Wooster and Montesquieu

Bertram Wilberforce "Bertie" Wooster is a defining character of P.G. Wodehouse's career, and my cat. Now my cat came to me at a somewhat later age through a complicated channel that I will not bore you with here as it is far more amusing to bore you with it in person. I was reading a great deal of Wodehouse when he arrived in my life and his deep concern for food and the most comfortable spot in any comfortable area reminded me of Bertie's own proclivity for creature comforts. Though my Wooster is less capable of quoting MacBeth when in a spot of trouble, he hisses as if he were Lady M. In his little gray suit, and sharp white shirt and boots he is indeed a fine dandy.

Which is why a dear friend yesterday informed me that unpacking her Penguin copy of Huysman's Against the Grain (A Rebours), she was struck by the similarity between the cover image and my cat. What an honor! Upon finding the cover in a quick Google search, I discovered that the portrait is one of my own favorite artists Boldini!

Now the original work represents the Comte de Montesquieu, the aesthete of the aesthetes. He represents much of the art for art sake's movement, his appetite for life, fine things, and beauty in general making him a prominent promoter and benefactor of the aesthetic and decadent movements at the end of the 19th century. A prolific art critic, an occasional poet (a seeming requirement of the times), he was a portrait sitter extraordinaire. Besides Boldini, he sat for Whistler, de Laszlo, Paul Helleu, and though a supporter of Sargent's, peculiarly never sat for him. 

He is one of the models for Proust's character Baron de Charlus in In Search of Lost Time. Some of the moments of greatest arrogance which lead to acts of cruel spitefulness are loosely based on Montesquieu's own behavior. He was quite hurt by Proust's interpretation of him–after all he had introduced Proust to Society–but must have understood the note of truth if he was able to recognize himself.

Montesquieu was friends with Mallarmé, Sarah Berhnhardt, Paul Verlaine, as well as socialites of the period beyond count, where my Wooster is really more a stay-at-home recluse who seems happy with my company alone. The Comte de Montesquieu would no doubt be horrified that I never do my nails or personally know Anna Wintour. Though my Wooster does not get into any of the scrapes from which Jeeves rescued the fictional Wooster, I do feel that I awake to serve him breakfast and am reprimanded if supper is tardy.

As TS Eliot explained better than I can, the naming of cats is a difficult matter and to get it correct is not done. But a name that's suggestive, that allures, is the best of the options to come. So I point laughing to a foolish Etonian, and another finds him in a grander salon-ian. But these human names are false. Seeing him calm and reflective I wish we all had what Montesquieu appears to have in Boldini's portrait, what Wooster would lose without Jeeves, what a cat seems to have with ease:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable.
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Changes in The Scandal of Susan Sontag

The conference on "The Scandal of Susan Sontag" offered an impressive array of feminist scholars. I hesitated for a moment before attributing that socio-political label, but I do not think any of them would be offended. The speakers had been Sontag's peers and significant advocates of a free path for women, even if they might have occasionally disagreed with her particular point of view. The first panel discussed her recently published, and seriously edited, journals from the years leading up to 1963 when she was thirty, had completed her education, and was just beginning to experience the success and fame she would embrace in the years to come.

One of the last questions posed by a member of the audience asked if there were any concerns that the journals revealed a side of Sontag far more uncertain than the fierce and imperious image she had presented in life. That absolute certainty had been a part of her success; she never worried about angering people with her opinions, even sometimes seemed to revel in the discomfort she caused. Were they not worried that we would begin to think of Susan Sontag differently with this new information? I was surprised by the question.

Why would we think of her now as any had thought of her then? Why should that be important?

I don't look at Manet's Olympia with the horror it caused the French when displayed in the 1865 Salon.

A quote from the Picturesque Lottery for the Salon of 1783, is quite clear in fact that we change the way we look at things: "Up to now we only expected amusement and neatness from their brushes; [women artists] show today vigor and nobility. They are finally the worthy rivals of our sex; and men, who had previously assumed their own talents to be superior in all respects, can from now on worry about real competition."

In fact, Susan Sontag was an advocate of change, which she discusses in some detail in her 1964 essay "One culture and the new sensibility". She recognized that art was "becoming increasingly the terrain of the specialist" and saw that as a part of the transformation of the function of art. Art's reference to the production of art, as well as its conscious use of other materials, produced an inter-textuality that was often only meaningful to students of art. She grants the discomfort caused by artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Albers. Their collaborations, improvisations were "changing the ground rules which most of us employ to recognize a work of art". For her, "art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility". This new sensibility was of great importance to her, and a topic to which she returned in her continuing considerations of what would eventually be termed cultural studies. She participated in the new sensibility with her own works, but largely for her support of the new works being produced, glorying that the "seriousness of modern art precludes pleasure in the familiar sense". A new sense was encouraged because that is what great art has always done.

The culture changes and works of art change too. Those who have come before become a part of the canon, or not. Some get forgotten for a while, relegated to obscurity until there is a reconsideration, for example Vermeer. Others' riotousness is incorporated into the education system so that Whistler, and Susan Sontag, can be found on most college programs, in one department or another, despite their once shocking life choices. Nothing remains scandalous if kept in the spotlight long enough.

I do not consider Susan Sontag particularly shocking, though I disagree with some of her views. I don't like Dali (with the exception of Hallucinogenic Toreador) but am not disturbed by him as the conservative communists were with his The Great Masturbator. I can't stand Jeff Koons' work enough that I don't even try to understand his 'art'. Yes, I did just put that word in quotes in reference to what he does. In time, the culture views the life and work of the artist in a new light.

The next generation comes along. The world finds new wars. People change. Art changes.

Whistler's gems

As much as I admire Roger Fry, I wish that I might never disagree with him. His aesthetic theory offers a balance between the appreciation of pure beauty and moral value that I embrace as well. His writing presents a man who kept learning ever year, and so inevitably altered his opinion as he reconsidered works of art in new contexts, only then to revisit them again later and change his opinion once more. I admire the flexibility of his mind and his wit.

Have I sufficiently prove to myself how tentative I am to disagree with him? Yet, here I am heart broken that he did not appreciate the later works of Whistler, which are to me precious jewels, each and every one. They are not sharp crystals in the spotlight glory of a Tiffany window. They are instead the rough cut gems that remind us that such value comes from deep within the earth, mined with diligence to uncover from the rock and the dirt something ancient and precious.

The last paintings are vague and shadowy...even more so than his well known larger nocturnes. They are covered in fog, morning mist and mood. They are small teardrops from an authentic spirit who could no longer paint fireworks but had still the tenacity to show us a vision of melancholy that asks no pity, inspiring this art lover to return many times to the room of his miniature works in the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian. They are always there to comfort me, affirming that my existential loneliness, my poverty of means need not slip into a poverty of endurance.

Some thoughts on the colors in Mallarme's La Pipe

The prose poem, La Pipe, by Mallarme minimizes color. The world described is foggy, dusty, and darkened. The two exceptions “les feuilles bleues” and “les bras rouges” are notable in contrast. I do not understand “les feuilles bleues du soleil” but can see the red and weathered arms of a hardworking woman who brings him coal. The undetermined shades between black and white, in brows and grays, set a tone for the poem. A tone that can perhaps best be seen in the paintings of Whistler, with whom Mallarmé was friendly.

Whistler studied painting in Paris and then based himself in London. In his prints of the river Thames, Whistler presents subtle tonal variations that seem interested in the qualities of water and air over matter and substance.

There is no research provided here that confirms a connection between “La Pipe” and Whistler’s paintings. This reader, however, of Mallarmé’s poem could not help but offer a visual simulacrum of the poem as a means of enhancing the reading experience. The poem evokes a time and place, and does so intentionally. These paintings likewise offer an ephemeral experience of a time and place and may perhaps bring another reader to a heightened appreciation of Mallarmé’s poem.

This picture, Nocturne The Thames, Battersea (1878) evokes the winter that Mallarme describes, “mouillé de bruine et noirci de fume” with the shades of shadows. It is also set on the water as Mallarme describes himself “grellotant sur le pont du steamer” and then the “riches dames…/sont dechiquetes par l’air de la mer.”

The drawing, By the Balcony (1896), is how I imagine Mallarme wrapped in blankets during this cold winter when he “revu par la fenêtre ces/arbres malades” even though the view from the window here is at an elevation. The smudged pencil marks at the bottom of the drawing are suggestive of “la poussière du charbon.” There is not enough of the room to tie it absolutely to “une chambre/sombre aux meubles de cuir saupoudres” but the intention is just to offer a visual hint of the poem.

Whistler and Mallarmé were ruthless in pushing the boundaries of their respective arts and establishing the importance of form over content. Neither Whistler nor Mallarmé were interested in developing a story that the reader or viewer could narrate as an understanding of the picture or poem. Neither were they interested in producing art that did not challenge the recipient. Whistler’s paintings are not intended to be views of a bridge or waterfront but rather to produce a visual effect that is possible only through fine art. Mallarmé was not attempting to describe an event or experience but enliven and renew words. In “La Pipe” the words are descriptive but describe nothing. Nothing happens but a memory. The words have produced no action; in fact, the reader has gone backwards in time to “Hier” and arrived at the nowhere that is the infinite eternal.

Between the first word, “hier” and the last word, “toujours”, we are always saying goodbye to the past, capturing the present only through senses that send us into memories. A pipe that can extend the smoking experience, stretching the present into the future, is also liable to the past. Even we, the reader, are not permitted the present of reading the poem since we are asked to journey into the past with the poet. Time is the gray between the black and white of then and later. The fog and the dust of the London scene are like our own experience of time, fading and unclear.