At the real beginning of his adult life, Berenson made the profound decision, accepted the necessity for dislocation, and decided to live abroad, in Italy. The fact that Italy was his profession, his art, does not remove the fact of his exile from interest. Ruskin and others pursued the art of Italy without expatriation. It was not a wandering, exiled scholar that Berenson became; he became a sort of foreign prince, a character in a fairy tale with all his properties and drama neatly laid out around him, symbolically ordered. And, indeed, who would dream of severing Berenson and Italy? Where can he be imagined? In Boston? On Fifth Avenue or established on Long Island? He united himself with his residence in the way a nobleman is united with his title and yet, like the nobleman again, it was not altogether convincing as the final existential truth of his life. The depth of the sense of alienation in one so consciously and conscientiously placed is a part of the peculiar affliction and, in another sense, one of the privileges of the voluntary exile.
After the war, Italy came into a multitudinous rediscovery and the old exiles who had been shut off from sight and correspondence for a few years came forth too, as old women with their market baskets appear after a siege. With Berenson, postwar prosperity meant an unexpected sweetening of his public image. His possessions, his worldliness, his aestheticism seemed in a frightened, inflationary world, at the least harmless and, at the best, admirably eternal and shrewd. In the Depression decade before the war, his villa, I Tatti, with its splendid library, its pictures—its Sassetta and Domenico Veneziano—might have been thought exorbitantly self-centered. In 1950, the first thing I thought about it was that it was not luxuriously beautiful, at least not as such places are abroad. It was not a paradiso for an interesting idler, but simply a passable Italian villa, serviceable, comfortable, rather staid, with a good many brownish sofas and draperies. True, it had its garden, its dramatic cypresses and pieces of suitable sculpture, indeed everything graceful and practical that might be expected; still it was most memorable for its solidity, the somewhat Northern substantiality, the thickness of stuffs and things, the reminders of the comfortable Beacon Street standards of Berenson’s youth. And the house seemed to ask that the occupants and guests conduct themselves in a discreet and plausible manner, keeping the spirit of reasonable calm and well-polished utility. Politeness, adaptability, the habits of social efficiency were strongly stated if not rigidly demanded; they were the firmness upon which a unique personal history rested. A steady pace, familiar and satisfying, reigned benevolently.
There was no Mediterranean slackness about Berenson, no languor or sunstroke or tropical vegetation. On the receptive, hospitable Italian soil, he built an orderly, conscience-driven life. Heaters glowed in the library; curtains were drawn and brown lamps turned on at dusk. At the fireside you might have been listening to the conversations of a character in Thomas Mann, one of those highly individual scholars in Doctor Faustus, with their passionate convictions, their quirks of taste. In the working household there was a noticeable number of non-Italians: a Scotch chauffeur and steady, fair-faced people gave the air of a punctual and neat reliability. Berenson was an intellectual first and, secondly, a person leading a rich and elaborate social life. No doubt, particularly when he was older, some of his habits and needs were suggested by the successful customs of the comfortable, non-intellectual world. He lived with the silky regularity and pleasurable concentration of energies that are at once opulent and sacrificial—the prudence of the sensual. He knew the grace of the steady rounds, the ritual and faithful observance of a kind of liturgical year with its feasts and fastings, its seasonal pilgrimages to Rome and Venice, the stately moves from the winter at Settignano to the summer in the vale of Vallombrosa. He had his morning privacy for work and his afternoon walks. This constancy, rich people seem to think, keeps the bones oiled, provides activity and change without encouraging the hazards or assaults of the unexpected, the wayfarer’s disappointments, the explorer’s disillusions. Beautiful things, sweet experiences may, like the sudden fluttering of a butterfly on the window pane, appear without warning, but organization, foresight and routine will prevent sleepless nights and throbbing temples. (In his Sketch for a Self-Portrait, Berenson cites the fact of heavy drinking in America as one of his reasons for leaving.) No matter, Berenson himself was still the host to all the sufferings of an unusual, gifted nature. There is, it seems, always a hole in the wall where the cold wind can enter.
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In Italy, looking about, we remembered Dylan Thomas saying after some complaint of ours about America, “You needn’t live in that bloody country, America! You could go somewhere else, you know.” The possibility of escape never entirely deserts the greedy dreams of the “self-employed.” It flares up and dies down, like malaria; it is a disease arrested, not cured; a question without an answer. The thought that one might himself settle far, far away gives a kind of engrossing sub-plot to one’s travels. And the Americans who have made the choice, those colonies with their stoves turned high in the winter, provide the occasional, rushing visitor, resting at the end of the day in his hotel room, with insolent or jealous thoughts.
A man may exile himself for isolation—Santayana in his convent in Rome—for the freedom of solitude, the purity of the release from useless obligations and conventions; or he may exile himself, from America at least, for the freedom of hospitality, the enlargement of possibilities. You may be a hermit or an innkeeper. Berenson’s nature destined him to be an innkeeper. Whether he loved humanity or not, he had an enormous appetite for meeting it, being visited by it, for serving it lunch and tea. He seemed helpless before the appeal of a new person, a soul who carried either an accidental or earned distinction. No one was easier to see than Berenson. He could not be called a snob, although his appetite embraced the merely social and the merely rich. When we mailed a letter of introduction to him, he accepted it as a bizarre formality because, of course, he who saw everyone was willing and happy to see yet another. One was never tempted to think it was ennui or triviality that produced this state of addiction; the absorbing inclination seemed to be a simple fear of missing someone, almost as if these countless visitors and travelers had a secret the exile pitifully wished to discover. The expatriate sometimes suffers painfully from the dread of losing touch with the world he has left but towards which he looks back with longings and significant emotions, with guilt and resentment, with all the tart ambivalence of the injured lover. It is, after all, the fickle, abandoned country for which the exile writes his books, for which his possessions are ultimately designated; money and citizenship, nieces and nephews, language and memory—the very skin of life—remain in their old place.
As the years pass, the feelings of loss and uncertainty appear to grow stronger not weaker for those who live abroad. The traveler from home is important, the visitor, the acquaintance passing through bring knowledge, prejudices, fashions that cannot be acquired from the newspapers. A feeling of guilt persists about the very beauty of life abroad, the greater ease, and above all the parasitism of the exile’s condition. The dream-like timelessness of Italy is a captivity into which uneasiness creeps. Americans who removed themselves to England were usually seeking manners, civilization, congenial spirits; in Italy the senses were enchanted, brought under the spell of the great sun, the heartbreaking landscape, the sweetness of peasant faces, toiling and enduring, the lemon tree against the wall. It appears that an American cannot become an Italian—property, marriage to the aristocracy, nothing seems to insure assimilation. And the answer must be that Americans want to live in Italy but do not wish to become Italians. Many once wished to become Englishmen and succeeded; foreigners from every land have become Frenchmen of a sort. The Italian exile, with his nostalgic, feudal temperament, is also a person with a wound, not so very different in his feelings from those beachcombers and divorcées in the Caribbean, all who seek to soothe their hurt spirits with the sun, with flowering winters, with white houses opened to the new air and entangled with ol
d vines. Everywhere in Italy, among the American colony, one’s envy is cut short time and time again by a sudden feeling of sadness in the air, as of something still alive with the joys of an Italian day and yet somehow faintly withered, languishing. Unhappiness, disappointment support the exile in his choice. Even the endlessly productive Santayana revealed at times his wounds from America and Harvard. Of his career at Harvard he wrote dryly, that it had been “slow and insecure, made in an atmosphere of mingled favour and distrust.” He pretended not to care. He made very little use of Italy; it was a refuge in which he wrote his books, tirelessly.
•
Was Berenson shady, crooked? Did he make his fortune with the help of false as well as genuine attributions? Whatever the truth, certainly large numbers of his critics and his admirers accepted the charge of profitable dishonesties back in his past. By choosing to use his knowledge for the sale of works of art he brought himself under the suspicion of financial immorality. The “attribution” of venality clung to this famous humanist. Old scandal, dubious gains, lingering doubts, gave a drama and tension to his life; but his work, his books were authentic and he was, himself, a pure creation—that everyone agreed. Berenson lamented that his fame as an art expert “degenerated into a widespread belief that if only I could be approached in the right way I could order this or that American millionaire to pay thousands upon thousands and hundreds of thousands for any daub that I was bribed by the seller to attribute to a great master. Proposals of this nature . . . became a burden; and in the end I was compelled in self-defence to refuse to see people unless I was sure that they brought no ‘great masters’ with them. Needless to say that every person I would not receive, every owner whose picture I would not ascribe to Raphael or Michelangelo or Giorgione, Titian or Tintoretto . . . turned into an enemy.”
Berenson’s success, the money he made as a young man, aroused superstitious twitchings among people everywhere, even those who delighted in him as a friend, and certainly among his colleagues. Hadn’t life turned out to be too easy for this poor Jewish fine arts scholar from Boston? Was knowledge, honestly used, ever quite so profitable, especially knowledge of art? He had, it was felt, sold himself to the devil by demanding life on his own terms, by asking more than other scholars, by becoming a padrone instead of a simple professor. Italian critics were far from hospitable to his ideas and great feuds raged. They did not give over their art to a foreigner without a fight, without accusations and sneers.
Some of the uneasiness felt by the world will inevitably be felt by the man himself. Stubbornness of attitude became a defense for a whole life. A hardening and narrowing, repetition of positions taken long ago, obstinate rejections disguised pain and fear of obsolescence. In Italy, the tremendousness of the past reinforces the spirit in its old assumptions; nothing new seems to be required. It was part of Berenson’s idyllic removal that he couldn’t like much of the art of his own time. The gods will not grant every gift. He set himself against violence, fragmentation, improvisation, primitivism. He couldn’t accept Picasso, Stravinsky, T. S. Eliot, Kafka. He was apprehensive about these productions, irked by the broken forms. He liked Homer, Goethe, and Proust, but Faulkner disposed him to fretfulness. He looked upon so many contemporary things with painful distaste and something like hurt feelings. He seemed to see his own essence threatened with devastation. For him, the agile will, the effort to maintain security and preserve courage had been everything. Hesitation, nihilism, abstraction appalled this pulsing ego that had sought to define in his work and personal existence a compact, ennobling, classical example. It was odd that in the lighter arts, in living personalities, he was extremely in-the-know, open to feeling, to humor, to affection, to wild originality.
Pride and conscience urged Berenson to the gritting work of writing. His style was clear and sensible, but literally brought forth in sorrow because he hadn’t the luck of ready eloquence, except in conversation. Santayana’s contented industry puzzled him. “He loved writing! Preferred it to reading and talking. Imagine such a man!” Still, write Berenson did, and some of the vices and temptations of the literary character were his as much as if he had been living in New York, producing regularly for the art publications. He gave hints of jealousy and of thinking himself undervalued. He was inclined at times to composition on topics that did not deeply engage him, but which he felt necessary to undertake because of wishing to keep in step with subtle changes in taste and emphasis. I once heard another art critic cry out in pain, “That wicked B. B.! He would never have thought of writing a book on Caravaggio if he hadn’t known I was doing one!” Berenson noted with chagrin the fee Sir Kenneth Clark was reported to be receiving for his lectures on the nude in the National Gallery in Washington. (The older critic had lived a longer life than most are granted well before the age of plushy lectures, easy endowments, fabulous stipends.) His disappointments were only reality, his firm sense of things as they were in life. A deeper truth of his nature was caught in odd moments—I remember seeing him, ancient, regal, stepping along nimbly, like a little gnome king, on the arm of the dancer, Katherine Dunham.
The great age Berenson achieved did not strike one as an accident, a stroke of fine heredity or luck; longevity was an achievement, the same as his books, bought with a good deal of anguish and hard work. His nature, with its prudence, its routine, its rich mixture of work and pleasure, seemed to have been designed for long use. We happened to be paying a call on him in Rome, where he was installed for his yearly state visit like Queen Victoria on her business-like holidays, when the news came that Croce had died. “I should have gone first! The dear man was younger than I!” Berenson said with feeling. Everyone smiled. It was not only that Berenson had lived so long but his wanting to go on living still longer that annoyed certain people. Age was another of his slightly disreputable luxuries.
When he died, at ninety-four, he left, besides his books and the pleasure he had given, a peculiar monument. He left his villa, his library, to Harvard, the home of his lost youth, so that gifted young Americans, interested in art and history, might look out on the Tuscan landscape and be saved from barbarism and provinciality. Berenson seemed to want to leave his daily existence to America, bequeath his setting, his chosen life. Like all his gifts to the world, this too was received with misgivings and hesitation. Did he have enough money to make such a gift? Before she could be accepted the gift must have a dowry, money for her own upkeep, as if she were a bride. “We will all starve! For Harvard!” they used to say in his household. The arrangements were made and the site created by sheer force of personal will and longing would be returned to its source, to be preserved as a little pocket of American intellectual industry, a bit of foreign investment, in the busy Apennines. What endurance and genius had kept alive would go along smoothly, buzzing like the lawn mowers in front of the White House, with the efficient routine of public domesticity. Institutionalized, the villa would soon remind one of those inns taken over by a conquering army. Its occupants will have been chosen and assigned. All those hundreds upon hundreds of guests of the past—the surly writers and old ladies from Boston, the dons, the pansies, the actresses, the historians—won’t be coming back to gossip, in a whisper in the halls, about how fortunes were made, to sneak into Florence to get drunk at the Excelsior, and to see the unique Berenson, leading his curious life. At the end, the Pope sent his blessing.
1960
MARY McCARTHY
MARY McCARTHY! “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt! That’s my Bible!” I once heard a young woman exclaim. No doubt the famous short story is rightly understood as a sort of parable representing many a young girl’s transgressions, even if it does not concern itself with the steps in the sinner’s rehabilitation. It would be hard to think of any writer in America more interesting and unusual than Mary McCarthy. Obviously she wants to be noticed, indeed to be spectacular; and she works toward that end with what one can only call a sort of trance-like seriousness. There is something puritanical and perp
lexing in her lack of relaxation, her utter refusal to give an inch of the ground of her own opinion. She cannot conform, cannot often like what even her peers like. She is a very odd woman, and perhaps oddest of all in this stirring sense of the importance of her own intellectual formulations. Very few women writers can resist the temptation of feminine sensibility; it is there to be used, as a crutch, and the reliance upon it is expected and generally admired. Mary McCarthy’s work, from the first brilliant The Company She Keeps down to her latest collection of essays, On the Contrary: Articles of Belief, 1946–1961, is not like that of anyone else and certainly not like that of other women. We might naturally wonder from what blending of bravura and commonsense this tart effervescence has come.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 13