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AND THE END OF ALL OUR EXPLORING
WILL BE TO ARRIVE WHERE WE STARTED
AND KNOW THE PLACE FOR THE FIRST TIME.
from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Little Gidding”
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collage © 2002 by Olin Howell
Yesterday my wife and I took a small break from the pressures of work to visit the studio of Gari Melchers, which overlooks the Rappahannock River in Falmouth, Virginia. Melchers (1860-1932) was a world-known American impressionist. His wife, Corinne Mackall, who was 20 years his junior, was also an accomplished artist. They had no children.
The Melcher home is undergoing restoration and their personal collection of paintings, which includes works from Morisot and Rodin, is currently on display in the gallery off the studio. There is a portrait of Corinne and her brother, Leonard, painted by an unidentified artist when the two were young golden-haired children; he might have been four, she, two.
On the way home my wife remembered that years ago she had bought a set of books that had Corinne’s name written in them. I found them behind the glass doors of the secretary.
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I have always liked the books and made sure they’ve been kept safe; I’ve always been on the lookout for a matching volume of Shakespeare’s histories, if there is one. I opened the volumes, and found the same inscription inside each, handwritten in ink.
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Leonard Mackall was a bibliophile, and was known for giving books away to people he believed would appreciate and take care of them, rather than sell them at exorbitant prices. He gave away as many as 200 books a year, yet maintained a 12,000 volume library of his own. He was also known for discovering rare books. Once while in London, he visited the British Museum to ask to see a particular book on American exploration. The librarian refused his request on the reason that the book was too rare for even a specialist to handle. Not put off by the librarian’s aloofness, Mackall went to Oxford in search of another copy, found one in a second-hand shop, paid two shillings for it, and promptly returned to the British Museum. The librarian was speechless.
Corinne, ever sensitive to the needs of the community here in Fredericksburg, may have loaned out this two-volume set (to a student, I’m thinking) and never got them back (something my wife and I have experienced all too often). They ended up in the old junk shop in which my wife found them, years ago. Corinne (1880-1955) willed the Melcher estate to the commonwealth of Virginia. We plan to return the books to their rightful place.
The books were obvious birthday gifts from her brother: Corinne was born on February 27.
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Painting by Gari Melchers
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The works of both artists influenced me, those of N. C. and his son, Andrew. I remember the moment I first saw an N. C. Wyeth illustration. I was a boy and an artist, so the impact was sublime: pirates on the high seas, wind-blown, sun-seared, grim. It was a rich, bold composition for the cover of the Scribner’s classic, Treasure Island. The fact that Robert Louis Stevenson was one of my favorite authors heightened the experience. I was just as enthralled, if not more, when years later I saw the originals from the book at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
Being a student of Howard Pyle, the father of American illustration, N. C. knew how to become his subject, whether pirate or Huron or Rip Van Winkle, in order to paint with authority. Not only did he live out the drama of his works in his mind, he surrounded himself with real articles of fading American cultures—many of which appear in his illustrations.
My first awareness of Andrew’s work was not Christina’s World—the famed painting of the stranded girl in the bleak, tense landscape (the real Christina was a victim of polio)—it was the graphite drawing of the bedpost for Chambered Nautilus. I had read that Andrew used a plain Number Two pencil—the kind I used in school—rather than an austere range of F, HB, B, B2, and so on. This told me it wasn’t as much the tools you used as it was what you did with them.
As Andrew developed as an artist under his father’s admiring eye, something unusual began to unfold. Father began to be follow son. Andrew explored directions away from book illustration, inspired by his environs rather than from literature. His art became a visual journal. I once thought that Andrew picked up where his father had left off—painting with egg tempera on panel, but it was N. C. who learned the technique from Andy, and with it sought to create art beyond illustration, which he undervalued.
The time came when father and son each entered a work for an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Andrew’s was accepted; N. C.’s was not. Son had eclipsed father, at least in the world of gallery work. At least at that moment. For Andrew, due in part to the fact that his father was the great illustrator and his own work had a straightforward narrative, would not be taken seriously by the highbrow art scene much of his long career.
His career now over, son has joined father to stand as a major fellow figure in the American composition of art and culture.
One of the best works written on the Wyeth dynasty is N. C. Wyeth, A Biography by David Michaelis (Knopf, 1998). Michaelis spent six years in research for the book, and had access to the family letters through the gracious permission of Betsy, Andrew’s wife.
I was introduced to her in college through her bittersweet Something Childish But Very Natural, and fell headlong in love with her, as does Henry with Edna in the story. Their love is too fragile to last—Henry’s and Edna’s—but mine is stirred every time I reacquaint myself with Katherine Mansfield. Her stories explore unfulfilled and broken dreams, domesticity, class ideologies and idiosyncrasies, eddies of intimacies within everyday people. Her adults are grownup children, her children are the seeds and sprouts of grownups, and the stories they inhabit are like times familiar to most of us. That does not mean she tells no occasional high drama: she just tells it in her quiet, natural voice, though with a slight chill. In How Pearl Button was Kidnapped, little Pearl loves the parenthetical bliss—and bliss it is, against her life in the “House of Boxes”—and despairs when she is rescued. In A Suburban Fairy Tale, the starving children in the snow become sparrows, begging for crumbs before flying away. The Child-Who-Was-Tired, in the story by the same name, overburdened with care and desperate for a moment’s peace, smothers her young charge in order to have it. The nervous wretch in the remote wilds reveals through a pencil drawing to the travelers who stop by that his mother, the woman of The Woman at the Store, shot and buried his father.
One of my favorites is See-Saw, a short short with a lasting truth. The title alone is perfect. In the story, a boy and girl are seriously at play being housekeeping grownups, in a small earthen hollow, while above them two “old babies”—a man and wife—are equally sincere at playing real life. It begins with a lovely description—
As the people leave the road for grass their eyes become fixed and dreamy like the eyes of people wading in the warm sea.
—in contrast to what follows. Listen to the young ones:
“If you don’t get me no sticks for my fire,” said she, “there won’t be no dinner.” She wrinkled her nose and looked at him severely. He took it very easy, balancing on his toes. “Well—where’s I to find any sticks?”
He collects an armful in a second, once she informs him in a whisper the sticks do not have to be real.
And the old ones:
“Very hot,” said he, and he gave a low, strange trumpeting cry with which she was evidently familiar, for she gave no sign. She looked into the lovely distance and quivered, “Nellie cut her finger last night.”
And so it goes, back and forth between the two pairs, up and down, youth and age. In a momentary reminder that there is beauty at hand, a bird perched on a young chestnut above sends out a “great jet of song” over them. The man, “the old snorter”, responds by shooing it away, complaining, “Don’t want bird muck falling on us.” The children, as spontaneous as the world that sparkles around them, are studying hard, unconsciously, to become what the grownups have long been: solidified into the mundane.
Capturing the beautiful with the mundane, that is one reason Katherine Mansfield’s works deserve to be on the writer’s shelf, if not in the writer’s heart. “Life never becomes a habit with me,” she said. “It’s always a marvel.” She died at age 35.
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A page from my college sketchbook, when I dreamed of illustrating her stories.
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Gone are the times when I read a book for pleasure. Now, as I read, I’m thinking: The writing is too self-conscious; or, What direction would I have taken had I been the writer? or, That “only” is in the wrong place. Not that I don’t occasionally enjoy reading, but as a writer who wants to continue improving his work, I read analytically, critically.
I picked up a book last night—Tess of the D’Urbervilles—with a particular scene in mind. I haven’t studied it page by page, but I know the plot, and wanted to see how Thomas Hardy handled the murder scene at the story’s end. Fate has been slowly wringing Tess in its grip, from that May day so long ago when Angel passed her by to dance with another, until the moment he returns to her, repentant and emaciated, to claim the bride he abandoned. It is too late. Too late for any spark of joy to light her way, any hope of fulfillment. She has surrendered to the numbing tide that is poverty and abuse, and has drifted like flotsam into the hold of Alec D’Urberville, the man who victimized her youth. It is one of the saddest tales in all literature. When Angel returns, only to be turned away, and Tess is back upstairs with Alec …
That is the scene. It is the climax, if the book has a climax. It is almost anticlimactic. How and why does Hardy do it?
We do not see Tess take the knife in her frenzied state. We are not there to feel her vindication, as she plunges it into Alec. We are not even with her as she rushes downstairs and out the door. No. We know of it through the disengaged landlady, who, on hearing Tess’s agony, peers into the keyhole to see her despairing face, then hastily retreats to the chamber below for fear of being caught eavesdropping. From over the landlady’s shoulder, as she glances out the window, we see Tess leave the house. The landlady then happens to look up to the ceiling, where a small spot of red grows.
And so we know what has been done.
The psychic distance that Hardy employs is almost a slight to what we deserve to witness, and what Tess is deserving to accomplish in our presence with its spectrum of passion and gore. Yet. She is an innocent throughout the story, soiled by, not her own actions, but those of others. Why should she now be stained? So Hardy maintains her purity of heart even as she commits her crime.
On thinking this through, this critical decision of a master writer and his craft, I came to another realization. Tess is nearing the close of her wobbly rotation. When we first see her, she is dancing the May Day dance in a circular celebration of newness and life. When we leave her, or rather, when she leaves us and the unjust world, she is symbolically, sacrificially entombed in Stonehenge, to where she and Angel have retreated, pursued by the law. She has come full circle, from life to death, by means beyond her control. Fate had dealt its trump. Hardy writes of the landlady’s room: “The oblong white ceiling, with this scarlet blot in the midst, had the appearance of a gigantic ace of hearts.”
All this whiteness, with its blot of blood, is the essence of Tess. Symbol and statement was, to Hardy, truer than drama.
What would you, the writer, have done?