What I suppose I shall never fathom, no matter how deeply I dive into the subaqueous caverns of the past, is the exact balance between benefit and detriment that I derived as a painter from my juvenile acquaintance with Eric Stair. If it be true that his example deflected me from the paths of banking or law, it may also be the case that, discerning early how much he could accomplish in the field of the abstract, I became too fearful of competing with him there. Maybe I slammed that door prematurely. Maybe I was too anxious, in confining my art to portraiture, to hide away in a world where Eric would never seek to follow or humiliate me.
And there is another thing. I can face it now I am growing old. Without what happened at that school might I not have painted the nude? When I cast my inner eye over the long gallery of my portraits, it strikes me how covered up the figures are, how draped and buttoned and tucked in, how expensively and colorfully added to, how bolstered and propped! Even my ladies in evening dress seem to reveal to me, in their alabaster arms and necks, in the exposed portions of their breasts and shoulders, how much more they are hiding from intrusive eyes. It has been said of Philippe de Champaigne that, being obliged as a strict Jansenist to eschew the flesh, he limited himself to ecclesiastical or judiciary subjects where all but the face and hands could be enveloped in voluminous robes, white or black or scarlet red. The peak of his great art was in the portrait of Cardinal Richelieu, where the sweeping cassock expresses the power and energy of the ruthless statesman. I have sometimes in preliminary sketches attempted to convey the character of my sitter in the suit or dress alone, as a kind of reverse nude. But that is as near as I ever come to it.
At any rate, all I can do is write down the facts, at least as they appear to me, and see if some kind of answer can be deduced from them.
***
I grew up with a feeling of “not belonging.” Some people claim that this has become so common a social phenomenon that the rare state is that of the child who feels himself a square peg in a square hole, but in my case the psychosis may have been intensified by my being the youngest, smallest and most subdued of a clan of Abercrombies who were generally large and noisy, and by my own uneasy suspicion that even if by some trick of fate I should become a true Abercrombie, I’d still be a fraud. For I cannot recall a time when my family did not seem to be trying to look brighter and funnier and richer and more fashionable than they were. Or was that true of everybody in the years of the Great Depression?
Mother dominated us all, as a famous old actress will dominate the stage. She was plump and rackety and full of high spirits, and she adored company. Her rich auburn hair, which surprisingly was not dyed, rose in a high curly pile over a round powdered face with small features and popping black eyes. Mother was thoroughly unintellectual and unartistic; she read nothing but detective fiction, and she never tired of cards or gossip. What saved her from being banal was the quality of her affections; she loved people, and she loved to laugh with them and at them. She was the presiding spirit of the summer colony in Southampton; a watering place was her natural milieu. She would amble down the sand to the Beach Club, close to our shapeless, weatherbeaten shingle pile on the dunes, and then back; these two sites made up her summer universe, except, of course, for the houses in which she habitually dined. Poor Mother! When the Depression obliged us to give up the brownstone in Manhattan, and she had to spend the winter months gazing out on the tumbling gray Atlantic, it was a hardship indeed. But her spirits never flagged. She always found just enough “natives” for her daily game of bridge.
It sometimes seemed to me, because my siblings so strongly favored Mother, that I should have inherited some of Father’s traits, but I could never really believe this to be the case. Father did not seem to have many traits to bequeath; his function must have been completed when the queen bee had been fertilized. Yet he was not subservient to Mother. He acted more like an old and familiar employee, a kind of trusted but peppery superintendent whose management of the household was never challenged. Father was bald and stooping; he would gaze at us with watery eyes that seemed to anticipate nothing but irrational conduct that it would be his tedious task to clean up after. His other children took him entirely for granted; only I made an effort to establish a relationship with him, and here I failed utterly. When I would ask him questions about his boyhood and the problems of growing up, he would look at me as if I had inquired as to the whereabouts of the washroom. Human intimacy must have struck him as a total irrelevance.
I realize now, looking back, that some of my sense of our being on the fringe of society may have been justified. We were as “old” as many other families, but we were a good deal poorer than the average in the world to which we clung. Father, so far as I could make out, had nothing and did nothing, other than to sell an occasional insurance policy, and Mother’s trust fund was woefully inadequate to pay the bills with which she was constantly dunned. Of course, our state was a common one in the Depression, but when club dues and school tuitions were left unpaid while Mother continued to entertain and gamble, she and Father came in for some harsh criticism. And I was early assailed by the uncomfortable feeling that, because I was plain and unathletic, I could not claim the partial exemption from social contempt that my exuberant, party-loving older siblings, no doubt unfairly, achieved. I deemed myself hopelessly encased in the parental tackiness.
There seemed, at any rate, just enough cash (plus a partial scholarship) to send me to St. Lawrence’s, and I entered that school with a sense of profound relief. Here, I hoped, I would not stand out as the child of my parents; I would be on my own. The whole tightly organized academy, with its ringing bells and hurrying boys, with everything happening at exactly the time it was supposed to happen, struck me from the start as a welcome proof that a world existed outside the papier-mache one of the Abercrombies, a “real” world, properly possessed of order and neatness, of heaven and hell. I found absolution in its regularity and blessing in its very sternness, and I became an overnight convert to the conservative social values that it enshrined. Even today, when I visit the school and behold the tall dark Gothic tower of the school chapel rise over the trees as I approach it from the railway station, I feel that actuality, even if it be a rather grim one, is taking the place of illusion.
St. Lawrence’s was considered architecturally a handsome school. Some four hundred boys slept and worked and exercised in long Tudor buildings of purple brick picturesquely situated along a creek that wound its snakelike way through the landscaped grounds. Sometimes, particularly in spring, the place seemed to exude a rich, throat-filling emotion, but in winter, under rapidly dirtying snow and a hard pale sky, it took on a somber gloom, and the narrow mullioned windows put me in mind of Tudor prisons, of Tudor discipline, of pale, tight-lipped Holbein victims and torturers, of the ax and stake. Emotion was never light at St. Lawrence’s; life was always earnest. I thought of Christ, as the near-mystic headmaster evoked him, the Christ of the passion, whose nails and thorns were far more than symbols, an elongated tortured gray body hideously twisted on the cross and illuminated by streaks of lightning against a weird, flickering El Greco background.
There was some hazing in the first year, but being small and inconspicuous and having learned early the art of protective coloration, I passed largely unnoticed and was able to make my early peace with the school. I became fascinated with the figure of the headmaster, Mr. Widdell, a tall, bony, balding, emaciated man, himself a bit of an El Greco, who preached sermons with such intense zeal that he alarmed some of the parents. It began to seem to me, listening to him, awestruck, on Sunday mornings, that he was the nearest thing to God I should ever experience, that for me it would be enough if he were God. And I righdy inferred that in his capacity of deity, as opposed to that of a busy and overtaxed headmaster, he would have as much interest in the one as in the many, that his love (yes, his love!) could include me as well as the faculty, the student body, the harassed Irish maidservants and the grave, slow-moving old men who to
ok care of the grounds and were known to the boys as the “sons of rest.” I had the nerve, or the inspiration, to take my doubts to Mr. Widdell himself.
“Yes, Jamie, of course, you can ask me any question you like. That is what I am here for.”
I sat, a huddled little bundle of nothing, across the great square desk from the aquiline nose, those huge, glassy eyes. Between us was the white stainless blotter of his total attention.
“It is the commandment about honoring my father and mother, sir. I wonder if I can honestly say that what I feel for them is honor.” Mr. Widdell’s gravity did not seem to deepen at this, and my confidence grew with this further assurance of omniscience. “Let me ask you just one thing, Jamie. Do you love your father and mother?”
“I love my mother, sir. My father doesn’t seem to have much to do with love.”
“But you have no aversion to him?”
“Oh, none, sir.”
“Well, then, your case may not be as bad as you fear. Love of one parent is a good start. Can you tell me why it is that you feel you cannot honor them?”
“It does not seem to me, sir, that they lead lives that I can honor. My father is occupied with very small things, like winding clocks and seeing the oil is changed in the car. And my mother plays cards and gossips. I mean, sir, that is all she does.”
“But the commandment is not to honor their conduct, Jamie. It is to honor them.”
“No matter what they do?”
“No matter what they do.”
“Even if they’re thieves and murderers?”
There was a gleam of something like a smile in those glistening eyes. “Hadn’t we better wait till we get to it before crossing that bridge?” The total gravity, however, soon reestablished itself. “Seriously, my boy, you must consider that God expects of his children only what they can give and only in the way they can give it. Your father, in his daily maintenance of the household, and your mother, in the cheer that she imparts to others, may be doing more for God than you suspect. In any event, it is not for you to judge them. And not judging them, you will find that you can and indeed will honor them.”
I left the presence on wings of elation. How easily did he dispose of my nagging problems! And, on his side, feeling that he had done something for me, the great man warmed to me. He always greeted me now, when we passed on campus, and I was on several occasions honored with the much coveted invitation to breakfast at the headmaster’s house. I worshiped Mr. Widdell. It was as if I had died and gone to a paradise where everything fell into its proper place. God ruled us with an awesome benevolence, and under his sway all was for the best. Resentments and harsh criticisms of one’s family were as unnecessary as they were presumptuous. How did one know that they, too, were not serving to the best of their capacity? Beyond the walls of the school lay a nation throttled in depression, but what did these few minutes of misery matter in the blaze of eternity? I learned from the headmaster that although it is our bounden duty to alleviate the sufferings of the human body, our first concern must always be with the soul. Perhaps too hastily I found myself willing to render unto Caesar just about anything Caesar claimed was his. I did not then understand that Mr. Widdell was different from me in that he had something of the saint in him and that to those who were less than saints his doctrine had pitfalls.
I had drawn pictures since I was a child, and now I took to sketching in earnest. I drew the chapel, the altar, the reredos; I made copies of the stained glass windows and illustrated biblical stories. Some of my things were reproduced in the school magazine, and I felt very holy indeed. I must have been quite unbearable.
It was in the fall of my fifth form and next-to-last year that Eric Stair, then aged twenty-five, joined the faculty of St. Lawrence’s. He was a Canadian, from Toronto, an artist who had come down to New York to work on a mural in a bank, the contract for which had been canceled for lack of funds. Jobless and penniless, he had been recommended by the bank president, a St. Lawrence graduate, to fill a vacancy in the school’s history department. He certainly did not seem the type for a New England prep school; he was short, heavyset and muscular, with a craggy face, small, suspicious, staring eyes and thick, messy red hair. There was a rumor that Mr. Widdell had asked him if he was willing to attend all chapel services and received the answer that he was willing—if he didn’t have to pray. He was reserved and minimally polite, and seemed to look about him at the boys and the school with a faint bemusement, as if not quite believing they could be true. But his personality was strong; he had no difficulty keeping discipline. The boys knew a man when they saw one.
I had a double connection with the new master, for I was in his dormitory as well as in his class of European history. As I was very much of a “mark hound,” seeking to make up for my small stature and athletic nullity with high grades, and as history had been my best subject, I was inclined to show off in class discussions. Mr. Stair watched me with a sardonic eye. He was not impressed.
“But Germany started the war, sir,” I protested, when he questioned the wisdom of the sanctions imposed at Versailles. “She was greedy and cruel. The Kaiser wanted to take over the whole British empire.”
“And hadn’t the British wanted to take it over?”
“But the British had it, sir!”
“Hadn’t they wanted it before they had it? If coveting empires be a crime, shouldn’t we start our sanctions in London?”
“Well, even if there were some wrong things about acquiring their empire, haven’t the British made up for it by using it as a force for civilization and world peace?”
“How wonderful that I, a colonial, should learn the glories of empire from a Yankee lad with a Scottish tag!”
The class chuckled; I was deeply humiliated.
“But whether or not the Kaiser wanted to rule the world,” Mr. Stair continued, “I think we might find him easier to deal with today than this new chap, Hitler.”
I could not avoid the temptation to reinstate myself in favor by impressing him with my special knowledge. “Quite so, sir. After all, the Kaiser was a grandson of Queen Victoria.”
But the old queen’s name did not have the magic with a “colonial” that I had anticipated.
“Is that so, Abercrombie? Well, let me ask you something. Do you know how many individuals were in domestic service in the United Kingdom when Victoria the Good breathed her last in 1901?”
“No, sir.”
“More than two million. Does that tell you anything about the reign of the good queen?”
“Only that the stately homes must have been kept spick-and-span.”
“Not a bad answer, Abercrombie. I can think of others.”
When he gave me only a B on my paper on the influence of Colonel House on Wilson, an essay that I had entitled rather flamboyantly “Gray Eminence,” and I protested to him, he replied:
“You see history too dramatically, Abercrombie. Your mind is fall of kings and cardinals and royal mistresses. You must learn that it’s also full of little people. Slaves. Serfs. Abercrombies. Stairs.”
Stair did not advocate any political policies, domestic or international, in his classroom. Like Socrates, he simply questioned everything. But because a certain antiestablishmentarianism emanated from his very failure to enunciate or endorse any of the usual school values, he became popular with the more sophisticated members of my form, who saw in cultivating him a way of developing their own independence of home and academic rule, an independence that largely boiled down to the desire to indulge in activities neither permitted nor even possible on the campus: smoking, drinking and necking. Talking more freely than they could to other masters in Stair’s study before “lights,” they could at least pretend they were doing those things.
My own position with Stair was different. Because I was determined to make him give me better marks, I studied ways to please him, and I soon discovered that, for all his craggy integrity, he was not entirely immune to flattery. My genuine fascination at h
is utter freedom from all my hang-ups may have tempered the unctuosity of my approach and made me less objectionable. He was also amused by my drawings and in helping me to improve them. Although I could at first make nothing of the dots and squiggles of his own abstract designs, subjects of considerable mirth in our dormitory when he was not present, I was already enough of an artist to perceive that the few strong lines he would introduce into one of my sketches had radically improved it.
I was very much surprised and pleased when he asked me to sit for a charcoal sketch, although I could not help asking why an artist of his school needed a model.
“I do not limit myself to abstracts, Abercrombie,” he retorted. “Every now and then I feel inclined to do a likeness.”
“Why me, in particular?”
“Let’s put it that I want to catch the spirit of this remarkable academy in which I find myself. As the headmaster is not an available sitter, I must seek the next closest. I think you may do very nicely.”
I knew him too well now to take this as a compliment, but I was nonetheless flattered to be considered the “spirit” of anything. Something, however, a bit more serious than his gibing came out on the second and final sitting.
Stair had a bad cold and was in a foul mood, something rather rare with him. I made the mistake of asking him why he thought me representative of the school.
“You’re not,” he snapped. “You’re representative of what they’re trying to turn the boys into.”
“And what is that?”
“A man who believes in the whole bloody mess.” He worked vigorously for a silent minute on his sketch, as if he were cutting me into slices. “For God, for country and for a small New England church school named for a minor saint roasted on the gridiron by Romans who, perhaps because of their very lack of imagination, may have had some small glimmer of reality.”
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 36