Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  To answer my own question: what makes Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? enjoyable is its deglamorized depiction of the literary and cultural world that hatched and to an extent smothered Dorothy Parker. The Algonquin wits, most of them, were under thirty when the Round Table first assembled, in 1919, and their blithe misuse of their time and bodily health, and their quick-fix approach to literary production, have the charm of youthful innocence. As in the Sixties, being young then was in itself an empowerment; writing under Harding and Coolidge was impudent fun. Dorothy Parker’s life brushed against most of the strands of American literary life from 1920 to 1950, and the strands crackled with an energy not felt since. Yet in those pre-television days, when New York had a dozen newspapers and short stories were as hot as rock videos are now, making a living out of words still wasn’t easy, even for those who became, like Mrs. Parker, celebrities. F.P.A.’s famous “Conning Tower” paid nothing to contributors, Harold Ross’s fledgling New Yorker paid little, and Condé Nast—who was a man before he was a corporation—called the tune to his pipers. Few New York writers could spurn the summons to Hollywood when it came, though it condemned them to a virtually anonymous and utterly frustrating part in the manufacture of mass entertainment. Benchley, the irresistibly publishable, jumped at the chance to become a stage actor, and then a screen actor. Dorothy Parker was more strugglingly loyal to her ancient craft. Her life, even unsympathetically told, evokes the pulse of a spendthrift generation, whose promise sparkled in speakeasies and glimmered through a long hangover.

  Was B.B. a Crook?

  ARTFUL PARTNERS: Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, by Colin Simpson. 320 pp. Macmillan, 1987.

  BERNARD BERENSON: The Making of a Legend, by Ernest Samuels. 659 pp. Harvard University Press, 1987.

  It is always a pleasure to see a reverenced reputation besmirched, and Colin Simpson works hard, in his flat-footed but roundly detailed account of a secret partnership between “the most successful art broker of the twentieth century” and the high-art-minded sage of I Tatti, to do some besmirching. His revelations, though, are somewhat less sensational than he and his jacket copy seem to think, and they hit at rather faded targets—Bernard Berenson’s reputation, in the public mind, at its acme borrowed much of its gloss from an amiable confusion with that of Bernard Baruch, and Joseph Duveen has already been unabashedly portrayed as a rascal in S. N. Behrman’s rollicking series in The New Yorker in 1958. Artful Partners on one hand takes a judgmental tone and on the other limns an international art world that had all the moral nicety of an underwater feeding frenzy. Between 1869, when Joel Duveen began to deal on the London antiques market, and 1939, when his son Joseph, titled Lord Duveen of Millbank, died, colossal American fortunes arose and uprooted hundreds of European artworks from their damp nooks in monasteries and palaces and the moldering great homes of the aristocracy; such a transatlantic surge required adroit fishers of men like Joseph Duveen and his uncle Henry and, to give some semblance of order and decency to the upheaval, experts like Berenson. That art experts received fees for their accreditations and recommendations, and that these were not always entirely disinterested shocks me rather less than it does Mr. Simpson, an English “popular historian.” Indeed, for one of my nationality, severe moral repugnance might seem downright ungrateful, since the result of these genteel predations lies all about us, in the form of the great American collections, which have passed from flattering the vanity of plutocrats to withstanding the conscientious scrutiny of humble museum tourists. Thanks to the Duveens and their ilk, we have a National Gallery and masterpieces for the masses.

  Mr. Simpson’s freedom to quote from Berenson’s correspondence has been legally hampered by Harvard University; it claims the literary rights in the letters Berenson willed to it and, in line with its motto of “Veritas,” wished to keep the texts for its own version of the truth, as offered in Ernest Samuels’s sanctioned and bulky biography, of which one volume appeared in 1980 and another is at hand. Mr. Simpson, however, thanks to his ghost-writing the memoirs of Edward Fowles, the head of the Duveens’ Paris office and their eventual successor, has had access to records, correspondence, and diaries that not even such noble researchers as Sir John Pope-Hennessy and the late Kenneth Clark were able to get at. It is Lord Clark, however, who, toward the end of Artful Partners, reminds us of what we quite miss in Mr. Simpson’s inventory of old transactions: a stylistic verve, an animating personal touch. In a few quoted passages from Clark’s autobiographical Another Part of the Wood, Joseph Duveen and his milieu are brought at last to life:

  [Duveen] was irresistible. His bravura and impudence were infectious, and when he was present everyone behaved as if they had had a couple of drinks. He worked entirely by instinct and was incapable of writing a letter or making a coherent statement; and he had rightly seen that, whereas in America it paid him to be very grand, in England he could get further by bribing the upper classes and playing the fool.

  Clark had the advantages of having met the man and being himself a man of the world; Mr. Simpson can only retail others’ anecdotes and censoriously reconstruct an unappealing and abstract monster of rapacity, who welcomed his father’s failing health, shouldered his elderly uncle aside, ousted his many siblings from any effective role in the firm, and milked millionaires with outrageous mark-ups and canvases shamefully reworked and brightened and then slathered with carriage varnish.

  Mr. Simpson’s style, while it rarely vivifies, frequently sneers. There is a latently violent tone that produces such overwrought sentences as “[Charles Eliot] Norton saw the cozy nest his uncle had so kindly feathered for him about to be invaded by a vociferous cuckoo” and (of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean) “Read slowly in small gobbets, it is easier to digest.” We are assumed to be already privy to a great deal of gossip, so that Mary Berenson’s “boundless sensuality” and “ever wayward affections” are taken for granted. Some of Mr. Simpson’s sneers irresistibly invite us to smile along: “[Herbert Michelham] took the title of Baron Michelham of Hellingly, and settled down to enjoy a life of semi-retirement at Michelham Priory with his wife and the two sons with which she had presented him: Herman, born in September 1900, and Jack, who arrived on Christmas Eve 1903. What the happy baron did not know was that Jack, his favorite, had been fathered by Jefferson Davis Cohn.” Mr. Cohn, with his strikingly hybrid name, is one of the more vivid of the many minor figures on the take from the Duveens; characterized as “a ubiquitous lounge lizard,” he rose to great heights through his conquest of Lady Michelham (herself suitably named Aimée) and as precipitately fell. The sexual behavior of the upper classes forms all too sketchy a background to this mercantile tale; we just barely glimpse a wealth of personalities through the muck Mr. Simpson claims to be raking.

  Of the Duveens, the most appealing is Henry. A mere twenty-three when dispatched by his brother Joel in 1877 to sell china in America, he made himself quickly at home. “I like America very well,” he wrote back. “It is a fine rich country. It beats England in everything.” He sniffed and savored the climate of the Gilded Age; “Money,” he wrote Joel, “is what America is all about.” The Duveens were Dutch Jews who became involved in the English porcelain trade; it was Joel who, by buying and selling the Hawthorn Ginger Jar, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, moved up into antique furnishings and, finally, paintings. Uncle Henry handled the American side, and built up valuable friendships with Stanford White and, through him, with the likes of J. Pierpont Morgan, Collis Huntington, P. A. B. Widener, and Jay Gould. “There was something about Henry Duveen’s rotund little figure and drooping walrus mustache that they found rather endearing.”

  Joseph Duveen was the oldest of Joel’s twelve children and, according to Mr. Simpson, was possessed of unseemly haste to take over the firm. He was aided in his ambition by his father’s fragile health, which made Joel a semi-invalid when Joseph was only twenty-two. Joseph ended as Lord Duveen, whose benefactions enlarged the Tate Gallery and the British Museum,
but who was in the end rebuffed by the English aristocracy it had been his life’s work to cultivate. We are told how Kenneth Clark, a brilliant art scholar born into elevated British circles, saw to it that Duveen, dying of intestinal cancer, was dropped from the Trustees of the National Gallery. “It broke Joe Duveen’s heart”: this is the first we hear that Joe had a heart. Before this sad end, he had smoked many a custom-made cigar and supervised many a lucrative purchase, and Mr. Simpson cannot forbear retelling some of the most notorious of the dealer’s feats of salesmanship: how he sold the Chicago restaurateur John R. Thompson a million dollars’ worth of paintings by implying that Thompson couldn’t afford them, and how he, conniving with Andrew Mellon’s secretary, David Finley, installed in the New York apartment just beneath that of his terminally ill and virtually bedridden client a gallery of paintings from which Mellon bought over six million dollars’ worth, at a net profit to Duveen of five million.

  Mr. Simpson, with his access to the Duveen accounts, sings a saga of thrilling mark-ups. The Hainauer Collection, sold to Duveen for a million dollars by a widow intimidated by the anti-Semitic currents of turn-of-the-century Berlin, was unloaded to American millionaires for five million, with dozens of items left over. The same cost-price ratio obtained when a tapestry bought for a bit over one hundred thousand was sold to Morgan for five hundred thousand, so he could lend it as decoration for the coronation ceremony of Edward VII in 1902. In 1911 a painting authenticated as a Verrocchio by Berenson was bought by the Duveens for $6,250 and sold to Bernhard Altman for $125,000. Four years later, another tapestry, which had cost the Duveens $8,772, including restoration costs, was sold to the shady financier Carl Hamilton for $150,000, and four paintings in whose purchase and enthusiastic accreditation Berenson had been active went to Hamilton for nearly ten times their cost. The banker William Salomon paid $650,000 in 1913 dollars for paintings that had cost the Duveens $145,000. Depreciations equally dramatic sometimes accompanied the resale of such acquisitions: Lady Michelham paid $70,000 for a painting attributed to Sir Thomas Lawrence that, after her death, was sold for $150. Caveat emptor.

  The news this book purports to bring, however, is not that the Duveens were capable of sharp practice but that Bernard Berenson connived, fudged, and cheated along with them. Relatively little space, in this portrait of a partnership, is given to Berenson’s side, and Mr. Simpson’s indictment of him must be sifted from many pages of colorful artmarket scramble. He begins by giving the early biography of a precocious boy, born in 1865 of a timber-worker and an eighteen-year-old mother in a Lithuanian town called Butrymanz. At the age of five the child suffered a revelation of the beauty of the world and was thereafter fired by a passionate (and, it is suggested, rather incongruous) taste for fine things. His father, Albert Valvrojenski, had studied to be a rabbi for two years but his college closed down and he was reduced to working in the forests. Tickets to America were secretly peddled in the Jewish villages of the Pale, and in 1874 Albert bought two and came with his cousin to Boston. His wife and three children followed the next year. They first lived in a cottage backing on the railway shunting yards; the father made a living pulling a peddler’s cart, selling pots and pans for a local tinsmith, and the mother took in washing and sewing and served lunch to railway workers. Young Bernhard (the Germanic “h” was dropped during World War I) continued precocious, and spent much time reading in the Boston Public Library. His mother scraped up fees to send him, at fifteen, to the Boston Latin School, and at the age of seventeen he qualified for a free place at Boston University.

  He was attractive as well as bright: “He still wore his hair in ritual locks but brushed and curled it so that he looked almost Byronic.” As a freshman, he supported himself by coaching other students, including Harvard men like George Santayana and Charles Loeser, through whom he met the wealthy Ned Warren, who sponsored Berenson for Harvard. His tuition was paid—“very probably”—by Jack and Isabella Gardner; they were known to finance impoverished students whom the celebrated Charles Eliot Norton thought promising. Berenson’s Harvard career brought him into proximity with the Gardners and such other swells as the openly homosexual Logan Pearsall Smith, but somehow he displeased Norton, who vetoed Berenson for a post-graduate travelling fellowship the young man sorely wanted. B.B. went to Europe anyway, and never looked back. He drifted about Europe on doles from his rich friends, studying art and becoming especially expert in the Renaissance Italians. He became known as a scholar, though his publications were at the least improved and at the most entirely written by his fellow traveller, devotee, and eventual wife, Mary Smith, Logan’s sister, who had in transit married an Irishman called Costelloe and borne two children by him.

  Berenson first came to the Duveens’ attention as the author of a scornful, unsolicited catalogue of an 1895 London show of Venetian art from great English homes. Of thirty-three alleged Titians, only one seemed to him genuine; of nineteen paintings attributed to Bellini, only three passed muster. This was an impudent enough performance to cause the Duveens to run a check on Berenson; word came back that he was “difficult,” “egotistical,” “fiercely ambitious,” and (from Columbia Professor George Rice Carpenter) “a charlatan.” Uncle Henry opined, “It appears that he could be most useful to us, but I advise caution as all are agreed that he will never play the second fiddle.” It was not until 1912, after Berenson had done a good deal of profitable business with Isabella Stewart Gardner and received commissions from a number of other dealers, that the Duveens signed him to a secret contract whereby “Doris,” as Berenson’s code name was, received twenty-five percent of all items of Italian origin sold by them. To deepen the skulduggery, the transactions were all to be recorded in a secret ledger kept by “X,” a London accounting firm who didn’t know who Doris was until 1927.

  But what, exactly, did Berenson do wrong? To recommend artworks for purchase and resale is surely no sin, nor is asking a fee in exchange for scholarly expertise notably venal. Even a source as bland as the Encyclopaedia Britannica knows and admits that Berenson “was an adviser to Lord Duveen and his opinion was often sought in the purchase of paintings.” The scholarly authenticator was a necessary part of a European art scene wherein the primal creators had seen no great distinction between themselves and studio assistants, and lordly owners had felt free to adjust artworks to their interior decoration, and good bright copies were thought better than deteriorated originals, and restorers blended into forgers and experts into dealers. Mr. Simpson’s indictment of Berenson seems to include these specific charges: (1) Always clumsy with written English, he signed criticism that was Mary’s work. (2) Operating on a five-percent commission from Isabella Gardner on paintings she purchased, he knowingly urged fakes and inferior imitations upon her—a pseudo-Cima, a “Titian” by a Portuguese copyist, a Sienese Annunciation that had been almost entirely repainted. Otto Gutkunst, the director of the art firm Colnaghis, wrote him during this pre-Duveen period, “Business is not always nice.… It is important for both of us to make hay while Mrs. G. shines.” (3) He continued to deal with Colnaghis after Mrs. Gardner had instructed him not to. (4) He assisted in a fair amount of smuggling, which was sometimes the only way to get Italian works of art out of the country. (5) He and Mary supplied her brother’s antique shop in London, called their “Iniquity Shop,” with the products of “Icilio Frederico Joni,” one of Italy’s finest and most prolific forgers. (6) Berenson recommended in 1903 that the Metropolitan Museum purchase an El Greco and accepted eight thousand dollars of the profit from the dealer. (7) Such duplicity became commonplace after 1907, when he entered into an agreement with the Duveens. They paid him, at first, ten percent on Italian items and then, under the Doris agreement, twenty-five; between 1911 and 1937 his share of the profits, never less than a hundred thousand dollars a year, added up to $8,370,000—a gigantic sum in those days. (8) Angered because Joseph Duveen had tricked him out of his percentage of the Mellon purchases, Berenson unsuccessfully conspired with Lo
uis Levy, the firm’s lawyer, to become a partner when Joseph died. (9) When this plot backfired, Berenson tried to scuttle the dying man’s last big sale, that of the “Allendale Nativity,” supposedly by Giorgione, to Samuel H. Kress, by vociferously insisting that the work was an early Titian.