by John Updike
There may be more perfidy wound into Mr. Simpson’s many accountings, but this is the gist. The victims were exceedingly rich, or frauds themselves, and even if only a third of the art they bought was genuine it was still the best investment of their lives. Whatever his misdeeds in Mrs. Gardner’s service, she remained friendly with him until her death.‖ The smuggling and the flirtation with Joni’s forgery were perhaps illegal. The rest seems no more than slippery, in a slippery business, and none of it invalidates the rare passion and erudition that Berenson brought to his field, or his tutorial contribution to generations of art scholars and museum heads, or his bequest of Villa I Tatti, his Tuscan estate, to a New World university as a place where others could study the Old World culture of which he had been, in his fashion, an inspired votary.
Harvard did give Ernest Samuels, professor of English at Northwestern University, access to the Berenson documents and correspondence, and the bulk of these materials, his preface states, “outran all calculation.” His wife, Jayne—listed on the title page as a collaborator—and he have “hewn a path” through mountains of paper that include letters from fourteen hundred correspondents plus six thousand letters Mary and Bernard Berenson wrote each other and, however disputatious and intimate their contents, scrupulously retained; this second volume of the Samuels biography covers the fifty-five years from 1904 to 1959, when B.B. died at the age of ninety-four.
Though an “official” biography, sanctioned by Harvard and by Nicky Mariano—the chief keeper, for forty years, of the Berenson flame—the book does not shy from showing its subject as vain, snobbish, ruthlessly romantic, and incorrigibly luxury-loving. Indeed, it provides, in a tone often of amusement if not reproach, ample context for the avarice that Simpson alleges to have been unscrupulous. Berenson’s favorite term of praise was “life-enhancing,” and the foremost life he sought to enhance was his own. He was greedy for exquisite sensations: he hobnobbed with the aristocrats of Europe, he travelled widely and in style, he bought himself a palatial establishment near Florence and kept expanding and improving it. He provided financial support, as well, for his wife’s two daughters and his own parents and many relatives in America. In 1911, four years after their purchase of I Tatti, Mary wrote to a friend that it was “really rather awful to think how many people live off of B.B.’s interest in Italian art … seven servants, six contadini, two masons, one bookkeeper, one estate manager, and their wives and children and then me, with a mental trail behind me of all the things I do and the people who look to me. And then B.B.’s whole family. Really it is a lot for the shoulders of one poor delicate man.” In the year he purchased the estate, Berenson had written to Isabella Gardner, “I have become a society lounger and money grubber and God knows what. It brings one in contact with the most distressingly odious people in the whole world, the dealers.” Yet the “real inferno” of the dealers and their “squillionaires” constituted the only treasury where he could fund his appetite for fine things—for paintings and thousands of books and a mode of life suited to a latter-day Marius the Epicurean. At one point he considered dressing his footmen in livery; Mary balked at that. She, from a family of Philadelphia Quakers, disapprovingly but passively noted, “Evidently our feet are set upon the path of worldliness and riches and the devil take the hindmost.” Berenson plaintively wrote to Duveen in 1912, “Whispers already are getting harsher and louder that for money I am sacrificing my gifts and my higher calling.… Not that I object to making money but I want to make it with scrupulous honesty and absolutely aboveboard.”
And did he? The kind of pressure brought by art dealers upon experts is several times illustrated. In 1935 Baron Thyssen wanted to buy two paintings which were believed to be by the painter Cossa but which Berenson had previously identified as by Ercole Roberti. The baron did not want Ercole Robertis. From the Duveens’ Paris office Edward Fowles wired Berenson, “Should we sell as Cossa would you flatly contradict?” Berenson responded, “Sorry, would have to.” Again, the fracas over the Allendale Nativity and Berenson’s refusal to call it a Giorgione began with Andrew Mellon’s churlishly telling Duveen, “I don’t want another Titian. Find me a Giorgione.” What Mr. Simpson, so anxious to imply evildoing, perhaps fails to appreciate is that the value of Berenson’s attributions rested upon the squillionaires’ conviction that he was honest, even if on occasion inconveniently so. Asked by the Duveens to educate the tastes of the investment banker Jules Bache, Berenson cockily told his pupil, “Art criticism suffers from being the priesthood of the slimy and slippery realm. I have been trying for forty years to sanitate and rectify this priesthood.… If you can trust my honor as well as my judgment I shall be glad to help you.” B.B.’s reputed integrity was his ticket to wealth, and neither the Simpson nor the Samuels book offers any evidence that Berenson ever deliberately falsified an attribution. Simpson, for all his sneers, in an appended list of relevant paintings leans away from any such charge: “Berenson and Duveen … sometimes sincerely over-estimated or indeed under-estimated the quality of their pictures. Attribution always has been and always will be a difficult business.”
If B.B. badly cheated anyone, it was himself—his long old age was fretted by the thought that he had failed to produce what a reviewer of 1909 had asked for: “the great book he owes his generation.” His studies and lists of Italian Renaissance painting were unsurpassed in their field but intellectually rather local, and a general work on aesthetics, though often contemplated, never came; his energy was diverted into “the frivolity of making money,” into pursuing aesthetic pleasures in museums and in travel, into hobnobbing with the rich, who were “apt to be enjoyable works of art in themselves.” Santayana, who shared with Berenson a Harvard education and an outsider’s detachment, offered a contrast in this respect, and though Berenson called Santayana “cold” he always spoke of him with respect. Santayana, on the other hand, took a rather mordant view of the irrepressible aesthete, and wrote after an encounter in 1939, “Berenson surprised me by talking with juvenile enthusiasm about ‘art’ (as if we were still in the 1890s).… It’s lucky for B.B., in one sense, that he keeps the old flame alive; but I can’t help feeling that it was lighted and is kept going by forced draught, by social and intellectual ambition, and by professional pedantry.”
Berenson loved people, as if finding in them the “tactile values” and “ideated sensations” that he preached should be sought in paintings. Many a stranger, writing Berenson a letter, became swept up in a prolonged correspondence and invited to come to I Tatti, where the old man, punctiliously dandified with his trimmed beard and boutonniere, presided over a constant swirl of the famous and rich and beautiful. His amorous affairs he flaunted as if they were masterpieces, and he invited his marital partner to share in the aesthetic experience. His and Mary’s voluminous correspondence brims with startling confidences incongruously mixed with his spiritual attitudinizing and her quaint use of the Quaker “thee” and “thou.” In one letter he gallantly made Mary one of a blessed trinity, avowing that all he would “take from this world to the next” would be the “memory of [her] young eyes, of Miss Greene’s, and of Madame La Caze’s … at a sexual crisis.” In the margin of another she wrote, “My God, his conceit, selfishness, snobbishness. Good heaven, what a revelation of self-satisfaction and cruelty to me.” Yet until middle age and avoirdupois overtook her, Mary was no slouch at open marriage; an especially intricate refraction of intimacy occurred when her lover, Geoffrey Scott, suddenly married Lady Sybil Cutting, a neighbor upon whom Berenson had often called; Mary, though heartbroken by Geoffrey’s defection, soothed her ex-lover’s doubts about his fiancée’s sexual abilities with the assurance that Bernard had told her he found Lady Sybil “très accomplie au lit.”
Like another disciple of Pater, Oscar Wilde, Berenson might lament that he had put too much of his genius into his life and not enough into his works. Looking back, the still mentally vivacious nonagenarian thought not of Pater but of Emerson as his teacher, who h
ad “taught him the importance of ‘becoming, of being rather than doing.’ ” He had taken Emerson’s advice and hitched his wagon to a star. Though he lived in this country only from the age of eleven to that of twenty-two, he always thought of himself as an American, and perhaps only via America could an itinerant pot-peddler’s son have risen to such posh eminence. Having become and been so flamboyantly, he yet wished to leave something “done” behind; he wrote essays for the newspaper Corriere della Sera almost to the last days of his life, and determinedly organized his bequest of an adequately endowed I Tatti, where students “should become ripe humanists and not mere teachers of facts about the arts.” He paid dearly for his own marvellous ripeness, but not, I think, with stolen funds. His conception of how he earned his money was simplicity itself, as he explained it in 1922 to the Internal Revenue Service: “I earn it by enjoying such authority and prestige that people will not buy expensive Italian pictures without my approval.”
The Bimbo on the Barge
CLEOPATRA: Histories, Dreams and Distortions, by Lucy Hughes-Hallet. 338 pp. Harper & Row, 1990.
This book, beneath its alluring jacket bedecked with Elizabeth Taylor and Cleopatras of bygone ages and, not the least glamorous, the pale-eyed English authoress, is a stolid dark green such as I associate with textbooks of first-year college math—analytic geometry and the foundations of calculus. I know the color well, for I lugged this naked tome, reft of its jacket, with me for over a month, everywhere I went. Amid the shimmering enchantment of Venice, and the grimy reality of Ravenna (that yet enhouses the most marvellous mosaics in Christendom), and the medieval ochre and stony lace of Verona, Cleopatra sat on my hotel table, waiting for me, jet-lagged or not, to brave another chapter. And on domestic trips as well, into Manhattan during its monsoon season, to rural fastnesses of Pennsylvania, and even into the dental offices of Boston’s fabled North Shore did the volume accompany me, read and yet not completely read, as if I were paddling between its Nile-green covers only a snail’s-pace faster than an opposing current. I say Nile-green, because this is what must have been intended, but for me it became the color of duty.
Why so? Lucy Hughes-Hallet writes very well, with a sometimes epigrammatic edge, and she has mulled her topic thoroughly and done perhaps all the Cleopatra research that can humanly be done. The “F” section of her index, for example, reveals not only Freud and Foucault, Flaubert and Anatole France, as one might expect, but Fulvia (Antony’s first wife) and Ftatateeta (a character in Shaw’s Cleopatra play), Antonia Fraser (author of Warrior Queens and The Weaker Vessel) and Eddie Fisher (third husband of warrior queen Elizabeth Taylor, father of warrior princess Carrie Fisher, and singer of “Oh, My Papa”). Relevant and revelatory quotations from Hegel and Tertullian and Ed Sullivan and the Marquis de Sade find space in Ms. Hughes-Hallet’s text; Shakespeare and Shaw and Petrarch and Lucan of course have their say on the subject, but also consulted and cited are such out-of-the-way works as Giulio Landi’s La vita di Cleopatra reina d’Egitto (1551) and Daniel von Lohenstein’s Kleopatra (1661) and Fuzelier’s Cléopâtre: Ballet Héroïque (1748) and Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra (1889) and Jean Cantel’s “gorgeously decadent romance” La Reine Cléopâtre (1914) and the Italian film Due notti con Cleopatra (1954), starring Sophia Loren. In addition, Ms. Hughes-Hallet has compiled a variegated sheaf of fifty art plates, from Old Masters to movie stills, which almost alone, with the help of her witty and well-turned captions, would carry the burden of her book.
Her thesis can be briefly stated: Cleopatra has presented many images down through the ages. Most of these images, the subtext runs, have been unfair. Winners get to write history, and Octavian, in the struggle for the Roman Empire capped by his defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium, perpetrated a propaganda image of the Egyptian Queen as an enticing monster, wanton, extravagant, devious, spineless. “Cleopatra was Rome’s enemy, and we in the West are Rome’s heirs. The notion of Cleopatra that we have inherited identifies her primarily as being the adversary, the Other. Her otherness is twofold. She is an Oriental, and she is a woman. Even in her lifetime her legend was already shaped by the two overlapping chauvinisms of race and sex.”
The author’s feminist brief is most obtrusive in the early sections, as she paraphrases the macho Roman attitude: “Orientals, who are ruled by queens, are effeminate. To submit to them would be tantamount (oh, horror!) to submitting to a woman.” She offers in opposition a picture of Cleopatra as a learned and loved ruler, a royal wheeler-dealer:
It is known that Cleopatra came to an extremely profitable arrangement with the Natatean Arabs over the oil rights in some territory at the southern end of the Dead Sea and that, having persuaded Antony to grant her some land around Jericho that was valuable for its dates and balsam, she subsequently leased it back to King Herod of Judea, a deal that brought Egypt substantial revenues without any outlay of money or manpower.
This well may be, but the tenuous traces of the “working queen” pale before the remarkable, and historically irreducible, facts of her sexual alliances: she bore children to Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, and her liaison with Antony produced a war for control of the Roman Empire, ending in the lovers’ joint suicide. With facts like these, who needs a legend?
Ms. Hughes-Hallet’s purpose is not to grope for the historical Cleopatra in the impenetrable mists of the first century B.C., but to trace the permutations of her reputation in the documents of Western culture. “As Cleopatra receded from living memory, as new generations of writers took up her story, she acquired the melancholy glamour of something irrevocably lost.” To the Middle Ages, surprisingly, she was a martyr for love; Chaucer included her in his Legend of Good Women, and her suicide, like those of Dido and Thisbe, appeared sublime by the traditions of courtly love. Behind this approval of her suicide stood the basic Christian disapproval of sex: “It is for sexuality—not her own, but man’s—that woman must be punished.” The Middle Ages did not make much of her role as an adulteress; medieval marriage was, away from the dynastic matches, so informal that Cleopatra was popularly accepted as Antony’s woman and allowed the title of “wife” (the word derives from wīf, meaning simply, like femme in French and Frau in German, “woman”). With Protestantism’s enthusiastic “valorization of marriage”—Calvin and Luther proclaimed that “monogamy was as ‘chaste’ as virginity”—Cleopatra aroused abhorrence and fascination as an “other woman,” as a promiscuous harlot. Ms. Hughes-Hallet’s analysis of the patriarchal-Protestant dread of female promiscuity seems especially acute: “A woman who had several lovers was not fully to be reached or understood by any one of them.… She had knowledge other than that which her husband had imparted to her.” Cleopatra’s two husbands, by the way, were both short-lived younger brothers called Ptolemy.
The eighteenth century involved the story of Cleopatra in its debate on monarchy, and the nineteenth century found in the exotic legend poetic justification for its imperialist penetration and possession of the languid, licentious nations of Africa and the Orient. Cleopatra as man-killer had a masochistic appeal for the Romantics and the Decadents: “The killer-Cleopatra’s heyday lasted roughly from the defeat of Napoleon to the outbreak of the First World War, an era during which heroism, the willingness of young men to allow themselves to be killed, was at an unprecedently low premium in Europe … hence the proliferation of fictions in which death could be experienced vicariously at the hands of a monster, a villain, a femme fatale.” Ms. Hughes-Hallet does not make the point, but could, that whether as killer or suicide Cleopatra satisfyingly confirms our Judaeo-Christian suspicion that sex should be punished by death.
Our own century, in trying to make mental room for the uncomfortable idea of sexuality that Cleopatra embodies, has camped her up, or bimboized her. Ms. Hughes-Hallet, who until writing this book was known in print as a writer for Vogue and a television critic for the London Evening Standard, energetically connects the kittenish Cleopatra of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) with the
childlike burlesque queens in such popular entertainments as the British film farce Carry On Cleo (1963): “Humour of this kind at least clears an imaginative space in which sex is possible, and friendly, but it does so at a high cost. All the participants must consent to be made foolish and the women, before they can be allowed their share of the jollity, must first sacrifice their claim to be fully grown-up people.” When Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, in the notorious film of 1963, winks, a new element of self-mockery, of complex devalorization, enters the game; quite brilliantly the author elicits from the publicized extravagance of the film’s cost, and of Burton and Taylor’s real-life, jet-set reprise of Antony and Cleopatra, an essay upon the spiritual worth of prodigality, seen as a Rabelaisian, Dionysian “holy foolishness” that liberates us from all those oppressive old Roman values.
The book concludes with the author’s own vision of Cleopatra, as a Venus subduing Mars and producing, as the myth goes, Harmony, an end to all the simple oppositions—“right/wrong, friend/foe, east/west, man/woman, alive/dead”—that make our thinking so stressful and rancorous. A pretty vision, endorsed as yet by few artistic re-creations of Cleopatra, though the author digs up an Egyptian play, Ahmad Shawqui’s Masra’ Kliyupatra (1929), and a curious painting of a nude, hefty, sky-gazing Cleo, asp on nipple, by Giovanni Pedrini. “If the sexes could become one, if love and power could be reconciled, if Orient and Occident could combine, death would be defeated. That concord and that hope appear epitomized in the person of my last Cleopatra.”
Well, with such a benignly cosmic conclusion, and so many insights, apt quotations, and provocative facts along the way, why did I have such a heavy time with this book, my distracting personal circumstances and possible Octavian resistances aside? Especially in its first sections, Cleopatra has the dogged, adviser-approved aura of a Ph.D. thesis, chewing up the centuries and spitting out word bites in a spirit of obligatory erudition. The appearance of so many plays, novels, and histories in chopstick-friendly fragments leaves one with an empty feeling that nothing, not even Shakespeare, could be a meal in itself. “The deconstruction of ancient narratives is a late twentieth-century practice,” Ms. Hughes-Hallet says in her introduction. Deconstruction sets out to relieve literary works of their intended content, substituting instead the subliminal messages the author did not intend. The old-fashioned reader expects to confront, between the Nile-green covers, Cleopatra herself, the reality of her, or an earnest estimate of that reality, and what he gets instead are images of her, generated by the delusions and neuroses of bygone generations. This makes for a faintly monotonous flutter. “I do not know her,” the author confesses cheerfully. “I, like all the other writers whose works I have dissected, know only her depictions and descriptions, masks made by others in her image.”