by Susan Sontag
The lady called out from the piano that she was happy when those she loved were happy.
How absurd you are, my dear, said the Cavaliere.
You may be right, she replied, smiling. No doubt I have many faults—
No! said the hero.
But, she went on, I have a good heart.
That’s not enough, William said.
The Cavaliere’s wife continued to strum at the piano. Ooody oody purbum, she sang out teasingly.
And what would make the Cavaliere happy?
I have noticed that many persons have lately expressed concern for my contentment, said the Cavaliere. But I do not seem to content them with my replies. Absence of strife. Freedom from disquiet. Firmness of nerves. At my age I do not expect ecstasies.
They all joined in telling him he was not so old.
And William? Who had been waiting impatiently for his turn.
I think I have found the recipe for happiness, said William. It is never to change, always to remain young. Being old is just a state of mind. One grows old because one allows oneself to grow old. And I pride myself that I am, give or take a few lines on my face, no different from when I was seventeen. I have the same dreams, the same ideals.
Ah, thought the Cavaliere, to be young forever. Not to change. That is perfectly possible if you don’t care about anyone but yourself. If he could live his life over again, that is exactly what he would do.
* * *
The second day William took his guests on a carriage ride through a portion of the vast estate, much of which he has enclosed with a twelve-foot wall topped with iron stakes to protect the wild animals in his custody, and to deny his hunting neighbors the use of even one of his two thousand acres for the pursuit of their helpless prey.
To be sure, William said, my neighbors cannot fathom someone who objects to the slaughter of innocent animals and believe that I have erected the wall to shield the orgies and satanic rites which I am reputed to conduct here. I am not liked in the neighborhood, nor would I think well of myself if I were.
In the afternoon, following dinner, while the Cavaliere was lingering in William’s picture gallery (Dürer, Bellini, Mantegna, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Poussin, &c &c, as well as many paintings of a tower), his wife and the hero had slipped off to be alone for a moment, hoping to elude the servants and find some corner where they could embrace. Like mischievous children, they looked into William’s sleeping chamber with its azure Indian hangings, and the hero avowed that he had never seen so large a bed. For the Cavaliere’s wife it was the second largest bed she had ever seen, the largest being Doctor Graham’s Grand Celestial Bed—twelve feet by nine feet, constructed on a double frame so that it could be converted into an inclined plane, supported by forty pillars of brilliant richly colored glass, and covered by its Super Celestial Dome of precious wood inset with highly scented spices, mirrored on the underside, and crowned by automata playing flutes, guitars, violins, oboes, clarinets, and kettledrums. Guaranteed to produce fertility in any hitherto barren couple. Fifty guineas a night.
Oh, it’s almost as big as the Celestial Bed.
What is that, said the hero.
That is the bed I am in whenever I lie with you, his beloved replied without missing a beat, and went on to muse astutely: I wager he usually lies alone in this bed, even though he have such a reputation for debauchery. Poor William!
He seems most disdainful of society, observed the hero.
Meanwhile, the Cavaliere was pursuing a similar line of reflection. After admiring the glorious paintings, the books, the rococo porcelain, the Japanese lacquer chests, the enameled miniatures, the Italian bronzes, and all the other treasures he was shown, he was now marveling at the fact that he was the first person not in William’s employ to see them. The Cavaliere had never thought of collecting as the operation of an enraged recluse.
They had settled in William’s study, whose ebony tables inlaid with Florentine mosaic were piled high with books he was reading. Unlike most bibliophiles, William read every volume he acquired, and then, with a finely sharpened pencil and in tiny script that with age had become meticulously legible, filled its inside covers and end pages with numbered glosses and a judgment, favorable or dismissive, of the book. The desk was covered with annotated lists from booksellers and auction catalogues, several of which he passed to the Cavaliere, indicating what he had already instructed his agents to purchase.
I gather that you do not enjoy browsing in bookshops or attending auctions, said the Cavaliere, citing two of his own favorite activities.
Being in attendance at something is an ordeal for me, as, indeed, is having to leave Fonthill for any reason, exclaimed William, who had spent years in peripatetic exile on the Continent before settling back on his domain to build his collections and his Abbey. But when I have properly housed the rare and beautiful objects I possess, I will not need ever to go out, ever be obliged to see anyone again. Thus fortressed, I can cheerfully contemplate the destruction of the world, for I will have saved all that is of value in it.
You do not want to give others the opportunity to admire what you have collected, the Cavaliere said.
Why should I be interested in the opinion of those less intelligent and less sensitive than myself?
I take your point, said the Cavaliere, who had not ever before thought of collecting as excluding the world. He had no quarrel with the world (though lately it seemed to have struck up a quarrel with him) and his collections had been a profitable, as well as pleasurable, connection to it.
Clearly, his kinsman did not give a damn about the improvement of public taste. But, the Cavaliere ventured, could William not envisage his collections open to view and prized at their true value by connoisseurs of some future age with the wit to appreciate what he had—
Nothing is more odious to me than thinking about the future, William interrupted.
Then the past is your—
I do not know if I love the past either, William again interrupted impatiently. In any case, love does not enter into it.
This was the Cavaliere’s first experience of collecting as revenge. Revenge facilitated by the immensest privilege. His kinsman never had to think whether he could afford what caught his fancy or whether it would be a good investment, as the Cavaliere had always had to do. Collecting, like all of William’s experiences, was a venture into the infinite, the imprecise, the not needing to be counted or weighed. He had none of the collector’s inveterate pleasure in the making of inventories. These described only the finite, as William might say. There could be no interest in knowing that he possessed forty maki-e lacquer boxes and thirteen statues of Saint Anthony of Padua and a Meissen dinner service of three hundred and sixty-three pieces. And all six thousand one hundred and four volumes of the splendid library of Edward Gibbon, which he had purchased upon learning of the great historian’s death in Lausanne—William had despised his Decline and Fall—but had never had sent over. For not only did he not have to know exactly what he had but sometimes he bought things in order not to have them, to sequester them from others; perhaps even from himself.
In some instances, William mused, it is the idea of possession that suffices me.
But if you do not see and touch what you possess, said the Cavaliere, you do not have the experience of beauty, which is what all lovers of art—all lovers, he was about to say—desire.
Beauty! exclaimed William. Who is more susceptible to beauty than I am? You need not praise beauty to me! But there is something higher still.
Which is…?
Something mystical, William said coldly. I fear you will not understand it.
You may tell me, said the Cavaliere, who was enjoying this exchange with his contentious relation, and enjoying, too, the feeling of clarity in his own mind. Perhaps, he thought, the reason it wandered so often lately is that he no longer ever had a conversation that challenged him or that touched on any learned subject. All had become anecdote. Do tell me, he said.
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br /> To go as high as possible, proclaimed William. There. Have I truly made myself clear?
Perfectly clear. You refer to your tower.
Yes, if you will, my tower. I will retire to my tower and never come down.
Thereby you escape the world which you reproach for mistreating you. But you also confine yourself.
As does a monk who seeks—
Surely you would not say you live as a monk, interrupted the Cavaliere with a laugh.
Yes, I will be a monk! You do not understand me, of course. All this luxury—William waved a slender hand at the damask hangings and rococo furniture—is no less an instrument of the spirit than the whip which the monk hangs on the wall of his cell and takes down nightly to purify his soul!
* * *
To surround oneself with enchanting and stimulating objects, a superfluity of objects, to ensure that the senses will never be unoccupied, nor the faculty of imagination left unexercised—this the Cavaliere understood well. What he could not imagine is a collector-lust pledged to something higher than art, more ravishing than beauty, of which art, as well as beauty, is only one possible instrument. The Cavaliere was a seeker of felicity, not of bliss. Never, in all his musings on felicity, had he sighted the chasm between a happy life and one that covets ecstasy. Ecstasy does not only make, as the Cavaliere might say, an unreasonable demand on life. It has to turn brutal, too.
Like sexual feelings, when they become a focus of dedication or devotion, and are actually lived out in all their vehemence and addictiveness, so the feeling for art (or beauty) can, after a while, only be experienced as excess, as something that strains to surpass itself, to be annihilated.
To really love something is to wish to die of it.
Or to live only in it, which is the same thing. To go up and never have to come down.
I want that, you say. And that. And that. And also that.
Sold, says the amiable dealer.
If you are rich enough to buy anything you want, you will probably be moved to shift your engagement with insatiability, with unattainability, to a building—a unique, intricate dwelling for you and your collections. This dwelling is the ultimate form of the collector’s fantasy of ideal self-sufficiency.
So now you say to your architect: I want that. And that. And that.
And the architect provides the obstacle. The architect says: That’s impossible. Or: I don’t understand.
You try to explain. You use the impure word Gothic, or whatever the retro style of the moment is. He seems to understand. But you don’t really want him to understand. I’m thinking of the Orient, you say. And you don’t really mean the Orient but the decor of the Orient, which you have always found conducive to losing yourself in what you call your visions and prophetic trances.
The architect does do what you want: difficult as you may be, you are the best client he has ever had. But no matter how faithfully he executes your fantasies, he cannot fully satisfy them. You keep asking for changes and additions to the structure. New fantasies come to mind. Or, rather, new elaborations of the old fantasy that has driven you to undertake the building in the first place.
I want more, you say to the harried, servile architect, who has by now started to disregard some of his eccentric patron’s instructions or to cut corners with the building materials. More, more. Such a building has the open-endedness of a collection. You think you want to finish it, but you don’t.
* * *
It is only because it is not finished (in fact, it was never finished) that he can show it to them, stage it for them. For once this is not their theatre. No one, not even the hero, can upstage William.
He had ordered flambeaux hung from miles of trees and stationed bands of musicians along the newly cut carriageway, and farther back to provide the solemnity of echo, in order to enchant them as they rode at dusk through the woods. When the first carriage broke into open terrain, there was still enough light to make out the hero’s colors flying from the octagonal tower of the prodigious cruciform building, already burgeoning with turrets, gables, oriels, and smaller towers. The flag was William’s only concession in all this theatre to the presence among his guests of the most famous man in England.
He led them into the building from an entrance on the west transept, through the Great Hall, to a room he told them was called the Cardinal’s Parlour, where a banquet was laid out on a refectory table lined with silver dishes. When they had finished dining, the Cavaliere’s wife offered a pantomime of an abbess welcoming novices to her convent. It seemed a good subject, she confided to William after the performance.
Most of the interior was lined by scaffolding spotted with shadowy figures of the five hundred local artisans, carpenters, plasterers, and masons whom William employed on round-the-clock shifts. Giggling nervously in his tense, high-pitched voice, cursing the slowness of the architect and the dilatoriness of the laborers, and then forgetting his annoyance and succumbing to a rapturous vision of what will be, William led his guests along the groined corridors and galleries lit with silver sconces, and up and down circular stairways which the Cavaliere’s wife, only a month short of her confinement, gamely negotiated. The Cavaliere smiled to himself at the hooded figures with muscular bare arms holding large wax tapers to illuminate the way.
A cathedral of art, William explained to his guests, in which all the strong sensations our limited sensory organs crave will be amplified and all uplifting thoughts of which our slender spirit is capable will be awakened.
He showed them the Gallery, three hundred fifty feet long, which would hold his pictures. The Vaulted Library. And the Music Room, where he would make resound on his keyboard instruments all the music worth playing.
A few rooms, provisionally readied for inspection, were paneled and had peacock blue, purple, and scarlet hangings. But William seemed more and more worried that the company would not understand what they were seeing.
This is my Oratory, he said. They were to imagine it filled with golden candlesticks, enameled reliquaries, and vases, chalices, and monstrances studded with jewels. Its fan vault will be in burnished gold.
Here, you must imagine doors of violet velvet, covered with purple-and-gold embroidery, said William. And for this room, I call it the Sanctuary, windows with lattices like those of confessionals.
I am rather cold, murmured the Cavaliere.
And for each of the sixty fireplaces, William continued imperturbably, there will be gilded filigree baskets heaped with perfumed coal.
The dark, the cold, the flickering light from the torches—the Cavaliere was beginning to feel ill. His wife wished there were a chair or a prie-dieu for her heavy body. The hero’s eyes were stinging from the smoke of the torches.
He showed them his Revelation Chamber, which would have a floor of polished jasper, where he would be buried.
He showed them what would be the Crimson Drawing Room, to be covered with crimson silk damask, and his Yellow Withdrawing Room, to be covered with yellow &c.
Last, he brought them to the immense room under the central tower.
The Octagon Hall. Here you must imagine the oak wainscot and stained glass in all the soaring arches, with a great central rose window, William said.
Look, exclaimed the Cavaliere’s wife. It really is like a church.
I estimate the altitude to be nearly a hundred and thirty feet, said the hero.
You must use your imagination, continued William irritably. But, when completed, my Abbey will leave nothing to the imagination. It will be the imagination, given tangible form.
He wanted so much for them to admire it.
So in the end—for William was not unique among collectors, as he imagined—he was disappointed. He expected nothing from this minister’s son, this wraith bulked out in an admiral’s uniform, whose only interest, apart from the Cavaliere’s wife, was in killing people. Neither did he expect anything from the hero’s inamorata, who belonged to that deplorable race of people who are effusive about
everything. But perhaps he had expected something from her husband, Catherine’s husband, his fastidious elderly relation with the gaunt face and absent look. There was nothing. Nothing. I vowed when I was twenty that I would always remain a child, thought William to himself; and I must bear with having a child’s vulnerability, a child’s absurd desire to be understood.
He would never have house guests when work on the Abbey had gone far enough for him to inhabit it. It was not a cathedral but a temple, only for the initiated: those who shared his dreams and who, like him, had undergone great ordeals and disappointments.
It will turn out, however, that the future use of these grandiose monuments to sentimentality and self-regard invariably defies the pious restrictions of their builders. Judged by posterity to be enchanting, berserk exercises in bad taste, they are destined to be gawked at on the guided tour by generations of tourists, who reach over the velvet ropes when the guards are not watching to finger the megalomaniac’s precious objects or silk hangings. But William’s Abbey, the mighty forerunner of all the aesthete palaces of surfeit and synesthesia and indoor theatrics of the next two centuries (both those built and those evoked in novels), did not survive to suffer the Disneyesque fate of Ludwig II’s Neuschwanstein and D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale. Incompetently built, the Abbey was from the beginning a ruin in the making. And since this cathedral of art, with all its gaudy arenas for self-dramatization, was principally an excuse to build the tower, it seems right that the tower’s fate be the fate of the building. The tower did not fall again for another twenty-five years, soon after Fonthill was sold, but when it did, the tumbling cloud of rotted stucco and mortar took much of the Abbey with it. And no one saw any reason not to tear the rest of it down.
* * *
Things decay, crash, vanish. Such is the law of the world, thought the Cavaliere. Wisdom of age. And those few deemed worth reconstructing or repairing will forever bear the marks of the violence done to them.
One February mid-afternoon in 1845, a young man of nineteen entered the British Museum, went directly to the unguarded room where the Portland Vase, one of the museum’s most valuable and celebrated holdings since its deposit on loan by the Fourth Duke of Portland in 1810, was kept in a glass case, picked up what was later described as “a curiosity in sculpture,” and started beating the vase to death. The vase broke, fractured, shattered, was decreated. The young man whistled softly and sat down in front of the heap to admire his handiwork. Guards arrived at a run.