Impossible Views of the World

by Lucy Ives

  “Good day,” said Rainer.

  “Hi. I just want to check something in the files,” I said, raising my ID. I have introduced myself to Rainer on several occasions in the past, but he doesn’t seem to remember me. As I have come to trust that he won’t, on the other hand, reject me, I didn’t bother with further pleasantries.

  “Yes, yes,” Rainer said. On his desk, he had a wall clock facedown and appeared to be dissecting it. He noticed my gaze. “It stopped!” He brought his hand down on the desk with a brilliant bang.

  “Too bad.”

  Rainer seemed at a loss as to how to interpret my reaction. “Well, not really,” he said, as if we had known one another all our lives. “One shouldn’t take these changes too seriously.”

  I smiled, nodded, walked by.

  As I didn’t want to engage Rainer further, I decided that I would do my best with the paper files on my own. There was a series of cabinets that seemed to be for acquisitions, and on opening one of the uppermost drawers I discovered that its contents were organized by year. After a bit of looking, I located the year 1930 and flipped around for another ten minutes, pulling files and replacing them, until I found the record for the commonplace book: “Gift of Alice Gaypoole Wynne, to be exhibited in perpetuity.” (This was something I needed to make a point of asking about, whether we did not list information of this kind in the online catalog because it encouraged copycat requests, or if there was another reason for our reticence.) There was a brief description of the physical appearance of the book and its contents, and it named the member of the American Objects’ staff overseeing the acquisition, “J. D. Weiss,” the young curator who had written to his mother regarding expeditions to pillage the decorative arts of British America. Attached to the back of the official intake record was a typescript. It was a letter.

  Dear J.,

  You will know already dear, thoughtful Alice wants you to have this. And you must do as she asks and always keep it somewhere the public eye can touch it. Things here at the “cutting edge” are grim. Don’t laugh and say I am fibbing. We’ve overplayed our hand and now receive boyish signs that even our surrender won’t be accepted. I doubt very much the club will survive and have resigned myself to it. The pen is so much mightier than the sword, and even the heart, etc., etc. Well, so it is. Alice claims there is more to tell and will write directly as she is stateside. What a mess. I do very sincerely wish the very, very best to you and to as much of your great institution as my modest shout from down here in the next county may reach. We are relying on you, even as I remain

  Your friend,

  M.

  There it was. This must be Mabel Styke, writing on her employer’s behalf. She was likable, odd. And judging from the letter, if I was reading its somewhat coded terms correctly, the Elysia Club had not quite met its end. And “boyish signs” must, for example, refer to Otto “Boy” Pastt’s retaliations against Alice. The letter was undated, but the intake form itself gave me “Feb. 2, 1930,” as the day of the acquisition. I’d need to look later for a subsequent acquisition, perhaps including paintings collected by the club.

  I began pulling files and paging furiously through. I ventured into the rest of February, March, April, May, June, July, and, then, in that month least hospitable to work, I found something. There was a series of forms all dated the same day, “Aug. 2, 1930.” There must have been at least fifty of them. They appeared to have been either very hastily or very cautiously filled out. Perhaps it was some combination of the two. In the space for description of the item, the administrator in question had seen fit to include only the phrase “Recent Americana.” Where the name of the donor should be inscribed the form read “Generous Benefactor.” J. D. Weiss was again the curator in charge. I flipped through the pages and was relieved to find at the bottom of the last a note advising me to “See addendum for detailed account of the gift (letter).” I lifted the page, ready to discover the document that would explain to me what this history was that I was at once ignorant of and did not know how to look for. The next page was simply another intake form, for a Peruvian necklace, circa 200 to 600 A.D. I flipped some more, attempting not to become desperate. I discovered additional intake forms. There was nothing else included in the folder.

  I stood there. The air around my eyes felt thick, possibly it was visible. I wasn’t sure what I could look at; I was experiencing that level of frustration. These fucking folders!

  I was thinking something else, and I wasn’t sure if I could possibly be right. It didn’t make any sense, but possibly it made the only kind of sense I’d lately come to know, as in, it could involve publicly punching a man in the jewels and then walking nonchalantly away. I mean, I hoped it wouldn’t involve publicly punching anyone else and/or proximity to additional genitals. I shook my bag and listened to the jingle of Paul Coral’s keys.

  I replaced the files as quickly and as accurately, with respect to date, as I could. In 1930 a gift to the museum had been improperly recorded, and the letter detailing this acquisition was lacking. And though I knew it was a species of magical thinking, I couldn’t help suspecting that Paul might have been the one who had carried it away.

  On my way back upstairs, I rummaged, via my phone, through old emails from my museum account. I knew there was one in which a department emerita, one Celeste Hardy, offered to send any takers a galley of her forthcoming book on children’s portraiture in Virginia before the nineteenth century. Paul had accidentally replied all.

  I remembered this because of his kindness and the elegance of his note. It wasn’t often you saw a straight man offer such earnest interest in a mediocre intellectual project undertaken by a woman. I mean, he had written to Celeste purely to be supportive, and not because this support constituted some sort of act of charity or penance or step in a course of professional advancement, either. At the time, I was still very new in the office, and this message had kind of blown my hair back. It probably seems weird, and it is very hard to describe in retrospect, but he was just so guilelessly humane. It was as if, in reading this personal note, out of nowhere, in the midst of light administrative drudgery, I had come upon a piece of unexhausted time.

  But more relevant to my current activities was the fact that in this email, directed to all and sundry of American Objects, Paul had seen fit to include a mailing address that was not his office coordinates. And so I knew, as the saying goes, where he lived.

  [ 20 ]

  I had one further errand for the day. I wanted to see what I could find out about Otto “Boy,” who I assumed was one of the Elysia Club’s earliest proponents and most passionate active members and, later, a rather foul antagonist. Did he even remind me a little of Whit? Of Fred? I tried to imagine what a person with such a nickname would be like. I wasn’t sure if the supposed individual I came up with was the type of person I’d want to be alone around. Or, maybe he was the type of person one wanted to be around, which is to say, alone with, like, constantly and exclusively.

  He did not, as it turned out, have a Wikipedia entry. Such, I guess, can be the fate of those who do not ally themselves appropriately with the appropriate institutions. A platform aggregating and synthesizing the content of various archives along with metadata drawn from globecat.org told me the following, under “Biographical notes”:

  Otto Pastt (1879 [1880?]–1960) was an art critic, lecturer, sculptor, and administrator from Buffalo, N.Y.

  Pastt served as art critic of the New York Saturday Post, 1911–1917; The Journal of the Arts, 1918–1929; editor of The Call, 1931–1933; and lecturer at the Art Students League. In 1933, he was made technical director of the first, but short-lived, New Deal art program, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), established to provide work for artists in the ornamentation of nonfederal buildings, and served under Ed Moran until its activities were suspended in 1934. He subsequently transferred, along with Moran, to the U.S. Treasury Department of Painting and Sculpture (later termed the Section of Fine Arts), which from the
early 1930s on administered the funding for competitive government commissions and grants for single artists, to decorate buildings and other federally maintained spaces. At the Section, he acted as sub deputy advisor, and as the editor of the Section’s Arts Bulletin. Pastt subsequently entered the U.S. Treasury Department’s Division of War Finance. Here he was in charge of organizing exhibitions and overseeing the design of posters by so-called “combat artists,” to stimulate the sale of war bonds. He was the author of a number of pamphlets and articles on American art and architecture, notably “The Concept of Picture Making” and “Views of Federal Buildings, an Illustrated Record.”

  From the description of the Otto Pastt papers, 1900–1950. (Unknown). GlobeCat record id: 234193907

  There was a link to an archival collection at the right, “Pastt, Otto, 1880–1960. Otto Pastt papers, 1840–1967, bulk 1900–1960. Unknown (ISIL: DSI-AAA).” I followed the link, which led me to a GlobeCat page with an error message: “The page you tried was not found. You may have used an outdated link or may have typed the address (URL) incorrectly.” Still, there were a lot of ledes within the biographical text. I tried copying half of it and pasting it into Google in quotes, just to see if there might be a page in existence at a different address. There was no such page, although I did come upon a link to a site called “Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America.” Here again, after clicking through, I landed in aporia: “Error: 22—Unknown error.”

  I sighed. I reread Boy Pastt’s biography. I was interested in The Call. Either it had enjoyed a very brief run, or Boy a brief tenure. Perhaps both. Subsequently Mr. Pastt had retreated, or maybe advanced (?), into the minutiae of federal administration. I directed my browser to globecat.org and entered search terms for the magazine. Its nondescript two-word title did not inspire confidence as far as database research was concerned, and, sure enough, I was not greeted with results that would help me. This was the thing with minor publications, minor figures. You needed text with real specificity to discover them online, but then the likely scenario was that your specific piece of text, whether title or passage, hadn’t been digitized or wasn’t cited in other materials, and much of what you otherwise had to go on would be buried by other, more canonical instances of similar terms. I mean, if you had given me three months to dig up information on Mr. Pastt, then, sure. I would have gone in person to Washington and read his records. But even then, when it came to the materials most useful to me, his earlier career before he became a full-fledged bureaucrat, I would have had only hints, correspondences, not the genuine article.

  I wasn’t being particularly methodical. But as of this afternoon on the museum steps, I had one man down, so to speak, and there was new space and new time in the mental landscape pertaining to yours truly. I decided to make a more aggressive effort. I steeled myself against disappointment. To my original search terms I now added “Pastt, Otto” and the word “Elysia.” I tabbed over to activate the search box, shut my eyes, and hit RETURN. I waited.

  When I opened my eyes again there were two results. One was an irrelevant (though fascinating, I am sure) DVD from 1998 regarding selfled wine tours and the storied notion of terroir, but the other was an entry for The Call, and clicking through I was elated to learn that the museum’s library possessed all six issues on microfiche. In fact, this was the only location within New York City that had relevant holdings. The University of Buffalo owned hard copies.

  I noted the call number and threw myself down to the library like I had hollow bones.

  —

  IT WAS GETTING TO BE late in the day, and the resident fellow was not excited about being forthcoming. “Mondays are really the day for microfiche,” Dani, who was a girl, said. “M for M, but with a different meaning.”

  I tried to get her to understand that we were talking about, at most, a single box, like twelve envelopes, nothing.

  She said, “Please don’t lie to me, Stella. Do you know how to use the machine?”

  “Yes,” I lied. I have seldom needed to access microfiche or film in my research. Again, because of the way in which digitization has tended to work across time periods, more of what I have needed was available to me online or via university digitization initiatives. The twentieth century is either so well known to us that its archives seem remote digitally, or the nineteenth is a time we’ve already so much forgotten that what’s to hand seems exhaustive. But this may have more to do with how grants have been disbursed than anything else, i.e., history is still just money talking.

  “Great, because I don’t have time to show you right now.” Dani was just standing there, expectant. “Yes?”

  “Don’t you have to go get the, um, fiches?”

  “Oh, no. I do not do that.” She pointed to an adjoining room/closet. “Help yourself. And, seriously, if you have any problems, you know what to do.”

  “Call you?” I hopefully offered.

  “No, the opposite of that. Or, I mean, just don’t have any problems. You can’t have any problems, because I can’t help you right now because of the reshelving project.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Oh, and we are closing in thirty minutes.”

  “Thank you,” I repeated. “Your hair looks nice.”

  “Stop,” Dani said. “I know you don’t know how to use the machine.”

  “I definitely know how to use the machine.”

  “You definitely do not.”

  “I’m off,” I said, “to go use the machine I used to use all the time in alternate libraries you never saw me at using the machine because you didn’t know me then or anything about my use of the machine!”

  Dani, whose hair I had complimented and which was like a pewter cap, like hoary silk, like something she had gotten done professionally at terrifying cost, and had put on a card and forgotten about, had already started doing something else.

  I pulled my face back together and strode into the task.

  It wasn’t that hard to find the fiches neatly slotted in their box. As Dani had foretold, my troubles began at the crucial moment at which I had to cause the fiches, these pieces of film, to interact with a desktop device that was something like what one would imagine a photographic enlarger could become, if a feature of the Starship Enterprise. It was fifty pounds of beige plastic, lenses, gears, and lightbulbs, and when I at last discovered its “on” switch, it roared to life with an enthusiasm that suggested the presence of copious additional hardware, if not an outboard motor. Next to the machine sat an elderly PC whose sole task it was to provide visual proof of the existence of files generated by the machine, and to allow the user to convey said files to his or her email account. The PC regarded me blankly. I ignored it. I began fussing with the mechanical parts that seemed most likely to be interested in admitting my fiche. After a few attempts, and the permanent corruption of one corner of a fiche (one and a half pages of The Call would, alas, never be legible at this library again), I got something up on the screen. Knob adjustment was now the way forward. The page came at last into eye-stabbing focus.

  Do not doubt that you hold in your hands THE CALL: Volume one, Number one; blazing a path into a super-modern world, a world willfully turned against weak tradition and assured in its own ability to imagine, draft, and build in and for the future, without recourse to a confessedly incompetent past. Once we might have said, “These are the days when the ivory of time-worn experience is being split into shards for inlay in some frivolous comb or thrown carelessly to the junkman. For a new golden age is under way—in ethics, in government, in lifestyle, and in the arts—an age gleaming beyond the boilingest inundation to tarnish its enamel. Even if, in matter and form, the age proves, in due time, to be but of golden oak: for the moment it glitters,—and it is yellow.” Now we have lived enough to know that we hold in our hands not gold but sapling branches. They are humble but vital, and can bend. The era progresses apace, sometimes uncertain in her steps, since still younger than she wants to be, though s
he is now wiser by far. These are times for the arts, when the arts must lead the charge, calling out, “Onward, friends! Here lies the way to the future!”

  This peculiar arabesque apparently constituted the “Editor’s Note” for the first issue. It was signed “The Boy.” Talk about your mixed metaphors. The thing made my teeth hurt.

  I began skimming, scrolling, reading bits of articles, removing and introducing fiche after fiche, trying to imagine who the hell the intended audience for this fascist nonsense might have been. But more than this, I wanted to find my prize. The catalog had told me that it must be in here. I was also racing against the clock. Would that Rainer might spontaneously ascend from his dungeon to break all of the timepieces in sight …

  Then, there it was. It was just a little piece of text, centered within a space normally, I guessed, reserved for advertisements.

  THE ELYSIA CLUB

  We take insufferable pride in the everywomen we have decided we indubitably are.

  This was the first notice. It appeared in the second issue of the magazine. Then, in the third issue: