Little Kingdoms

by Steven Millhauser

  Moorash possessed engravings of Hans Holbein the Younger’s series of drawings Der Totentanz (1524) and Das Todesalphabet (The Alphabet of Death, 1524), as well as engravings from La grant danse macabre des hommes et des femmes printed by Nicolas Le Rouge in 1496, but his handling of the subject is so radically his own that the search for a model is surely mistaken: he need have had no more than the broadest sense of a Dance of Death for his imagination to have taken fire. The conception is bold, stark, and disturbing: from a dark ground that at first appears empty and black emerges a line of five milky, transparent figures, who at one moment seem to melt into the darkness and at another to float into a kind of ominous half visibility. The figures, which seem to repel close inspection, appear to be dancing or reveling—they carry sticks, bells, a tambourine—and are oddly distorted, as if displayed in gestures that have been unnaturally arrested. The first figure, with its hollow eyes, snub nose, and sticklike forearm, emerges after many viewings as a dim, shifting skeleton; the four followers appear to be two men and two women (with their long, eerily floating smokelike hair). But what is most striking and uncanny about the Totentanz is the way it continually presents itself as different from the way it appeared a moment before—one is continually stepping closer, and farther back, and to the side, simply in an effort to see what is there. The background alone is a masterpiece of murk, a tone poem of dissonant darknesses. Dim forms appear to be visible, only to reveal themselves as the curves of bold brushstrokes, which again seem to tease the eye into evoking shapes that may or may not be there. From Elizabeth’s Journal we know something of Moorash’s methods: we know, for instance, that over a ground of white lead and oil he painted a more or less conventional landscape, the sole purpose of which was to be covered by a layer of black pigment applied in such a way as to permit a shadowy sense of the obscured landscape to show through at certain angles or under certain kinds of illumination. We know that Moorash experimented with scumbles and glazes. We know that for a while he became obsessed with the literal thickness of applied pigment and attempted to use that thickness to permit buried images to emerge. It is in this context that we first hear of a series of paintings, all lost, called variously the Haunted Paintings, the Ghost Paintings, and the Ghost Canvases, to which it will be useful to turn for a moment.

  In addition to the six surviving paintings of 1844–46, there are an unknown number of paintings now lost—presumably destroyed by Moorash himself—about which we hear from time to time in Elizabeth’s Journal and in occasional letters of Elizabeth and William Pinney to friends. Among the lost paintings, variously estimated at between seven and fifteen, are a small number known collectively as the Haunted Paintings, on which Moorash worked from time to time, but especially in the summer and early fall of 1844. There appear to have been at least six of these paintings, several of which are described in some detail in the Journal, for they disturbed and attracted Elizabeth. From her description it appears that all of the Haunted Paintings were characterized by thickly painted dark backgrounds, pale transparent figures that seemed to sink into the thick paint, and an ambiguous manner of impressing themselves on the eye: Elizabeth was never certain exactly what she was seeing. Moorash referred dismissively to the canvases as his “ghost tricks,” but kept on painting them. The paintings troubled Elizabeth; she calls them “brilliant but sinister” and begins to feel haunted by them. On 12 August 1844 she records an interesting exchange:

  ELIZABETH: I’m beginning to feel I live in a haunted house!

  EDMUND (shrugging): Nothing new here. All paintings are ghosts.

  After the concentrated work on the Haunted Paintings of the summer and early fall of 1844, Moorash appears to have dropped them for other projects, returning briefly to them in December; we last hear of a Haunted Painting in March 1845, shortly before his return to the Totentanz.

  The Totentanz, then, may be thought of as the culmination of a particular series of experiments; its uncanny effects derive directly from the “ghost tricks” of the Haunted Paintings. The effect of the Totentanz on Elizabeth was extraordinary—she calls it “dangerous to look at” and adds: “Edmund has turned us all into ghosts.” There was no doubt in her mind that the four figures led by Death were Edmund, William, Sophia, and herself.

  It will be recalled that shortly after Moorash’s offending words to Sophia on the night of 2 August 1843, a reconciliation appears to have been effected with the help of Elizabeth; in any case we find the four friends visiting back and forth across Black Lake as if nothing had changed. But everything had changed. From all indications it seems clear that Moorash was now desperately in love with Sophia, but forced to suppress his feelings in her presence. Elizabeth, always keenly sensitive to every nuance of her brother’s moods, cannot have felt at ease in her friend’s company: she was confused and even frightened by Edmund’s passion for another woman, perhaps hurt and jealous, secretly hoping they could all return to a more innocent time—yet even as she suffered his obsession she remained the devoted sister who longed for Edmund to be happy, to have what he wanted. Alongside her jealousy and fear, therefore, another strain sounds in the Journal: her resentment toward Sophia for refusing Edmund. She imagines (4 September 1843) the marriage of Edmund and Sophia: “And why should I not continue to live in the same house with them, loving her as a sister?” She will not have to give up Edmund: she will simply add Sophia to their ménage. What threatens this idyllic vision is not a possible hesitation on the part of Edmund or Sophia to include Elizabeth in their marriage: what threatens it is Sophia’s refusal to love and marry Edmund in the first place. But meanwhile new difficulties in friendship had arisen for both Sophia and William. Sophia, who did not return Edmund’s passion, was forced to suffer his mute gazes, his pain, his noble suppressions, his deliberate coolnesses; above all she was forced to feel Elizabeth’s distraction and unhappiness, for which Sophia felt obscurely responsible. Had she in some way caused Edmund to fall in love with her? (she asks in a letter to her friend Eunice Hamilton). She will not permit him to mistake her feelings a second time; yet she does not relish the role of cruel stony-hearted refuser, and she is aware that, in some way she cannot grasp, her refusal of Edmund has injured her relation to Elizabeth. As for William, his warm friendship for Edmund had already been severely tried during the time of his own unsuccessful suit of Elizabeth—in a sense, he had lost Elizabeth to Edmund—and he cannot have watched calmly his friend’s sudden obsession with Sophia. It must at times have seemed to William that Edmund was trying to draw all the women to his side and leave William with no one. In addition, William’s own decision not to marry, as well as his decision to live with his sister, was at least in part influenced by Edmund’s life with Elizabeth; and now his friend, by throwing himself at Sophia, was rejecting the very world of tidy domestic arrangements that he himself had brought into being and presented to William as a model.

  The Pinneys left for Boston in mid-September and did not return to the cottage on Black Lake until the late spring of 1844, when Moorash had almost certainly begun the Totentanz. On 8 August 1844, according to Elizabeth’s Journal, the four friends were walking in a small wood when Edmund grasped William by the arm and invited him to “come along to the barn,” where he still worked during the warm summer months and where the Totentanz stood on an easel among bits of straw. When the women returned to Stone Hill Cottage they found William and Edmund in animated discussion in the kitchen-parlor. “Pinney,” cried Edmund, springing up from the sofa when Elizabeth and Sophia entered the room, “you’re the best friend a raving madman ever had!” William laughed aloud, Sophia looked away with the shadow of a frown, and Elizabeth, who knew that Sophia thought Edmund a little mad, watched the scene tensely. In her Journal she noted that “E never behaves naturally before Sophia.” But the elation was genuine: William had been “overwhelmed” by the Totentanz and had urged his friend not to abandon it. In doing so he made use of a curious argument that left a strong impression on Moorash. Whether
you hate or love the painting, Pinney had argued, makes no difference: you must work on it as if the painting were a destiny, you must work on it as if you were dead.

  [22]

  DEATH SONATA

  1844–45

  Oil on canvas, 46 × 54 1/2 in.

  The Death Sonata is first mentioned by Elizabeth in April 1844, although the entry leaves it uncertain whether Moorash had actually begun the painting or was merely speaking of a possible subject. The picture was definitely in progress by October 1844; there is no mention of it again until June 1845, when he appears to have taken it up for the third or fourth time, after an interval of several months, and we last hear of it in September. Although work on the Death Sonata alternated with work on the Totentanz (and other paintings), the evidence suggests that the Totentanz was begun earlier, and served as an inspiration for or challenge to the Death Sonata, which in turn appears to have influenced the earlier painting. The technical relation of the two, although complex, is undeniable; and they are the only two surviving paintings to employ the method of “haunting” a canvas.

  The Death Sonata is in some respects a more difficult and challenging work than the Totentanz, because in it Moorash confined himself almost entirely to black. Indeed the first impression one has is of a uniform black, applied thickly with visible brushwork. The first impression yields to a second, deeper one: barely perceptible black forms are visible in or on or through the blackness. It is tempting to speak of “black on black,” but such a description would be misleading: there is properly speaking no background, but rather a thick layer of dark paint (black, purple, burnt sienna) that gradually reveals what might be called “presences.” The presences are so elusive, so deeply concealed by the very paint that reveals them, that their precise nature appears to change with different viewings; again as in the Totentanz, a deliberately uncanny effect is sought and achieved. Most responsible viewers agree that there is a presiding death-figure, a black-robed faceless figure (Havemeyer detects “an intimation of eyes”) who may or may not be seated at a piano. There is a window, with a view of black distances, and perhaps a black moon; in the presumed room, four or more other figures, flowing and shadowy, hover between the visible and the invisible. The effect of the canvas, when it is not merely exasperating, is to haunt the viewer—to draw him or her into its elusive depths with the promise of some dark revelation. The method is in certain respects more radical and mystifying than that of the contemporary Totentanz; if it seems less successful, less fully achieved, this may be due not simply to its experimental nature or its state of incompletion, but to our own failure to follow Moorash into the enigma of his art—in other words, our failure to know how to look at it.

  The fact that Moorash devoted two of his last paintings to the theme of death should not mislead us into supposing that he had intimations of his untimely end. Quite apart from the attractiveness of Death as a subject for romantic painters, poets, and composers, there were good reasons in 1844 and 1845 for Moorash to be preoccupied with mortality. He was hopelessly in love with a woman who spurned him, and who must at times have made him feel that death was the only way out. He was at the traditional middle of life (his thirty-fifth birthday fell on 16 July 1845), without a shred of worldly success; despite his aggressive self-confidence, he must sometimes have felt himself a failure. His emotional life was entirely bound up in a four-way friendship that had begun to show serious signs of strain—were they not all fools of Death, dancing merrily to the grave? In addition, the Journal makes it clear that he was racked by financial worries, and by guilt over his dependence on his sister’s slender annuity. But above all, in these years he witnessed Elizabeth’s decline into a disturbing species of illness. By late 1844 the occasional headaches of earlier years had blossomed into crippling two-day or three-day headaches, often accompanied by fits of vomiting. At the same time, Elizabeth begins to record—always very briefly—mysterious “aches” in her legs, as well as occasional attacks of “vertigo.” In September 1844 Moorash traveled with her to Boston to consult a specialist in nervous disorders; Elizabeth was placed on a rigorous diet that did not cure her headaches and led swiftly to general weakness and a series of bronchial infections, which ended soon after she returned to her old eating habits. A second specialist, a friend of William Pinney’s who traveled up from New York, prescribed pills that contained a mixture of quinine, digitalis, and morphine; the pills had no result other than to dull her pain and make her lethargic, and she began to grow dependent on the soothing effects of morphine. Moorash, who was closer to Elizabeth than to any other human being, and entirely dependent on her, cannot have failed to imagine, during her worst hours, his sister’s death and his own death-in-life afterward; and it is possible that the continual, restless turn from painting to painting in these years was a sign of his fear that, once Elizabeth was gone, there would be no reason for him to go on painting.

  [23]

  WILLIAM PINNEY

  1844–46

  Oil on canvas, 34 1/8 × 29 1/16 in.

  Contemporaneously with the Totentanz and Death Sonata, as well as with the lost paintings of 1844–46, Moorash turned to portraiture of a startling and original kind. Perhaps it is misleading to speak of these paintings as portraits, although several features of portrait painting remain; rather, they are dream-visions, intimations, soul-studies—what Elizabeth felicitously calls “inner landscapes” (Journal, 4 January 1846). The immense, ethereal figures have the look less of human creatures than of mythic beings; it is as if only by smashing what he once called “the mimetic fetters” that Moorash could release into paint the human mystery.

  Moorash appears to have begun a portrait of William Pinney in February 1844, destroyed it or set it aside for the Totentanz and later the Haunted Paintings, and returned to it briefly in December. He was at work on it again during the early summer of 1845, at a time when he had taken up the Death Sonata after an apparent break; it is unclear whether he laid it aside or proceeded with it intermittently during the next eight months, but he was at work on it once again in March 1846, before abandoning it and all other work in May for what was to prove his final painting.

  More than any other painting by Moorash, including Dornröschen, the disturbing portrait of William Pinney impresses the viewer as an illustration for a book of fairy tales. A transparent and shadowy giant bestrides a dark lake and rises into the night sky, where his streaming hair forms fiery stars and comets. He is naked and powerful; through his body we see night clouds and a glimmer of moonlit hills. But what is striking is the expression on the face: a doubting, brooding expression, a kind of suspiciousness ready to burst into anger but held in check by uncertainty. His hands are half-clenched beside his sinewy transparent thighs. The giant gives an impression of a great prisoner in chains—of power mysteriously baffled or frustrated. He radiates a peculiar aura of anguish, weakness, and danger. The figure is deliberately a creature of myth or legend, yet a comparison with the conventional chalk sketch of Pinney from 1829 (see [2]) reveals an uncanny kinship. Elizabeth writes on 4 June 1845: “My soul recognized him before my eyes did—in that terrible dream-change—a shudder passed over my body—? has seen into W’s very soul—I could not bear to look long, but turned away with a feeling of dread.”

  Although Pinney remained an unwavering admirer of Moorash’s art, and a close friend to the very end—Moorash was to say that Pinney was the only friend he ever had—nevertheless the friendship was subject in an unusual degree to unhealthy strains and tensions. Pinney had courted Elizabeth Moorash and lost; and after a struggle he had resigned himself, with a certain good-natured wistfulness, to the not unattractive role of rejected lover. When Moorash fell violently in love with Sophia Pinney in the summer of 1843, William cannot have been unaware of the almost comical repetition of a pattern, including the rejection of the suitor. But a difference quickly revealed itself. That difference was the difference in temperament between Pinney and Moorash—for Moorash was not a man to res
ign himself good-naturedly to anything. His passion for Sophia, though he was able to tamp down its outward expression for the sake of being in her company, remained strong, tormenting, and obsessive. Pinney, a sensitive student of Moorash’s moods, was therefore forced to endure the continual sense of his friend’s suppressed passion, of his suffering and disappointment—and this from the very man whom he partially blamed for his own well-mastered suffering and disappointment. Moreover, Moorash’s passion, if successful, would have meant for William the loss of his own sister, so that he was continually threatened by a kind of theft. Meanwhile his relation to Elizabeth was to undergo another change. As her illness became increasingly apparent, William drew closer to her. Often he sat with her for long afternoons while Moorash, deeply grateful to his friend, painted in the barn. But William’s new closeness to Elizabeth rekindled his old sense of grievance: in large part he came to blame Moorash for Elizabeth’s illness. For, as Sophia put it in a letter to Fanny Cornwall, if Elizabeth had been allowed to flourish as a wife and mother, to establish her own life independent of her brother’s, would she not have been far healthier than under the conditions of “an unnatural attachment”? (Sophia appears to be blind to her own life with her brother, but in fact she always insisted on a difference: Elizabeth lived permanently with Edmund in an isolated cottage, whereas Sophia joined her brother only in the warm months and otherwise lived with a maiden aunt in Boston.) But Elizabeth’s illness had a further effect. Sophia, despite her apparent insensitivity and even hostility to Moorash himself, was profoundly responsive to Elizabeth’s moods; and as Elizabeth’s headaches grew more serious, and her health more frail, Sophia herself began to experience sharp, dizzying headaches that left her prostrate for entire afternoons. William, often with two sick women to attend to, could not prevent himself from tracing the harm to his friend. At times he wondered whether his duty lay in protecting Sophia from the ailing Elizabeth; and a desire arose in him to escape from all this, to vanish somewhere into a peaceful place, even as his heart drew him to Elizabeth’s side.