Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  To option this story, please contact Bedeworks@Clio.edu. Yes, that’s right, edu.

  True Confessions of a History Boy

  National Theatre programme essay for Alan Bennett’s The

  History Boys, May 2004

  Yes I was, and still am. I blame it on my teachers whom we always called masters. One of them still writes to me, spotting egregious errors on a page or a TV script and gently correcting them at which point I revert to the 12-year-old dunce in grey flannels and snake belt, and go stand in the corner, flushed with shame.

  The first master, at primary school, was a man of gaunt, wolfish features who reserved his occasional smile for History Boys of Promise and who thought it all right if I really wanted to do a history of the Royal Navy, the main point of which were the cigarette card illustrations: Golden Hind, Victory, Ark Royal, WD & HO Wills, Gallagher, Dunhill. He was followed at secondary school – one of the Oxbridge hatcheries Alan Bennett’s Headmaster yearns to rival – by a history master committed to having us all experience, at first hand, the terror of the Dark Ages. Dressed in RAF uniform, he would bring a heavy metal ruler down on the desks of inattentive ‘toads’: Hengist and Horsa, boy, WHACK, Ethelred the Unready, boy, SLAM! One day, when his aim was off, a toad got it right on the knuckles while looking out of the window during the Battle of Hastings. We couldn’t wait for the Renaissance to arrive but apparently it wouldn’t until the Third Form.

  The history masters of the Upper School divided into the Wisecrackers and the Uncles and both were magic. The Uncles really cared; perhaps about their part in the hatchery production quota, but what they cared most about was our distant kinship with the shades. In their charge we got to know Mazzini and William Jennings Bryan and Masaryk as if they were in the room. Hullo, Tamas, pull up a chair and tell us what really happened. With the wisecrackers (including the deutero-Voltaire) we chuckled at the antics of the mighty – that Charles I, what a ninny – and specialised in the foibles that brought them down to earth. It was bliss to know that Pitt the Younger couldn’t hold his drink (especially in the House of Commons) and dawn to be alive when we learned that Bismarck’s voice was falsetto. ‘Blut und Eisen’ we would shriek as we headed for the Fives Courts for a quick fag (of the nicotine not the pubescent kind).

  But the Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name was certainly around in Cricklewood where the school stood (though its official address for the Headmasters’ Conference was, needless to say, ‘Hampstead’). A brilliant and gentle geography master was suddenly removed from teaching the climate and produce of Indonesia and then from the staff altogether. He was, the Head announced at assembly, ‘not well’ and so not well that no-one should attempt to communicate with him, even though he undoubtedly deserved our sympathy.

  And we were lucky enough to have our own unforgettable, incomparable, Hector; erotically ambiguous, effortlessly charismatic, dazzlingly erudite. And like Hector, all the history he thought we would ever need, and much more besides, was in the literature he set before us. He didn’t enter the lives of the History Boys until the school had made a move from the grit and grunge of Cricklewood to a suburban pastoral farther north, where it instantly invented a pukka public school ‘house’ for boarders. This was the last straw for us urban cowboys, already in grief and shock at being exiled from the Beeferie (Willesden Green) and from the House on the Corner which we were sure was an Irish brothel. (Why we lurked there, I’m not sure; possibly on the off-chance that someone would emerge one day and announce a Schoolboys’ Discount?)

  Public schoolboys we emphatically did not want to be. They were the enemy. There was a real one up the road, and when its inmates, on parole, came to our History Club our hearts went out to them for they were an anaemic, pimply-gangly bunch, all snot and blazers, evidently cast down by their incarceration in bosky Hertfordshire. Though our Hector had come to us from a Real Public School, and though he was, in fact, a deep-dyed aristocrat with actual land and an eccentric pa who did himself in with an ancient hunting gun while we were reading A-Level Hamlet, Hector was, for us The Glamour of the World. He had toiled in Greek bauxite mines, had been a Scots Guard, had sat at the feet of the immortal Leavis, all of which made us pay attention when he spoke of Empson and Eliot and Donne and Dryden. His voice, a baritone as smooth and dark as buffed porphyry, could explode, when amused (and he was, a lot) into a girlish giggle. It was not Golders Green. It was not even Hampstead. Nor were his clothes. Leather-patched tweed and flannels and our Hector were strangers to each other. When we opened the door to our first class we beheld (rather than saw) a figure, dressed entirely in black (this was well before black was Black), perched, cross-legged on a table. The face was startlingly handsome; the nose Roman, the eyes blazing. Rows of desks had been replaced by a circle. He was, naturally, in the centre.

  Yes it was an act, but we all signed up for parts: the shy but bookish closet philosopher (not me); the worldly tough-guy (not me); the versifying sixth form pseudo-Thom Gunn (not me); in fact, the Dakin, the Posner, the Scripps (or rather the Rebbe Shkripovich) (not me). And, my God, we worked for our prince of letters: if the essay was Donne, we damned well gave him Herbert too; if the essay was Shelley, we showed off our intimacy with Keats’s prose. Without warning, entire lessons would be replaced by sessions listening to the Sanctus from different Masses: Bach, Brahms, Fauré. We went to hear the Czech Philharmonic with him and there was a party at his flat in Kensington (or was it Belgravia?). He was romantic, dangerous and perhaps a bit much, but we couldn’t get enough of him.

  But I was a History Boy, and come A-Level and Oxbridge time, I made my choice, albeit with some torment. Hector took it badly as if betrayed, and barely spoke to me for months; the flashing smile replaced by a thin-lipped expression of indifference which cut to the quick. Many years later at a garden party I told him that much of the rest of my life had been spent trying to make the choice between literature and history moot, and reminding him of Carlyle’s dictum that ‘history is the only poetry were we but to get it right’. He smiled the old smile, benevolently unconvinced.

  Photographic Insert

  Frans Hals, The Marriage Portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen, c. 1622. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

  Peter Paul Rubens, The Four Philosophers, c.1608. Palazzo Pitti, Palatine Gallery, Florence.

  J.M.W.Turner, A Disaster at Sea, ‘The Wreck of the Amphitrite’, c. 1835. Tate Gallery, London.

  J.M.W.Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 1835. John Howard McFadden Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

  James Ensor, Scandalized Masks, 1883. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.

  Pablo Picasso, ‘Ecce Homo’, After Rembrandt from Suite 156, 1970. Tate Gallery, London.

  Picasso At Work, c. 1970.

  John Virtue, Landscape No. 711, 2003–4. Marlborough Fine Art, London.

  Anselm Kiefer, Karfunkelfee, 2009. White Cube Gallery, London.

  Anselm Kiefer, Shevirath Ha Kelim, 2009. White Cube Gallery, London.

  Picturing

  The Matter of the Unripe Nectarine:

  High Ground/Low Ground and

  Ruskin’s Prejudices

  Christ Church Symposium, on the centenary of Ruskin’s

  death, Oxford, 7 April 2000

  I suppose we don’t expect our prophets to be reasonable, which is just as well, since this is the way that Ruskin offered his considered judgement, in the first volume of Modern Painters, on Dutch landscape painting:

  The great body of them is merely to display manual dexterities of one kind or another and their effect on the public mind is so totally for evil that though I do not deny the advantage an artist of real judgement may derive from the study of some of them, I conceive the best patronage that any monarch could possibly bestow upon the arts would be to collect the whole body of them into a grand gallery and burn it to the ground.

  Why did Ruskin hate Dutch painting so much, and with a vehemence and intensity he
sustained over many years, returning to the subject in volume five of Modern Painters as a way of constructing a portrait of everything he believed art should not be? It’s no mystery, of course, that his attacks on Dutch art were of a piece with his deeply felt anti-commercialism. But it’s worth noting at the outset that Ruskin’s equation of Dutch painting with ignobility, with the amoral reproduction of mechanically derived effects, those ‘manual dexterities’, was emphatically not the view of critics elsewhere in Europe, especially in France, who otherwise did share much of Ruskin’s hostility to capitalist philistinism. And in this respect at least, the prophet turned out to be false, for the one thing that Modern Painters did not generate was modern painting, and what Ruskin has to say about Dutch painting almost inadvertently tells us why. Authentically modern art – that is to say, and here I’m following Clement Greenberg’s famous definition, painting that embraced its two-dimensional flatness, painting that self-consciously rejected a transparent relationship between objects and their representation – was not the child of Ruskinian criticism, but of the French critical tradition in which all the things that Ruskin most hated – the indifferent rendering of contemporary material life – turned out to drive the modernist revolution. In that respect at least, 1900 has to be seen as the last year of an old, rather than the first year of the new modernist century.

  For Ruskin, of course, painting was normative or it was nothing. Its reach to beauty was only possible to the degree to which it also reached for truth. With this in mind he launched his attack on Dutch painting, as the epitome of stale meretriciousness. He was withering about seventeenth-century Dutch art in general, the ‘various van somethings and Back somethings’, seeing it as devoted to the mechanical reproduction of cheap lighting effects, the random accumulation of mindless anecdote. He complained of its vacancy of ideas and, most damning of all, its reduction of a calling to the status of a trade. Potter, Berchem, Backhuizen, Willem van de Velde the Younger and, most surprisingly, Jacob van Ruisdael (so passionately admired in Germany and France) all came in for a beating at the hands of Ruskin’s big stick. Rubens was taken to task in a very particular and telling way, and Rembrandt seldom alluded to at all, although Ruskin evidently liked the master’s landscape etchings and drawings, as well he might. Of Rembrandt’s paintings he had virtually nothing to say except that he thought the greatest of all was the self-portrait of the artist and his wife in Dresden, which we now know to represent Rembrandt and Saskia as the Prodigal Son and his Whore in a Tavern, but which Ruskin, in keeping with his pathetic innocence about the nature of connubial bliss, believed to be the artist and his wife ‘in a state of ideal happiness. He sits at supper with his wife on his knee flourishing a glass of champagne with a roast peacock on the table.’

  Ruskin’s most savage denunciations, though, were reserved for his particular bête noire, Aelbert Cuyp. Perhaps this was because Cuyps were represented in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which, close to Ruskin’s paternal home, must have been an exceptionally important place of initiation for him, assembling as it did so many more paintings than Eastlake’s fledgling National Gallery. It was there that Ruskin saw one particular Cuyp and read William Hazlitt’s description of it, which raised his hackles. In the chapter on ‘The Truth of Skies’ in volume I of Modern Painters, Ruskin let Cuyp and Hazlitt both have it. Skies were, after all, a crucial subject for Ruskin, for whom the perception and description of sky was a contact point between painterly practice and intimations of the celestial, which inspired some of his most beautiful drawings. Just before getting on Cuyp’s case he cites the lovely remark made by Dickens in his American Notes, when lying on a barge deck and looking, as Dickens felt, not at but through a pure blue sky. Ruskin too was exacting in his account, not just of blue skies, but of what happened to those skies when they were flooded by different kinds of radiance, at dawn, at sunset, at high noon. He certainly knew that when commonplace admiration was voiced about Cuyp’s grand production numbers, sooner or later it was his skies – their tonal warmth; their golden saturation – which was supposed to clinch the matter. So it was precisely this quality in which all of Cuyp’s habitual meretriciousness was he thought exposed, on which Ruskin concentrated his critical gaze:

  Look at the large Cuyp in the Dulwich Gallery, which Mr Hazlitt considers ‘the finest in the world’ and of which he very complimentarily says ‘The tender green of the valleys, the gleaming lake, the purple light of the hills have an effect like the down [Ruskin italicises this for full withering effect] on an unripe nectarine!’ I ought to have apologized before now, for not having studied sufficiently in Covent Garden to be provided with terms of correct and classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to observe the other day that Claude was ‘pulpy’, another added the yet more gratifying information that he was ‘juicy’ and it is now happily discovered that Cuyp is ‘downy’. Now I dare say that the sky of this first-rate Cuyp [Ruskin had no more damningly backhanded compliment than a ‘first-rate Cuyp’] is very like an unripe nectarine: all that I have to say about it is, that it is exceedingly unlike a sky.’

  Perhaps Ruskin should in fact have spent some time in Covent Garden, in which case he might have noticed – and it would still have served his purpose in attacking Hazlitt – that nectarines (unless Victorian fruit was different from our own) are conspicuously smooth and un-downy on their skins, and that it was the red-golden colour, not the texture of their surface, that Hazlitt was after, in coining his doomed simile. But the producer of fake sunsets, compounded by the egregiously inattentive critic, epitomised for Ruskin everything that was wrong about conventional bourgeois taste – the craving for gaudy theatrical effects not found in nature, the willingness of the technically proficient painter to supply them, and the complicity of the critic in praising them. ‘It is difficult to conceive how any man calling himself a painter could impose such a thing on the public and still more how the public can receive it.’

  It is odd, though – or then again perhaps it is calculated – that in all his diatribes against Cuyp, Ruskin should have failed to notice or say anything about the fact of his hero Turner’s immense and glaringly obvious debt to the very same detestable Cuyp. If the point of harping on about Cuyp was precisely to achieve a dissociation between Turner and the Dutch master – that Ruskin felt was inappropriately lodged in the public mind – then he completely, and quite uncharacteristically, fails to address the issue specifically. It’s much more likely, I think, that Ruskin failed to register the awkward fact that so far from Turner understanding the Dutch tradition as something to be aggressively discarded in pursuit of the higher truths of his own landscape painting, he repeatedly turned back to it as a source of deep interpretative inspiration. Unlike Ruskin, who did his best to avoid the Low Countries, except in so far as he was obliged to disembark en route to the High Countries where his heart lay, Turner returned to Holland again and again: the first time in 1817, then in 1825; and in 1840–42, just prior to the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters, in 1843. Turner had been there for three successive years, not just as a traveller of course, but as a working artist, his sketchbook filling up with drawings. Paintings which drew deeply on Dutch art for their inspiration, and composition, punctuated crucial moments in Turner’s career. The very first painting that he had ever shown in public, in 1796, a marine painting of fishermen, was famously closely modelled on a Willem van de Velde the Younger. The painting with which he gained a public following when it was exhibited at the British Institution in 1801, Dutch Boats in a Gale, Fishermen Endeavouring to Put Their Fish on Board, was likewise indebted to van de Velde, and was in fact commissioned by the Third Earl of Bridgewater (a huge fan and collector of Dutch marine paintings) to hang alongside his own van de Velde.

  Of course Ruskin might well have retorted that it was precisely the taste of a canal-builder like Bridgewater which had deformed, happily not fatally, the young Turner’s early prospects and healthy sense of independence. But he would have had
a harder time with the painting exhibited in 1818 as a direct result of Turner’s first journey to Holland the year before, and which justifiably won him an even greater fame: Dort, or Dordrecht. The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed. For it was blindingly obvious that the great picture, immediately and expensively bought by Turner’s most devoted patron Walter Fawkes and hung in the music room of his Yorkshire house, was a fulsome act of homage to Aelbert Cuyp. Turner had seen Cuyp’s Maas at Dordrecht when it was shown at the British Institution in 1815 and it may well have been that he was so struck by it as to make a pilgrimage (for there was no other reason to go to Dordrecht, which was quite out of the way for a British traveller), to the very site at the junction of the Scheldt and Maas from which Cuyp (and van Goyen) habitually painted their estuarine scenes.

  Turner’s painting ought to have been absolutely abhorrent to Ruskin, for, quite apart from its reproducing a classically Cuypian late-afternoon blue-gold sky, it was, after all, a picture of people, a very low kind of people by Ruskin’s standards, reduced to doing absolutely nothing in the absence of wind. That is of course the magic of the piece: the sense of utter stillness in a world that was habitually busy. The twin emblems of the painting’s play on movement and immobility are the bird skimming across the surface and an item straight from Ruskin’s worst nightmares of Covent Garden – a single cabbage floating impeturbably on the oily surface of the river.