Greek vases
In a post on my recent sojourn to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I mentioned being stunned by the Greek vases in the Greek and Roman Art galleries. Since this past May, when I journeyed to Naples, a city first colonized by the Greeks in the 700’s BC, I’ve become newly fascinated by the literature of the classical period. Now I was face to face with the art produced, in some cases, in the same period. I had not anticipated the effect these works would have on me.
My first thought – when I was able to think again – was of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: specifically, the words, ‘O attic shape, fair attitude.’
Here is the entire poem:
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thou express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunt about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
These astonishing works of art, which in earlier visits to the Met I have always sailed right past, cheerfully distracted and oblivious, now seem to me the most miraculous of objects, and for just the reasons that Keats cites in his poem: their timelessness, their freezing of a moment in time, their promise of eternal youth, of an eternity of bucolic joy in a setting devoid of any hint of ugliness.
I have just purchased this book: 
and have ordered this glorious tome from the Met: 
. I shall enjoy learning more about these Attic shapes…
The section of the Met’s collection database that deals with these works is entitled: “Athenian Vase Painting: Black- and Red-Figure Techniques.”
When I told my New York friend Helene about my new-found fascination with Greek vases, she, who has tutored me in love of the arts almost my entire life, smiled and said, “Keats knew something, huh?” Oh yes, he did – with his tenuous hold on life, Keats knew.
John Keats 1795 - 1821
Quotidian moment, frozen in time: Vermeer’s Milkmaid
It was the light. I was completely unprepared for it.
The painting seemed to be emitting light.
The colors, especially the blues, are rich and deep. The milkmaid concentrates on her task; she is probably making bread porridge. The prosaic task of pouring the milk is frozen in time forever. The bread looks good enough to eat!
But I kept coming back to the light, which seemed both ordinary and unearthly. The scene depicted in “The Milkmaid” is not ostensibly a religious one; nevertheless, the painting confers a kind of benediction on the viewer. I felt exalted in its presence (as did those on either side of me, judging by the rapt expression on their faces).
Currently mounted at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Vermeer’s Masterpiece the Milkmaid” is a small exhibit. (In “Dutch Touch,” his article in the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl pronounced it “an example for recession-era museum practice.”) Also on view are the Met’s other Vermeers – they own five in all – plus other works by Dutch Genre painters.
What a gift these artists gave us, showing us people going about the business of life at the height of The Netherlands’ Golden Age. Centuries before the advent of photography, they have captured these quotidian moments for us to see all these many years on.
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Art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s piece in the September 21 issue of The New Yorker- unfortunately the full text is not available online – is an odd mixture of masterful writing and puzzling assertions. First, he comments that Vermeer’s “View of Delft “doesn’t do a lot for me….It’s so bizarrely special – a fairyland city persuasively identical to an actual city….”
“View of Delft” – a painting I personally cherish – is not present at this exhibit, but “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher” is:
This is clearly a painting that Peter Schjeldahl adores. Here he is, waxing rhapsodic – not to mention quixotic – on the subject: “…a little patch of llapis-lazuli-tinted white, describing backlit linen in the head scarf of the Met’s “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher,” would have killed me a long time ago, if paint could.”
This rather disconcerting statement is followed by further (idiosyncratic and hyperbolic) expressions of rapture:
“The entering sunlight sustains all manner of ravishing adventures, throught the picture, but the incidental detail of the head scarf has affected me like a life-changing secret, whispered to me alone. I revel in it each time I see it–having misremembered it, of course, since the last time, helpless to retain the nuance of the color and the velleity of the painter’s touch. ‘Young Woman with a Water Pitcher’ is a Sermon on the Mount of aesthetiic value, in which the meek–or, at least, the humdrum, involving trifles of a prosperous but ordinary household, on an ordinary day–inherit the earth. Beholding it, I feel that my usual ways of looking are torpid to the point of dishonoring the world. At the same time, I know that my emotion is manipulated by deliberate artifice. An artist has contrived to lure me out of myself into aan illusion of reality more fulfilling than any lived reality can be.
Is it just me, or is there a bit too much of “I” in this piece? Art criticism or psychotherapy? And as for being “manipulated by deliberate artifice” – why, Dude, it’s a painting! It is by definition a work of art – and of artifice, one that is superbly executed. (We agree there.)
As to “The Milkmaid,” Schjeldahl is awed but at the same time ambivalent: “Like ‘Delft,’ ‘The Milkmaid’ exercises more dazzling virtuosity than I quite know what to do with.” What – it’s too good? too close to perfect? Or perhaps a case of too much showy genius in the service of a prosaic subject? I confess, I am well and truly stumped by this statement.
Ah, well – moving right along…
The Met now has a wonderfully rich site that functions as a sort of online art college. Click here to see what is on offer regarding “Vermeer’s Masterpiece: The Milkmaid.”
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When I arrived at the museum last Friday, my intention was to proceed directly to this exhibit. In order to do so, you must pass through the Greek and Roman galleries. This I proceeded to do. But before I reached the Vermeers, I was stoppped dead in my tracks by these:
“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time…
Stay tuned for the further adventures of a passionate art lover, who is thunderstruck for the first time by the “Grecian Urns,” objects she first saw at the age of eight…
Arrivederci, Napoli…parting thoughts
I would have liked another day in Naples – actually another week would have been most welcome. For one thing, I had wanted very much to see the Caravaggio paintings housed in various venues in the city:
Th Flagellation, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte
The Martyrdom of St. Ursula, Banca Commerciale Italiana
The Seven Acts of Mercy, Church of Pio Monte della Misericordia
Caravaggio, whose turbulent life would make a great movie, is one of many great artists and writers who were either born in Naples or lived some part of their lives there. Among these are Giovanni Boccaccio, author of Tales of the Decameron; the great sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the notorious and fascinating Emma Hamilton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the composers Alessandro Scarlatti and Carlo Gesualdo, to name just a few.
Like Caravaggio, Carlo Gesualdo led an eventful life marked by violence: upon finding his wife in flagrante with her lover, without hesitation he killed them both. He then fled to his castle in the mountains, where he proceeded to kill his only son because he suspected him of having been sired by his wife’s illicit amour. Talk about material for a movie! (This bloody tale is recounted by Jordan Lancaster in her history of Naples entitled In the Shadow of Vesuvius. The author further informs us that in a trial that lasted only a single day, Gesualdo was acquitted, ‘given the well-known just cause which guided him.’ )
And yet, and yet…such beautiful music!
And speaking of music, I neglected to mention when writing about our visit to the Cappella Sansevero that while we were there, sacred music was playing softly in the background. I heard one of my favorite selections in the early music reperoire: Miserere Mei, Deus by Gregorio Allegri:
(Click here to read the history of this work – a history that involves the young Mozart.)
And speaking about music once more, I had also hoped at least to visit the Teatro di San Carlo, if not actually attend a performance there.
Alas, we got only a fleeting glimpse of this historic (1737) performance venue as our bus sped through the city.
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And now, from the sublime to the merely delicious!
Among its other virtues, Naples is the birthplace of pizza – specifically, Pizza Margherita. It seems that when Queen Margherita of Savoy came to the city in 1889, Raffaele Esposito, the reigning pizzaiolo of the day, sought to create a dish in honor of her visit. His deceptively simple concoction consisted of the basic ingredients, bread and tomato sauce, topped with the famous local mozzarella di bufala and finished off with sprigs of fresh basil. Ecco, there you have it: red, white, and green, the colors of the Italian flag!
National Museum of Archaeology, Naples
Housed in an elegant edifice dating from the early 17th century, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli is a vast treasure house of sculptures, frescoes, mosaics, and other artifacts from ancient times. Many are from Pompeii and Herculaneum; they were removed to the museum for purposes of safekeeping and preservation.
Choirmaster and actors, from Pompeii
Fish mosaic
the Farnese Bull,from the second century BC
Click here for the harrowing tale depicted in this remarkable sculpture, thought to be the largest ever recovered from antiquity.
"Pseudo-Seneca," now thought to be a bust of the Greek poet Hesiod
Seated Hermes
Farnese Hercules
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Okay, I know you want to see them…here are several examples of the art that resides in the famous (infamous?) “Gabinetto Segreto:“
Erotic pair
Satyr and Nymph
Priapus fresco
There’s plenty more in that secret room, which used to be off limits to all but those with special permission to enter and view. I’m not about to tackle the subject of the sexual attitudes that characterized ancient Roman provinces, but I can recommend the chapter entitled “The Pleasures of the Body” from Mary Beard’s fascinating book: 
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We spent the morning in that place of wonders and it wasn’t nearly long enough. This fact was especially brought home to me as I paged through the catalog. I thought we had seen quite a bit, but actually we saw just a small fraction of the museum’s vast holdings.
Here is the catalog:
The cover image is Flora, from Castellammare di Stabia, Villa of Varanus or Ariadne; it is described thus:
“The female figure seen tripping barefoot away from us, her veil and the hem of her dress fluttering in the breeze, has the heartaching allure of a fleeting apparition in a dream. As she moves she turns aside to pick with gesture full of elegance white flowers from a bush which she will then lay in her basket. We do not know whether she is human or divine, a nymph, Flora, or Proserpine. But then the painter himself, who took his inspiration from 4th century models and produced this masterpiece of grace and fantasy as a vignette on a III style wall, made no effort to characterise with extraneous attributes the identity of this young maiden, whom it seems only natural to view as the embodiment of Spring itself.
They’re coming at me, all the ancients…
Souls of antiquity, artists and politicians, the real and the mythical, are taking up residence in my brain:
In her absorbing history of Naples, In the Shadow of Vesuvius, Jordan Lancaster tells us:
“Persephone’s childhood friends, the siren sisters, were the daughters of Melpomene, the muse of tragedy.They are often depicted as beautiful creatures, half-woman and half-bird….However, since the Middle Ages, the sirens have been portrayed as mermaids, half-woman and half-fish, representing a potential hazard to fisherman and sailors. The Ancients had a reverential fear of the sirens, who personified the perils of the sea and its storms. Because the sirens had been cursed by Demeter for their failure to save her daughter [Persephone], their beautiful music always portended disaster. Their songs promise to reveal great secrets about life and the world, yet in truth they were only a ruse to lure hapless sailors to their island off the Amalfi Coast, to be seduced and devoured.
The very rocks on which those vessels foundered are, I understand, near the Isle of Capri. One can still see them – I will see them!
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Ulysses and the Sirens, John William Waterhouse, 1891
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Sirènes, by Claude Debussy, Claudio Abbado conducting:
In case anyone is interested…
Yesterday’s Washington Post Style & Arts section featured a piece on artist Stanley Mouse, who, along with the late Alton Kelley, designed the posters that advertised concerts by the Grateful Dead. Mouse’s work is currently being exhibited at the Govinda Gallery in Washington DC.
Mouse provides this explanation of how the duo’s most iconic poster came about:
“Kelley and I had a job doing posters for the Avalon, and the promoter said: ‘Do a poster for the Grateful Dead.’ So we went to the library in San Francisco, just searching through old books. We came across “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” and in it was an old illustration that had the skull-and-roses character on it. We went: ‘Whoa, look at that! That has Grateful Dead written all over it.’ So we used it on that poster, which became the famous icon.
Here is the poster:
The article does not provide the original “old illustration,” but I can:
After many years of searching, I found the Rubaiyat I wanted at Books With a Past in Western Howard County. The artist who created the haunting images in this edition of the poem is Edmund J. Sullivan. The book itself contains no copyright date; my guess is that it was published around 1935.
My quest had nothing to do with the Grateful Dead; this edition of the Rubaiyat was at one time one of my mother’s prized possessions. Growing up, I read and re-read it often. Both the poetry and the illustrations made a lasting impression on me. Somewhere along the long path of my life, it was lost. I am very pleased to possess it now, a small piece of the past recaptured, as it were.
For additional information, see the post Lunching with Intellectuals.
Oddly enough, the same Grateful Dead poster is also on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section in yesterday’s New York Times; it accompanies the article “Bring Out Your Dead.”
Art and Intrigue II: The Gardner Heist, by Ulrich Boser
At 12:30 AM on March 18, 1990, two men gained entrance to Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Employing subterfuge – they were dressed as policemen – they had deceived the two duty guards, whom they tied up and left in the basement of the building. As of that moment, the impostors had the run of the lightly secured premises. They proceeded to help themselves to some of the world’s most priceless objets d’art. At 2:41 AM, they left as they had entered, through the building’s side entrance:
“The thieves were inside for a total of eighty-one minutes and nabbed thirteen works of art, valued today at over $500 million. They’ve just pulled off the largest robbery in history. In the wet, empty streets, the thieves and their faceless associates start up their cars and speed down Palace Road, and as their tail-lights disappear into the night, so do the Gardner masterpieces.
Thus did an audacious dead-of-night caper instantly attain the status of legend, giving rise to questions that have perplexed police, federal agents, private investigators, and art lovers for almost two decades: Who masterminded this heist? And where is the stolen art?
This is the question that at first intrigued, then perplexed, then ultimately obsessed journalist Ulrich Boser. Boser’s quest led him first to Harold Smith, a man who, in the course of a career as an international expert on art theft, had amassed an enviable track record when it came to locating stolen art work and jewelry. For years, Smith had focused on the Gardner theft and occasionally came tantalizingly close to cracking the case. But he died without solving the mystery.
Spending time with Harold Smith was an edifying experience for Boser; it was, vicariously, for me as well. Despite being ravaged by an aggressive form of skin cancer, Smith never lost his drive, his acuity, or his generosity. Up to the end, he maintained a vigorous work ethic enlivened by a sense of humor that was probably his salvation. When Smith died in 2005, Boser vowed to take up the search where his mentor had left off.
As the investigation proceeded, Boser encountered, among others, members of the so-called New England Mafia, the most notorious of which is the famously elusive James “Whitey” Bulger.
Bulger and others of his ilk have long been suspected of, at the very least, harboring guilty knowledge concerning the Gardner theft and the whereabouts of the stolen treasures. Now, I admit that I often think of Boston as an island of cultural riches amid the sea of vulgarity threatening to engulf the rest of the country. I have heard about the existence of a criminal underworld in the environs, but I was rather taken aback by the viciousness of some of its denizens, as described by Boser. I found myself thinking back to Martin Scorsese’s harrowing film, The Departed.
In addition to the aforementioned mobsters, we meet members of various law enforcement agencies. My particular favorite among these was Charlie Sabba, a New Jersey police officer with a Bachelor of fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. A painter himself and passionate about art in general, he put me in mind of Susan Hill’s Simon Serrailler and P.D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh.
The list of dramatis personae goes on. There are run-of-the-mill grifters, art and antiques dealers, and a few who are a bit of both. Boser followed the trail of the missing masterpieces to Ireland, where many in the know believe they are hidden. (Whitey Bulger himself is rumored to be concealed somewhere on the Emerald Isle.)
The book features an intriguing section about how great painting affects some viewers:
“Philosopher Richard Wollheim made three trips to Germany to view the Isenheim Altarpiece, Matthias Grunewald’s sixteenth-century masterwork, but each time he looked at the canvas, he found it unbearable and had to turn away. There is a book dedicated to people who cry in front of paintings, and a disease called Stendhal’s Syndrome, where extensive exposure to Old Master paintings can cause dizziness, confusion, and hallucinations.
The book referenced in this passage is Pictures & Tears by James Elkins, a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And as for the Isenheim Altarpiece, read this description, provided by Hungary’s superb Web Gallery of Art. Then gaze upon the altarpiece itself (by clicking on links at lower left). You may then better understand Richard Wollheim’s reaction.
(Not to be nitpicking, but Colmar, home to the Unterlinden Museum which houses the Isenheim Altarpiece, has been part of France since 1945.)
Generally the pace of The Gardner Heist is lively, although as events unfold, Boser has some difficulty keeping the suspense ratcheted up. I think this is primarily the fault of the narrative arc of the story. It starts with a bang – the lightning strike, in the dead of night, by the two daring thieves. Boser then goes on to detail the investigation, which is, alas, a tale of fizzling leads, dashed hopes, and profound frustration. Ultimately, one does tire of all the evasive tactics, coyness, legal maneuvering, posturing, and outright lying on the part of many of the individuals interviewed by Boser. Especially since the stakes are so very, very high…
Chez Tortoni, by Edouard Manet
Storm on the Sea of Galilee, by Rembrandt
The Concert, by Vermeer
The Rembrandt is the only known seascape by that great master. The Vermeer is one of only thirty-four works positively identified as being by him. And as for Chez Tortoni, there is such mystery in that man’s expression… More than once, while engrossed in The Gardner Heist, I wanted to stand up and shout, enough already! Give us back our paintings, our art, our patrimony.
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In the fall of 1990, my husband and I visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for the first time. Just beyond the entryway, there was a table displaying reproductions of the stolen art. Contact numbers for the FBI and the Boston Police were provided. “If you have any information…” Since then, there has been plenty of information, ranging from tantalizing to fraudulent, virtually all of it useless.
In 2005, The Boston Globe published this multimedia review by Steve Kurkjian of the facts of the case. And in “A Wounded Museum Feels a Jolt of Progress” (New York Times, March 13, 2009), Abby Goodnough updates us on the Gardner’s efforts to move into the future – this, despite the strictures forbidding change that “Mrs. Jack” placed in her will. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum remains, after all, a repository of countless treasures placed in the most gracious of settings.
The Isabella Sewart Gardner Museum
Isabella Stewart Gardner, by John Singer Sargent
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A final note: one of my favorite mystery authors, Jane Langton, sets most of her novels in the greater Boston area, where she is a long time resident. Langton published Murder at the Gardner in 1988. I often wonder what she thought when she opened her paper on that March morning two years later.
Art and Intrigue: Caravaggio’s Angel by Ruth Brandon (with a diversion to Cornwall))
Regina “Reggie” Lee, a curator at London’s National Gallery, is trying to put together an exhibit featuring several paintings by Caravaggio. A task that should have been relatively straightforward becomes anything but when two of the four lenders suddenly go back on their promise to provide works for the exhibition. What is going on? Reggie is determined to find out.
Her investigation takes her deep into the French countryside. Reggie has an affinity for the paysage; one of her grandmothers was French. The reader will be similarly enraptured by author’s deliciously evocative descriptions of the region. I was reminded of a DVD I watched recently which showcased the attractions of the Dordogne, with its ancient, still-preserved villages and medieval strongholds perched at cliff’s edge. And a river runs through it!
Chateau de Beynac
I wanted to pack my bags and go there at once, preferably with Reggie Lee as my guide.
I found Reggie quite appealing. A brainy woman passionate about art, she’s also passionate about – well, passion. As the novel opens, she has just been left by a lover she still longs for. Later, in the course of her investigations, she has an ill-advised one night stand with a journalist whose wife she considers a friend. She even finds herself attracted to the steely, sinister Jean-Jacques Rigaut. Luckily, she has no opportunity to act on that (potentially very dangerous) feeling.
My one reservation concerning Caravaggio’s Angels is that by the time I was halfway through the novel, the plot lines had become so tangled that I was having some trouble figuring out exactly what was happening and why. We fans of crime fiction have all experienced this phenomenon, and often more than once. Sometimes we throw up our hands in despair; other times, interesting characters and a great setting are sufficient compensation. For me, with this novel,the latter was the case. I stayed with it and was glad that I did.
The angel on the book’s cover is a detail from St. Matthew and the Angel. Here is the painting in its entirety:
One cannot help but be fascinated by Caravaggio, with his supreme talent and his turbulent, occasionally violent life (and inevitable premature death). It is not surprising that novelists make use of this mother lode of dramatic material. One of my favorite examples of this paradigm occurs in The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers. On this post you’ll find images of two of Caravaggio’s works: The Supper at Emmaus and The Taking of Christ. The latter is the subject of one of my favorite nonfiction titles of recent years, The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr:
The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio
Click on the Wikipedia entry for this masterpiece and read the first section, entitled “Description.” Then click to enlarge and look to the extreme right of the image. Be prepared for chills…
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Caravaggio’s Angels comes to us courtesy of Soho Constable, a new imprint launched a little over a year ago by one of my favorite publishers, Soho Press. Peter Lovesey’s terrific contemporary novels featuring Peter Diamond and also, of late, Henrietta “Hen” Mallin have long been published by Soho. While scrolling down the Soho Constable Frontlist, I noted with pleasure the inclusion of this fine writer’s excellent Sergeant Cribb historical series as well. And then, I exclaimed with delight! Why? Because I had spotted, just below the Lovesey titles, slated for an August 2009 release, this book:
So why am I so excited? In 2005, this mystery by Olive Etchells arrived in the library:
The following year brought this sequel:
What was so special about these two novels? The characters were fascinating, the writing was excellent, as were the plots – and the Cornwall setting was utterly captivating. Meanwhile, 2006 came and went, then 2007… Nothing further was heard from, or about, Olive Etchells. So yes, I could not be more pleased that at last, the third DCI Channon procedural is on its way to us.
The Face of Shakespeare?
A painting in the collection at Hatchlands, a stately home in Surrey, has just been identified as a portrait of William Shakespeare.
Until now, there have been two likenesses thought to portray the Bard. The first is the frontispiece in the First Folio, the collection of his plays published seven years after his death in 1616. It’s a copper engraving by an artist of Flemish descent, Martin Droeshout.
The second is the so-called Chandos Portrait, which currently hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London:
The artist may have been one John Taylor; the subject may have been William Shakespeare. There is no absolute certainty on either point.
And now, this:
The work dates from 1610, which means it was executed during the playwright’s lifetime. Stanley Wells, emeritus professor of Shakespeare studies at Birmingham University and chairman of the Shakespeare Birthday Trust, believes that this is in fact the face of Shakespeare. Others, such as Andrew Dickson of The Guardian, have reservations.
I’ve always had a fondness for the Chandos portrait. The hint of a smile, the somewhat indirect gaze – behold, they show us a mystery…
This article in the Telegraph features a video on the subject of this recent, rather significant find. (Stanley Wells is married to Susan Hill, a writer I esteem highly. I love this small world quality of British intellectual life!)
Feeling Scottish…
Because I’m listening to M.C Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth mysteries and being mesmerised by Graeme Malcolm’s beautiful, subtly inflected reading and by the author’s loving evocation of the Highlands, and
Because Friday night, I led a discussion of Alexander McCall Smith’s The Careful Use of Compliments. Re-reading this novel, I was enraptured all over again.
Alexander McCall Smith
I love Isabel Dalhousie, ethicist and intellectual. I love the mixture of elements in her: brainy one minute (and not averse to showing it off), passionate the next; possessed of an insatiably curious nature and yet at times preferring solitude, and the possessor of a heightened aesthetic sense that makes her exquisitely responsive to poetry, music, and art.
I was especially taken this time around by the by the poetry quoted and alluded to in this novel. W.H Auden is a great favorite – Isabel calls him her poet. While she and Jamie are bathing little Charlie, she finds herself reflecting on one of Auden’s best known poems:
Musee des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
(I was ready to identify the artist as Pieter Breugel the Elder; however, a Wikipedia entry claims that this attribution is now considered to be highly doubtful. I tried in vain to find additional information about this controversy. The work resides in The Royal Museums of Fine Art in Brussels – aka, ‘Musee des Beaux Arts.’)
As she and Jamie exclaim over Charlie’s perfect little body, the poignant “Naming of Parts” comes to Isabel’s mind:
LESSONS OF THE WAR
by Henry Reed
To Alan Michell
Vixi duellis nuper idoneus
Et militavi non sine gloria
I. NAMING OF PARTS
To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.
This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.
This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.
Later in the novel, when Jamie exclaims that he is falling in love with Jura, their vacation destination, Isabel quotes the following, again from Auden:
Love requires an Object,
But this varies so much,
Almost, I imagine,
Anything will do:
When I was a child, I
Loved a pumping-engine,
Thought it every bit as
Beautiful as you.
Click here to read the poem, “Heavy Date,” in its entirety.
I had trouble finding the full text of “Heavy Date.” Tracking down the other poetry referred to in the novel turned out to be even more of a challenge. I was so determined to locate Hugh MacDiarmid’s “Island Funeral” that I am now the pleased owner of this book:
In this edition of MacDiarmid’s works, “Island Funeral” is eight pages in length. Here’s an excerpt:
“They are weather-beaten people with eyes grown clear,
Like the eyes of travellers and seamen,
From always watching far horizons.
but there is another legend written on these faces,
A shadow–or a light–of spiritual vision
That will seldom find full play
On the features of country folk
Or men of strenuous action.
Among these mourners are believers and unbelievers,
And many of them steer a middle course,
Being now priest-ridden by convention,
But not one of them betrays a sign
Of facile and self-lulling piety,
Nor can noe seee on any face
‘A sure and certain hope
Of the Resurrection to eternal life.’
This burial is just an act of nature,
A reassertion of the islanders’ inborn certainty
That ‘in the midst of life we are in death.’
The poem concludes with these lines:
“The cornet solo of our Gaelic islands
Will sound out every now and again
Through all eternity.I have heard it and am content for ever.
I have not had the chance to read the other poetry, but “Island Funeral” was powerful and moving and well worth the cost of the entire volume.
When the scheming yet superficially congenial Christopher Dove comes up to Edinburgh to confer with Isabel concerning his upcoming assumption of the post of editor of The Review of Applied Ethics, a post cherished and heretofore admirably filled by Isabel herself, she must struggle to be civil to the man. He mentions that he’ll be returning to London on the sleeper train, an experience he has previously enjoyed. “‘Norman MacCaig didn’t,” she responds, and goes on to quote the following: “‘I do not like this being carried sideways through the night.’” I love that line, especially the rhythm of it, imitating as it does the actually rhythms of riding on a train. Research revealed that the poem is entitled “Sleeping Compartment.” I have not yet obtained the full text.
During the bath scene, the Auden work puts Isabel in mind of yet another poem:
“‘There’s a poet called Alvarez who wrote a lovely poem about angels appearing overhead. The angels suddenly appear in the sky and are unnoticed by a man cutting wood with a buzz saw. But [she adds] then it was in Tuscany, where one might expect to see angels at any time.’
Oh, dear, off to the chase yet again! I’m thinking that the Alvarez in question is A. Alvarez. Years ago, I read a powerful book by this author, a meditation on suicide entitled The Savage God. I have not been able to find the poem alluded to above. The final puzzler is a poem by an Irish poet “which suggested that we could all be saved by keeping our eye on the hill at the end of the road.” No title is given or author named.
I’ve concluded that this novel should come with a concordance!
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Near the novel’s end, Isabel attends a concert in which Jamie, a professional musician and music teacher, is playing the bassoon. The second half of the program is to consist of the works of contemporary composers: Peter Maxwell Davies, Stephen Deazley, and Max Richter. There’s a piece by Peter Maxwell Davies that I really like, though I haven’t heard it for quite some time. It’s called Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, and there are bagpipes at the end, which is probably why I’ve never forgotten it.
The Requiem by Gabriel Faure comprises the first part of the program. These are Isabel’s reflections on it:
“It was not complex music, with its cautiously developed melody and its utter resolution; it was a lullaby really, and that, she thought, was what a requiem really was. If one were to be taken up to heaven, then it would be Faure who might accompany one….Grant them rest, rest everlasting; they were such kind words, even in their finality, and the music that accompanied them, as in this requiem, should be gentle.
Not a believer herself, she nonetheless concedes that “this was music which might, for a few sublime moments, nudge one towards belief…” – belief, she means, in some kind of afterlife.
The following are excerpts from the Requiem:
Sanctus, performed by the King’s College Choir, Cambridge
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Pie Jesu, sung by the incomparable Lucia Popp
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The concluding movement, In Paradisum, performed by the Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Carl Marie Giulini.
I first encountered this music when I sang it with the Chorus of my alma mater, Goucher College. From it I have received both exaltation and consolation all my life, and yes, Isabel, I hope it sees me off into the next!
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Now art, of course, is the springboard for the plot of The Careful Use of Compliments. Alas,the group felt that the intrigue, such as it is, surrounding the fate of painter Andrew McInnes is the least interesting aspect of the novel. I couldn’t help but agree with them. Far more compelling are Isabel’s efforts, which seem at times almost desperate, to keep the dominant elements of her life in some kind of harmony. There’s her much younger lover and all the insecurities entailed in that relationship, despite the fact of their having a child together. The intensity of feeling is stronger on her side, and she knows it. To further complicate matters, she is also far more financially secure than Jamie.
Then there’s her niece Cat. Each is the other’s only near relation in Edinburgh – in all of Scotland, for that matter. But Cat is a mercurial, rather shallow young woman who is capable of spiteful and injurious behavior toward Isabel, despite the latter’s kindness .
Finally there is Isabel’s position as editor of The Review of Applied Ethics. Isabel does not have a “day job; her inherited wealth relieves her of the necessity of shouldering that particular burden. But her work for the Review is a labor of love, one that keeps her connected with her chosen field of study and with colleagues from all over the world. When that position is threatened – by the oily Christopher Dove no less! – her first instinct is to acquiesce with as much grace as she can muster. But then another instinct arises within her: the instinct to fight.
Isabel decides to use her vast resources in order to save her position and the Review itself from further interference by potential adversaries. But she has qualms about doing this. Is she using her money in an arrogant, unscrupulous manner? Eventually she overcomes these reservations, and once she has made her move, does not look back.
The group did not have a problem with Isabel’s actions in this case, but in some of the book’s ticklish social situations, we felt she could have acted with more tact. Showing up at Cat’s flat with Charlie in tow seems a particularly egregious act, especially considering that young woman’s prickly nature and extreme sensitivity regarding Isabel’s relationship with Jamie, her own former lover.
Although the mystery surrounding the painter Andrew McInnes does nor engage the reader as it might have, it does nonetheless provide motivation for the journey Isabel and Jamie make to Jura in the inner Hebrides. McCall Smith’s description of this windswept island make you want to go there immediately. Approximately 170 persons currently live on Jura, while the population of red deer is about 5,500.
The Paps of Jura
(I was delighted to read about the Paps of Jura, as they immediately reminded of the Grand Tetons. This, then, is the second time I’ve encountered mountains named after that portion of the female anatomy!)
Included in this portion of the book is fascinating (and factual) background on George Orwell, who stayed at Barnhill, a house on Jura, while he wrote 1984. And here’s news for all you intrepid vacationers: you can now stay at Barnhill yourself! But you’ll need a Land Rover to get there…
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My reading of the Dalhousiee novels has awakened me to the rich heritage of Scottish art. I acquired this fine book:
Cover painting: Poets' Pub by Alexander Moffat (1980)
In its opening pages, I discovered an object which I loved (and wanted to hold) instantly: the mysterious Towie Ball.
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Here are some portraits by Scottish artists:
Margaret Lindsay, by Allan Ramsay (1713-1784)
Niel Gow, by Henry Raeburn (1756-1823)
Sir John and Lady Clerk of Penicuik, by Henry Raeburn
Isabella McLeod, Mrs. James Gregory, by Henry Raeburn
And here, a cityscape I find immensely appealing:
The Tay Bridge from my Studio Window, by James McIntosh Patrick (1948)
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With one exception, I had the feeling that group members were not quite as enthusiastic about The Careful Use of Compliments as I was. For one thing, they had not read previous titles in the series, and I think that proved a disadvantage. In particular, they lacked the back story of Isabel’s ongoing and rather tortured relationship with Cat. Even so, I think we all agreed that the conclusion was pure poetry.
Just before drifting off to sleep, Isabel and Jamie are sharing a few intimate thoughts. Then:
” Isabel closed her eyes. There is a sea of love, she thought. And we are in it.”
