by Paul Theroux
During the period that these sculptors and painters were being heavily patronized in Washington, no one was encumbering American writers with much help. Just before Captain Meigs began hiring artists and commissioning busts and pictures, Edgar Allan Poe died (1849)—his work was done; and Brumidi was still cleaning his brushes and preparing his palette when Moby Dick appeared in 1851; Uncle Tom's Cabin came out the next year, The Scarlet Letter in 1850, Walden in 1854 and Emerson's English Traits in 1856. Sam Clemens in 1857 had just become a riverboat pilot and was saying "Mark Twain" for the first time, as a command.
Perhaps these American writers had heeded Emerson's call ten years earlier to be self-reliant. None I have mentioned had patrons, though in 1852 Hawthorne wrote the campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, idealizing his old friend and Bowdoin College classmate. For this, Hawthorne was on the receiving end of a piece of political patronage. As soon as he was elected president, Pierce made Hawthorne American Consul in Liverpool. In a sense, they proved what Dr Johnson had told Boswell about merit. "I never knew a man of merit neglected," he said. "It was generally by his own fault that he failed of success. A man may hide his head in a hole: he may go into the country, and publish a book now and then, which nobody reads, and then complain he is neglected. There is no reason why any person should exert himself for a man who has written a good book: he has not written it for any individual. I may as well make a present to the postman who brings me a letter. When patronage was limited, an author expected to find a Maecenas, and complained if he did not find one. Why should he complain? This Maecenas has others as good as he, or others who have got the start of him."
It would have been ironic if Harriet Beecher Stowe had received a government grant to write Uncle Tom's Cabin. Jefferson Davis became Pierce's Secretary of War the year after it appeared, and the novel did much to hasten his new appointment in the Confederacy. He might have remarked, as the generous French statesman did in the Dr Johnson story, "J'ai fait dix mécontents et un ingrat," which can be roughly translated in Henry Ford's dictum, "Give the average man something, and you make an enemy of him."
Patrons are by no means a recent growth in America, and they have not always been so concerned with the arts. Ben Whitaker argues in his study The Foundations that the first Foundation in the United States was probably the Magdalen Society, which was started in Philadelphia in 1800, "to ameliorate the distressed condition of those unhappy females who have been seduced from the paths of virtue, and are desirous of returning to a life of rectitude." Apparently, there was a shortage of candidates; it was eventually reorganized into a foundation to assist schoolchildren.
Whitaker is comprehensive in his treatment of foundations and lists among others, "the Robbins Fund of Chicago with its assets of $8. The James Dean Fund ... to provide for the 'delivery to the Boston Light Vessel of one copy of each of the principal Sunday newspapers published in Boston'. A Horses' Christmas Dinner Trust"—in Kansas—"The Benefit Shoe Foundation provides for people with one foot. A foundation in Latin America is devoted to the deportation of foreign bull-fighters. A Science Fiction Foundation has recently been started in Britain, where the Scientology Foundation is already active, and the Osborne Foundation now offers to pray for you for £2 a month... not long ago a United States Flag Foundation brought a lawsuit against a New York artist whom it accused of showing a lack of respect for the Stars and Stripes"—though the artist may well have had a Guggenheim to do it—"Recently"—this was in 1974—"in the Philippines, President Marcos announced that he is donating all his worldly possessions to the Marcos Foundation as an example of self-sacrifice to his people; and the Search Foundation dispatched its seventh expedition to find Noah's Ark." We also have a Lollipop Foundation and two foundations to preserve prairie chickens. But prairie chickens are no laughing matter, nor is other desert fauna. In 1980, the Guggenheim Foundation awarded one of its Fellowships to a man in order to assist his study, "The social ecology of free-ranging coyotes."
This is a far cry from Brumidi's per diem of $8, and even further from Dr Johnson's having to find subscribers to his dictionary, and so cross about Lord Chesterfield's cold shoulder that he rewrote his imitation of Juvenal,
Yet think what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the Patron, and the jail.
Mr Whitaker is very good on the paradoxes of philanthropy, and on the numerous motives that impel the philanthropoid to give his money away. There is the religious emphasis—alms-giving, which may have evolved from the tradition "of making a sacrifice to propitiate fate or hostile spirits, together with a more material fear of the malevolence of the poor." There is tax deduction, but this is recent—no deduction was allowed for charitable gifts prior to 1917. There is simple kindness; and complicated kindness, motivated by a mixture of idealism, pride, and the wish to be loved. "At least ninety per cent of all existing foundations today," Mr Whitaker remarks, "perpetuate the donor's name"—not only Ford, Carnegie and Kennedy, but also, as we have seen, Gertrude Clarke Whittal, and not only all recent presidents but members of their cabinets—the John Volpe; and Maurice Stans Foundations are but two of very many. There is the selfish motive, to which Will Kellogg, the cereal tycoon, admitted: "I get a kick out of it (giving to children). Therefore I am a selfish person and no philanthropist." There is real malice. Mr Whitaker cites the case of the American who "established the fund to help French peasants to dress up as matadors or hula dancers, to prove his thesis that there is no degradation to which French people will not stoop for money." There is also the straightforwardness of James Buchanan Duke, who founded the Duke Endowment. He said, "People ought to be healthy. If they ain't healthy they can't work, and if they don't work they ain't healthy. And if they can't work there ain't no profit in them." From such down-to-earth sentiments came the great institution we know as Duke Medical School and pioneering scholarship in the field of extra-sensory perception and parapsychology, and what we laymen call ghosts.
One of the subtlest and most paradoxical points Mr Whitaker makes in The Foundations regards patronage between enemies, or gift-giving out of suspicion. It is the hectoring of one group upon another's uneasy conscience, the sort of eleemosynary blackmail that frequently creates an even greater suspicion between the races in the United States. In this connection, Mr Whitaker quotes Levi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship. Small nomadic groups of Nambikwara Indians in the Brazilian jungle
are in constant fear of each other and avoid each other. But at the same time they desire contact... and from being arrayed against each other they pass immediately to gifts; gifts are given, but silently, without bargaining, without any expression of satisfaction or complaint, and without any apparent connexion between what is offered and what is obtained.
That "constant fear" and wary, circumspect behavior, that sense of mutual suspicion, puts me in mind of an escaped convict suddenly confronting a child in a foggy, marshy graveyard, and the following dialogue:
"You know what a file is?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you know what wittles is?"
"Yes, sir."
After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a greater sense of helplessness and danger.
"You get me a file." He tilted me again. "And you get me wittles." He tilted me again. "You bring 'em both to me." He tilted me again. "Or I'll have your heart and liver out." He tilted me again.
And so begins the relationship between patron and recipient in what is certainly the greatest novel about patronage, Dickens's Great Expectations. The complex motives of both giver and receiver have never been more cunningly delineated than in the surprises and plot-shifts of this novel. George Orwell called it "an attack on patronage," but if it were as simple as that one would only need to list its abuses. Dickens was at pains to demonstrate the paradoxes.
After one has read the novel, one quickly sees how, like Pip, one has misapprehended the source of his funds, and it is possible to feel a sympa
thetic sense of victimization. Certainly, Pip is a snob, but we have seen his humble origins, and we understand how glad he is to receive the grant of money that liberates him from the blacksmith shop apprenticeship and the pretensions of his provincial town. The story is of Pip's rise and fall, and his rise again. As a child, he is summoned to the house of Miss Havisham and commanded to play with the girl, Estella. Miss Havisham urges Estella to break his heart; Miss Havisham is reputedly wealthy. Pip longs to be rich himself and he believes that his ambiguous welcome at Miss Havisham's will ultimately make his fortune. He also longs to be a gentleman, as he tells the kindly Biddy—Biddy is also an orphan, "Mr Wopsle's great-aunt's granddaughter"; Pip is not sure of the relationship to Wopsle, but very early in the novel he notices that she is rather unkempt, unwashed and even slovenly. He unburdens himself in this way:
"Biddy," said I, after binding her to secrecy, "I want to be a gentleman." ...
"You know best, Pip; but don't you think you are happier as you are?"
"Biddy," I exclaimed, impatiently, "I am not at all happy as I am. I am disgusted with my calling and my life. I have never taken to either since I was bound. Don't be absurd."
And he goes on to say:
... understand once for all that I never shall or can be comfortable—or anything but miserable ... unless I can lead a very different sort of life from the life I lead now.
He confesses that his wish to be a gentleman has something to do with Estella, and Biddy wonders whether this aspiration is meant to spite the girl, or to win her over. She observes, "Because, if it is to spite her, I should think—but you know best—that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think—but you know best—she was not worth gaining over."
Shortly after this seemingly fruitless plea for patronage, Pip is visited by the lawyer Jaggers, who informs him that his expectations have been fulfilled: someone wishes to give him a great deal of money, clothes, a tutor, a new life—in short, wishes to make him a gentleman. Pip is delighted, within a few pages he is a raging snob; a few pages more and he is dreaming of becoming a philanthropist. His reflection is like a paraphrase of Andrew Carnegie's The Advantages of Poverty. Pip feels a "sublime compassion" for the church-goers in his village, for their low state and their mean lives. But he is rich now and "I promised myself that I would do something for them one of these days, and formed a plan in outline for bestowing a dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of condescension, upon everybody in the village."
One advantage of charity, Carnegie said, was that it allowed the rich to "find refuge from self-questioning."
Pip assumes that Miss Havisham is his benefactress, and in that reverie of philanthropy that I quoted, he remembers the convict he met, the brief friendship, and he concludes that his comfort is that the felon has been transported and is probably dead. Pip is consoled by the thought that this foul creature is out of the way and that he, Pip, is in no danger of further contamination.
It would take too long to show how Pip squanders his money in London, preens himself, dispenses charity and is jilted by Estella. Suffice to say, he is in for a shock, for his patron turns up. It is, much to Pip's embarrassment, the convict Magwitch.
Magwitch is a fascinating character. He is the unwelcome aspect, the unacceptable face of patronage. And he is like many patrons, many starters of foundations. Like Carnegie, he made his pile far from his native land; like Guggenheim and others, he is a bit vague about his methods; like Joe Kennedy, he is rather sanctimonious; and like James Buchanan Duke, his syntax is somewhat twisted. He is also the soul of generosity; he has not forgotten the kindness that was done to him so many years ago by the boy who gave him "wittles" and a file to free him of his manacles. It is another characteristic he shares with philanthropoids—he has a very long memory. Lastly, he passionately craves respectability. You might easily mistake him for the show business comedian and buffoon who solemnly reveals himself as a patron of the fund to combat muscular dystrophy, or that other unlikely combination, the tobacco man and the sportsman who seem anxious to associate smoking and money with tennis-playing and health (in the Virginia Slims Tournament there is the added factor of Triumphant Woman, a sort of chain-smoking world-beater). Magwitch's victory is that he has turned Pip into a gentleman, through patronage—funnelling the funds through the lawyer, Jaggers—without the young man knowing. Pip is appalled and ashamed. There is something about his shame that cannot fail to remind us of the combined outrage and embarrassment evinced by writers and scholars, when they learned that the distinguished magazines Encounter and Preuves were funded by that other Magwitch-like patron, the CIA.
Magwitch has been living in Australia and denying himself luxuries in order that Pip might prosper. If there is something pitiful in his self-denial, there is also something quite horrible in his gloating over what he has achieved.
"Look'ee here!" he [Magwitch] went on, taking my watch out of his pocket, and turning towards him a ring on my finger, while I recoiled from his touch as if he had been a snake, "a gold 'un and a beauty: that's a gentleman's, I hope! A diamond all set round with rubies; that's a gentleman's, I hope! Look at your linen; fine and beautiful! Look at your clothes; better ain't to be got! And your books too," turning his eyes round the room, "mounting up, on their shelves, by hundreds! And you read 'em, don't you? I see you'd been a reading of them when I come in. Ha, ha, ha! You shall read 'em to me, dear boy! And if they're in foreign languages wot I don't understand, I shall be just as proud as if I did."
And then the convict, the "warmint" as he calls himself, takes Pip's hands and kisses them, and Pip's blood runs cold. Pip's perplexity arises not from any scruple that he has been unworthy, or that he is a spendthrift and a snob; but rather that his patron is unworthy, an ex-con, a spendthrift and a vicarious snob. Magwitch, in Pip's eyes, has "a savage air that no dress could tame", he sits like a lout, he eats with a jack-knife and wipes it on his leg to clean it. Pip's main objection is that he does not want to be the vindication of Magwitch's obsessive sacrifice. The patron has dirty hands. He has no right to be proud of Pip:
What would alone have set a division between that man and us ... was his triumph in my story ... he had no perception of the possibility of my finding any fault with my good fortune. His boast that he had made me a gentleman, and that he had come to see me support the character on his ample resources, was made for me quite as much as for himself. And that it was a highly agreeable boast to both of us, and that we must both be very proud of it, was a conclusion quite established in his own mind.
Pip tells his friend, Herbert Pocket, that Magwitch must be stopped in his giving. Herbert says, "You mean that you can't accept—" And Pip replies, "How can I?... Think of him! Look at him!"
It is the moment in literature that most accurately mirrors that moment in history when, for many writers, the CIA's clumsy figure (savage air, jack-knife, dirty hands) appeared behind the dignified façade of The Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Pip disengages himself from Magwitch after a time and takes a humble job with Herbert Pocket. Pip would not have minded receiving the money from the pathetic, crazy, vindictive Miss Havisham; she, after all, is a kind of pillar of the community, the sort of crank who would not miss a few thousand. Pip is penitent, but the irony is that it was Pip's patronage—an anonymous handout—that allowed Herbert to start the firm that redeems Pip and makes him his second fortune. In one ending of the novel he loses Estella, in another upbeat ending suggested by Bulwer-Lytton, he gains Estella.
There are not many novels which deal with patronage.
The Member, by John Gait, published in 1832, is a brisk, Scottish fictional memoir about political patronage, in which the pious note is struck on the first page, as Archibald Jobbry finagles to get into parliament:
... I began to take shares in divers public concerns, and to busy myself in the management thereof, slipping in a young f
riend now and then as a clerk. I will not, however, say, that in this I was altogether actuated by affection; for public spirit had quite as much to say with me as a regard for my kindred: indeed, it is a thing expected of every man, when he retires from business, that he will do his endeavour to serve his country, and make himself a name in the community.
Galt's hero buys his way into parliament and finds that he can only stay there by continuing to dispense patronage, though he occasionally allows himself a kickback.
Patronage is conspicuously absent in George Gissing's New Grub Street, the best novel ever written about the life of hard-pressed writers, literary journalists, and outright hacks. There is one patroness in Conrad's The Secret Agent, and another in James's The Princess Casamassima —indeed, it is the princess herself (formerly plain old Christina Light from his earlier novel, Roderick Hudson). The career of Hyacinth Robinson is well worth studying by anyone interested in the ups and downs in the relationship between patron and recipient, for the Princess Casamassima is quite determined that only money stands between Hyacinth and refinement. (Incidentally, it is Hyacinth who says that he would never marry a girl who would have him for a husband—predating by some fifty years Groucho Marx's "I'd never join a club that would have me as a member".)
And no one, as Pip's experience shows, can truly enjoy patronage unless it boosts his self-esteem. Pip's self-esteem is in for a knock as soon as it is revealed that his money is from an ex-convict. Patronage always works best when both patron and recipient are held in mutual esteem; and each has what the other lacks. So often, it is the uneducated millionaire who founds a university; the scarcely-literate one who starts a library; the artless tycoon who patronizes the artist. Here, the philistine and the publican are happily paired. It is not merely that the patron wishes to become respectable and artistic through his gift; the recipient, too, gains respectability by association with his patron. If the patron is distinguished enough, the actual money may be regarded as no more than a detail. The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation claimed in its Annual Report 1965—66 that, since its awards, "year after year were seen to be based on rigorous professional standards, the informed public came to realize, in the words of one observer, that a Guggenheim Fellowship constitutes a sort of 'intellectual knighthood'. Thus the Foundation has gradually assumed a role in the validation of intellectual excellence that is quite as significant as its role in the provision of material assistance." Prestige matters. Charles Sackville's patronage may have been no more than a spirited evening at Knole House, but Sackville's friendship was an affirmation that you were of the élite, and if you were a poet, a great poet.