallman in 1939. For all his formidable intellect and poetic genius, Auden was utterly captivated by his younger lover, to the point where he regarded their relationship as a marriage.

Naturally, within just a few years, Kallman was faithless, breaking Auden’s heart.

Amazingly enough, Auden might have been a worse judge of the value of his early, powerful work than he was of overs. Harmed by experience and an overactive artistic conscience, he edited out one of his indelible lines, “We must love one another or die,” from one of his landmark poems, “September 1, 1939.” (“We die anyway,” he said grouchily.)

I wasn’t surprised, then, to find that, in editing his collected works, Auden deleted the three stanzas at the top of this post. I’m not sure why. They don’t have the ferocious, metaphoric force of what famously follows (“In the nightmare of the dark/All the darks of Europe bark”), but Auden was at the top of his game when he wrote this—almost anything he committed to paper glittered.

I have never made any attempt to memorize this poem, and yet the verses are so vivid that I can call most of them to mind instantly. That includes the three stanzas quoted here. Like the rest of the poem, they drive home the point of the impermanence of life and of so many of our superficial values—very much including an inheritance from the ancients, the worship of the human body—while hailing what lasts: in this case, poetry that sustains the human spirit.

Bonus Quote of the Day (William Carlos Williams, on His Feelings for America)

“Of mixed ancestry, I felt from earliest childhood that America was the only home I could ever call my own. I felt that it was expressly founded for me, personally, and that it must be my first business in life to possess it; that only by making it my own from the beginning to my own day, in detail, should I ever have a basis for knowing where I stood."—Poet William Carlos William, in a July 22, 1939 letter to fellow poet Horace Gregory, explaining how he came to write his history In the American Grain, in The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, edited by John C. Thirlwall (1957)

Quote of the Day (Matthew Arnold, on Love in a World of Uncertainty)

"Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night."—Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

This Day in Literary History (Hemingway Welcomed Into World By Young Man With a Horn)

July 21, 1899—Several hundred miles west of Garrettsville, Ohio, where Hart Crane, another future literary genius afflicted with alcoholism and an instinct for self-destruction, was being born, Ernest Hemingway made his entrance into the world in a manner that startled most of the good citizens of the leafy Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Ill.

At 8 AM, the town of 10,000 awoke to a blast from a cornet being played by the local obstetrician, 27-year-old Clarence Hemingway, welcoming the latest addition to his family.

With his future concern for appearances, the future novelist and short story writer, one suspects, would have enjoyed the direct, emphatic manner in which his father announced his birth, as well as the town doctor’s vivid demonstration of his own masculine prowess in siring more offspring.

On the other hand, with his aversion to flowery prose, he probably would have been appalled by what his mother, Grace Hemingway,  wrote: “The robins sang their sweetest song to welcome the little stranger into this beautiful world.”

In prior posts, I discussed Hemingway’s tendency to stretch the truth (particularly concerning his World War I service) as well as the thread of depression that infected his genetic line. 

Far more can be said, however, about the Nobel Prize laureate’s life, and especially about the formative cultural influences of his family and hometown.

Not a word about Oak Park ever made it into Hemingway’s published work, but his experiences growing up in the town—at his birthplace on North Oak Park Avenue and another one on North Kenilworth Avenue—affected him for life.

Nearly five years ago, when I visited Oak Park, I was struck by the fact that it was home not only to Hemingway but to architect Frank Lloyd Wright. 

In fact, Grace Hemingway belonged to Oak Park’s Nineteenth Century Women’s Club, along with two-thirds of what would become the town’s notorious scandalous triangle—Catherine Wright, wife of the architect, and the latter’s mistress, Mamah Barthwick Cheney.

“I had a wonderful novel about Oak Park,” Hemingway informed an academic, Charles Fenton, in 1952, “and would never do it because I did not want to hurt living (sic) people….Nobody in Oak Park likes me I suppose. The people that were my good friends are dead or gone. I gave Oak Park a pass and never used it as a target.”

What irked Hemingway so much in later years about the place? Much of his ill-will was bound up inextricably with his feelings about his mother, who reflected the town’s moral conservatism.

Oak Park’s temperance bill, passed in 1872, lasted for a hundred years—even after the death of its most important native son—and Grace Hemingway lashed out at Ernest because of his drinking when he returned from World War I.

Hemingway blamed his mother for his father’s suicide in 1928. But her original sin, in his eyes, might have been the sexual ambivalence she instilled in him from an early age.

During my visit, I noticed a photo showing Hemingway in a blouse and his sister Marcelline in a pantsuit. Both had the same haircut. 

Until they were five or six, Grace—who had wanted a daughter when Hemingway was born--had the two siblings sleep in the same bedroom in two separate beds, play with identical dolls and with small china tea sets, and fish and hike together. For all intents and purposes, she treated them as twins.

In high school, Ernest took Marcelline to the prom as a date—a choice that might have been dictated by his mother.

In his posthumously published novel, The Garden of Eden, Hemingway’s protagonist is part of a bisexual ménage a trois, in a story that, biographers such as Kenneth Lynn now speculate, evince his longstanding fears of gender confusion.

Is it any wonder, as novelist John Dos Passos noted, that Hemingway was the only man he knew who really hated his mother?

But we can’t let the story end there.

Hemingway’s frequent subject matter—fishing, bullfighting, war, and other male rituals—led critics to regard him as a kind of glorified American primitive. But that is a stereotype at odds with his upbringing.

Hemingway came by his interest in these matters primarily through his father, who taught him the importance of ritual --i.e., doing everything correctly and in the proper order, including catching and cooking fish. 

(Dr. Hemingway, in wooing his future wife, took note of her lack of traditional feminine domestic skills by promising that she would never have to cook, and he was as good as his word for as long as he lived.)

But in his own way, Hemingway, though not as exposed to culture as much as, say, Henry James, probably grew up with as much acculturation in the arts as Willa Cather, whose work is permeated with it.

Grace Hemingway might have been something that her son loathed—a church lady—but she was a church lady with a decided artistic inclination that he inherited.

Before her marriage, she had hoped for a singing career. But as a victim of scarlet fever, she was sensitive to bright lights, rendering her debut a disaster.

(To console herself, she went on a cruise and bought 35 pairs of opera gloves, stopping at that point only because another glove would incur a tax.)

After marriage, Grace taught voice and served as a choirmaster. Her services were frequently employed in a number of the 40 churches in town at that point, meaning that she ended up making 10 times more than her husband, who often had to accept payment in whatever form his not-very-affluent patients could afford, including crops or chickens.

Hemingway’s birthplace actually belonged to Grace’s father rather than her husband. Upon her father's death a few years later, she used some of the proceeds from his estate to have a larger house built to her specifications (even though Clarence Hemingway was not sure the family could afford it). 

The new home featured a music studio and recital hall thirty feet square with a vaulted ceiling and a narrow balcony.

The Hemingway home featured an “imagination room”. Each of the children was taught an instrument and encouraged to tell stories, and several of Ernest's siblings became writers or artists in their own right.

A couple of other items in the Hemingway Birthplace and the nearby museum in his honor highlight other fascinating aspects of his childhood and youth:

* In the birthplace, a room for older children contains a series of pictures by famed magazine illustrator Maud Bogart, who used her son as a model for Little Jack Horner. That son, Humphrey Bogart, was the same age as Ernest Hemingway, and starred in the film version of the novel To Have and Have Not.

* At the age of two, Hemingway drew, on his father’s stationery, the following items: a giraffe, a sailor, two guns, Noah’s ark, a tree, a pipe, and a man on the moon—all testifying to his future love of adventure.

* As a little boy, Hemingway particularly loved his nicknames “Pecos Bob” and “Billy the Squirrel.”

* In high school, Hemingway’s writing was already drawing notice, with his compositions frequently read aloud in class as models. But he was widely regarded by classmates as “conceit(ed),” “carefree,” “unkempt,” and not especially popular with girls. The latter two traits were probably related, because right before starting classes, he would sometimes skin fish, and he might still reek of it by the time the school day began.