Here, to Louis Hill’s dreamy house, in the spring of our senior year in high school, our graduating class was sent for a weekend retreat. Thirty-two of us—and room for everyone. The nuns who ran the place were real nuns (we kept assuring ourselves) but they didn’t wear habits. They had hair. This was very strange in 1964. The Mother Superior, an elegant woman who wore a timeless tweed suit and pumps, a strand of pearls at the neck, had a sitting room walled with books that she allowed me to visit. “You write?” she said. She, too, wrote, she confessed. Poetry.
The retreat, from Friday afternoon until after Mass on Sunday morning, was supposed to be conducted in silence. At night there was much padding around from room to room, of course, sharing Hershey bars and clasping pillows to our faces to stifle shrieks of laughter. It was a glorified sleepover.
But the silence was there, wafting over us, hours at a time in the beautiful pastel house. There was something thrilling about not being allowed to talk, walking down the generous white curving staircase from the bedrooms to the breakfast room, feeling like the chatelaine of the place. In between the retreat “conferences,” inspirational talks given by a retreat director alleged by the nuns to have rapport with young people, we were encouraged to find a quiet place to sit—to read or pray or think. Given these three choices, I naturally chose to read. No one seems to have thought Jane Eyre strange retreat reading. In my romantic Catholic upbringing the line between literature and religion was always airily imprecise.
I planned to make my private place the little dark library that the pearl-wearing Mother Superior had opened with a key, telling me I could use it, apparently offering choice real estate to a sister poet. But on Saturday morning I came downstairs early and made a wrong turn (a house big enough to get lost in!). I found myself in a rounded room, circled with curved windows. This was the sunroom visible from my father’s greenhouse. The big glassy room, round as a bowl, took in east and south. The light streamed softly in. The room seemed cantilevered over the bluff above the West Seventh flats where I had been born. On the tile floor upholstered chairs had been arranged, along with a fainting couch covered in old chintz, masses of unnecessary pillows upon it. A low table with a vase of flowers was placed by the curved windows. It was the room of my dreams, a transparent bowl to hold me like a contented fish in the curved aquarium of its glass. A room meant for reading, the light gently impressing itself, the deep quiet of a great house full of ease and daydream.
The Mother Superior had said the night before that this had been the home of an “artistic family.” “I think you can see that,” she said, looking around the moss-colored room where she kept her books. Or were they the books of the artistic family? I wasn’t sure.
She asked if I wanted to be a writer. Oh, I did.
Well, that was good because I had come to the house of an artist. In fact, a Renaissance man—he composed music, wrote poetry, he painted pictures. And (she saved this for last) he had won an Academy Award. The movies. She paused to allow this glamour to shiver through me.
He had grown up in this house, she said. The grandson of James J. Hill. But of course he no longer lived here—I think we both understood that such a person, a painter, a composer, the winner of an Academy Award, could not live in St. Paul. He had to be elsewhere. New York, Hollywood. No, she said, he lived in the south of France.
Ah, better than Hollywood. More literary, more artistic, a place even more hallowed than the Holy City of New York, shrine of all my usual future imaginings, bred of dust jacket author photos: She lives in New York. . . . He divides his time between New York and Cape Cod. . . .
“The south of France” was not simply a location as New York finally was. The south of France was a condition, the unreal estate of romantic ex-pat dreams. It was an indistinct yet brilliant region, a narrow band of possibility laid out like a gold filament, a precious necklace cast on the smooth flesh of beaches ancient even to the Romans, its dreamy coast punctuated by the habitations of my future arty saints whose lives and desires I already intuited—Matisse and Fitzgerald, and the girl writer I came to adore, Katherine Mansfield, she of the cool prose style and early death.
And now, it turned out, this glamorous region was home, as well, to Jerome Hill, a homeboy like Fitzgerald. I collected such local models of artistic escape. And though Hill was a lesser light in the pantheon, still he intrigued me, maybe because he seemed to have picked up the gauntlet Fitzgerald threw down, the bitter grudge against the leisure class. For Jerome Hill was crazy rich, rich the way Fitzgerald liked his heroes to be, a man who could really be imagined to possess a diamond as big as the Ritz. Instead, he had trotted off to the south of France and become an artist, and somehow got himself an Academy Award. Wealth and achievement. Fitzgerald had not, perhaps, counted on that combination.
Alone in the Louis Hill sunroom in the early morning, basking in silence, I opened my novel, and read about the fierce English orphan girl as I sat in the house of the son of the artistic family. I sank into the big flowers of the chintz-covered fainting couch and read about poverty, but inwardly I glittered (a Fitzgerald word) with grandeur. Because I understood long before the novel had it worked out, that Jane Eyre would not be a penniless spinster, would not teach forever in a threadbare gown in a miserable charity school. I knew she would, somehow, ascend.
But I also knew dimly, sometimes with a sharp sting, that I didn’t belong in the splendor I was borrowing in this lovely room, this gigantic house. I didn’t even belong in my fancy girls-school where the nuns taught us how to use fish forks. It was a fluke, bred of my parents’ furious belief in education and a great aunt’s influence with the nuns that I was enrolled with the daughters of the city’s Catholic rich to begin with. Fitzgerald (whose mother had attended the same school in her day) knew this sensation and the odd, viral touchiness with which it attacks the soul. Fitzgerald admitted he “would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, toward the leisure class—not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smoldering hatred of a peasant.” The romantic “winter dreams” of Fitzgerald’s ruinously ambitious working-class hero Dexter Green to possess beauty and ease in the person of the careless Judy Jones were doomed even as his outward success displaced them and he became rich and successful.
But what of the winter dreams of the rich, those who supposedly already have it all? The hardscrabble surface of raw ambition is the poor man’s gold, a creative freehold. Creativity and a thirst for fame can make a king out of a poor boy. But how does the rich man pass through the eye of the needle, how does he feel the protean surge, working as Matisse did from youth—“like a drunken brute trying to kick the door down”—if all the doors are already wide open. Is he destined only to collect, never to create?
What great fortune, instead, living off the reservoir of Depression era pride as my florist father did, happily attesting to that golden age when, as he put it, nobody had anything, not anything. He always said this as if it were evidence of his greatest, most enduring wealth. My inheritance.
JEROME HILL, grandson of the Empire Builder, second son of Louis Hill (also a railroad man, patron of the arts, passionate amateur photographer), was born in this lovely house in 1905, nearly nine years after Scott Fitzgerald was born in a lesser house on a lesser street in the same neighborhood. Jerome Hill graduated from Yale with a music major, and from the late twenties made his main residence in Cassis, a fishing village along the same stretch of the Mediterranean as Matisse’s wild beast territory in Collioure. Cassis was also the summer home for migrating members of the Bloomsbury set, especially the painters. Vanessa Bell leased a house and painting studio there between the two wars, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf, after staying in a hotel in town, almost leased a property as well before thinking better of such a commitment. Katherine Mansfield, too, had come to Cassis, in one of her first of many attempts to find a home in the sun along the Mediterranean coast.
Were it not for the Academy Award for best documentary film (for a document
ary portrait of Albert Schweitzer), Hill might be dismissed as a gifted dilettante. That would be a mistake. Jerome Hill wasn’t exactly a dilettante. He was that rare bird—a free artist. Free because of wealth, because of temperament, circumstance, the mixed bag of nature and nurture it is impossible to prize apart into an explanation of personality and accomplishment. Another St. Paul escapee, gone across the sea to find not only the sun but the life of art.
Recognized as an artist from childhood, encouraged and directed in his talent from his earliest years by his “artistic family,” Hill’s painting does suggest the amiability of an ardent student. The canvases, bedazzled with sparkling color, the fizzle of sea air about them, mark him as a diligent retracer of the light-obsessed generations of French painters dating from the Impressionists. They especially connect him to Matisse who gathered with his friends—Derain, Vlaminck—on the bright coast of the Mediterranean to paint their wild-beast paintings during the very year of Jerome Hill’s birth in frozen Minnesota.
Hill’s real kinship, which shows up in his films, was not to any art form but to the avant-garde, that corner of modern art that resolutely retains the rights of the sandbox, of childhood games and handmade objects. The word experimental is usually associated with avant-garde artists as if they constituted art’s pure science, the lab for the rest of creative endeavor, a way station for future advances in form, or investigations in the opposite direction, as if digging for buried shards like archaeologists. But there is another way of looking at the place of the avant-garde: its artists can refuse to serve either the future or the traditions of the past, but pledge themselves radically to elemental gestures of human expression—Yoko Ono’s primal screams, the silences of John Cage.
Jerome Hill, so apparently obedient to the best efforts and projects of the past in his painting, found in movie work a canvas free of the past’s instructions and greatness. Hill steered clear of Hollywood, drawn to documentary not because he favored nonfiction but because it allowed him freedom from the studios, the unions, the whole professional moviemaking apparatus. The rich man would enter the kingdom of film by choosing the poor man’s form—practically the humility of the home movie. He refused, apparently instinctively, to work on feature films, the great collaborative form of the twentieth century—collaborative in part because it is the most expensive art form in the history of human expression, at least as it is practiced in America. Jerome Hill held, instead, to the chamber work of independent filmmaking, to portraiture, and finally, in his last and best attempt, to autobiography, that most home-brewed of genres.
“The me that am . . . but never will be again. Hold on to a single moment, even for a second, and it already belongs to the past.” With this prosaic observation, spoken in an attractively laconic voice, Jerome Hill begins his narration of his autobiographical film, Film Portrait. The voice-over accompanies a sequence of Hill shaving. The ordinariness of this routine activity and the unremarkable, if philosophical, voice-over perfectly represent his style: casual, benignly wry, cheerfully aristocratic, and modest. This is a man who can spend many frames on close-ups of his own face and convey not intimacy but an almost scientific, or at least objective, detachment.
At the time, Jerome Hill was in his midsixties, and although Film Portrait was to be his last film, apparently he didn’t yet know about the cancer that would end his life late in 1971. The film won the 1972 London Film Festival award for best documentary.
Jerome Hill belonged to the first generation of moviegoers, and the prevailing theme of Film Portrait (and the point of its title) is that he and the movies were born at the same moment and, in his view, grew up together. For him, movies were forever new, young, experimental. It was in their nature to be provisional and independent, a matter of one person with a magic box catching light, seeing the world afresh. They were not a “production.”
Jerome Hill is still referred to by those who knew him as a Renaissance man, just as the Mother Superior of my senior retreat invoked him as we sat in what I now realize, from scenes in Film Portrait, must have been his mother’s sitting room. He had many gifts, “almost too many,” his friend Otto Lang says in The Man in the Portrait, a film eulogy for Hill made shortly after his death. With his degree in music composition from Yale, he wrote music throughout his life, including the score for Film Portrait—impressionistic, French in the manner of Satie and “Les Six” composers like Poulenc. Though he was best known professionally as a filmmaker, he thought of himself, perhaps primarily, as an artist and devoted himself steadfastly to painting. He also wrote poetry. And he gave away money.
He had a lot of it to give. His childhood was positively Nabokovian in its splendor, with a background not simply of wealth, but of taste, art, thoughtful travel, and long dreamy days. Besides a lively family life in the elegant Summit Avenue house, there were trips to France (he was not simply bilingual, but bicultural practically from birth, the son of a Francophile mother), long train rides west into Indian country, summers riding horses at North Oaks, the immense family farm north of St. Paul.
It was a privileged, liberal American childhood with a late—Russian Empire tang. It seems to have been a life destined by birth and sensibility for art. “Good,” the Empire Builder is reported to have said, observing his three little grandsons, “one for the railroad, one for the bank, one for the arts,” as if the whole of life arranged itself tidily into just these categories.
When Jerome Hill turns to “the me that was” in Film Portrait, he turns not to himself but, as if instinctively, to time itself. “1905,” he says in his dry, faintly amused voice. “More curious than glorious, the year of my birth.” The crammed interiors of the age appear festooned with aspidistras and antimacassars. In an invitation to shared judgment, he remarks, “Was there ever a period more ugly?” A nonchalant comment, but it establishes an authority for his voice, and therefore for his story: a man of unquestioned aesthetic judgment is running this life, this movie. “Thank God for Louis Tiffany,” he says, and the camera surveys a series of Tiffany glass lamp shades and windows glowing and manipulated by the painterly hand of Hill’s editing.
He plays the high card of his family wealth and prominence early, with characteristic ease. “My grandfather,” he acknowledges as a portrait of the steely old man appears. And then adds casually, “He was in the railroad business.” Hill isn’t coy, any more than he is confessional. He mentions the family’s Scotch-Irish immigration to Canada, and then, in a single sentence, places his family in a world that explains his background: “They had, in one immense leap, become important people.” Not rich, not successful—important.
I relished that line when I first saw Film Portrait in my twenties, about the same time I saw Matisse’s Woman Before an Aquarium. It was a movie so different from my notion of what a movie was—and showing pictures of St. Paul—that I was captivated. Film Portrait conveyed a familiarity that had nothing to do with personal revelation, but relied on the unexpected intimacy of the narrator’s voice. I hardly understood that this was “an experimental film.”
This was simply the first time a movie had ever come to me like a personal letter, as direct and unmediated an utterance as poetry, one human being to another—or to himself—musing. I did not expect movies to speak directly to me or to speak somehow to themselves as books did, as poems did. Movies were immense seductions, grand and imposing productions—the word was a movie word, and apt. Didn’t everyone love the movies? But they were not the human voice, alone and free, telling its bit of life news to a single listener in the way that a book did. There was something large and communal about movies. It was right that they were on “the big screen”: they were writ too large for anything but a wall.
But here was a movie that belonged to a modest, intimate world. A poor man’s movie. It did not speak solely through pictures and dialogue like feature films (which, to me, were “real movies”). Nor was this man speaking in the godly style of documentary as “a narrator,” nor in the anonymous inf
ormation-giving voice-overs of certain old-fashioned feature films, usually adaptations from classic novels.
Besides, I knew Jerome Hill spoke the truth: in St. Paul, the Hills were important. Indeed, they were important beyond St. Paul, but somehow it was a St. Paul way of looking at things, of saying things. On the one hand eliding any crude reference to money, on the other inflating the condition of wealth with magnificence, moving a half step toward divinity. A very F. Scott Fitzgerald way of seeing things—which is itself a very St. Paul way of seeing things. Hill’s was a real voice, speaking from a life, not a narration.
And I was listening to a memoir, the genre that inhabits a fascinatingly indeterminate narrative space between fiction and documentary. As it refines its point of view, lavishing itself on the curious habits of personal consciousness, memoir achieves a rare detachment even as it enters more deeply into the revelation of individual consciousness. Its greatest intimacy (the display of perception) paradoxically reveals its essential impersonality. It wishes to see the world, not itself. Hill’s real subject, like Matisse’s, was individual perception: not simply what was seen, but how seeing was experienced. How it “conveyed all one’s emotions,” as Matisse put it.
It didn’t concern me that Jerome Hill wasn’t telling his secrets, that I wasn’t getting the scoop. Some years after I first saw Film Portrait, when I learned that Hill was gay, I wondered whether he had felt constrained from allowing that fact to surface in the film, whether he had wanted to speak of it. But he seemed so intent on his lifelong love affair with film as the story he was telling in the film that I didn’t feel cheated that he had suppressed or avoided the subject. (Though the case for conscious suppression is right in the film: in his visual list of possible selves, he displays a photo of himself with Brigitte Bardot, very intime on the Côte d’Azur where he had his main residence in Cassis. Without other information, the photo steers the viewer naturally to assume this is one possible scenario he would relish living more fully.) Who can say? Hill made his movie in 1971, a time already very distant.
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