The Summer Visitors

"And my heart ached as never before at the thought that in that tomb, erected, it seemed, to guarantee the perpetual repose of the man who commissioned it - his and his descendants - only one, among all the Finzi-Continis I had known and loved had managed to gain that repose."  - from The Garden Of  The Finiz-Continis by Giorgio Bassani, translated from the Italian by William Weaver, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich: 1977, originally published in 1962.

You could read The Garden of the Finzi-Contins at any time of year but it strikes me as the perfect novel for the end of summer.
The year is  1957 and  in the northern city of Ferrara, a man stands before an untended cemetery vault.  Giorgio is meditating on the fate of wealthy, reclusive Finizi-Continis, friends of his childhood. They are all dead but their absence is more painful than the presence of their remains would be.
Giogio had attended the public school while the neighboring Finzi-Contini children were tutored at home, appearing only at exam times. When Jews were expelled from public tennis courts, in the summer of 1938, the Finzi-Continis invited outsiders to play on their private courts. Behind the walls of their compound a fragile peace existed, rich with the music of Scarlatti, and Fats Waller, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Protected by their social position, the Finzi-Contini family believe that their lives can continue undisturbed, as  political conflict encroaches. Alberto and Micol, young adults, find solace in the artificial world of their garden. Daily tennis games become the only social life they have.  Micol, in particular, fervently rejects the uncertainty and danger that lies outside the compound. She tells Giorgio that the future means nothing to her, only the beauty of today (le bel aujour'hui) and "the dear sainted past."  Giorgio's father, bitterly realistic, sees things very differently.  "They basically welcome the anti-Semitic laws... with their broad smiles, low bows... and the garden finally opened to everyone... converted into a ghetto under their noble patronage."

Now, the narrator tells us that he lost touch with the Finzi-Continis., that the family was taken away to a holding camp at Fossoli and then deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Only Alberto's remains rest in the family vault; he  was the lucky one who died of consumption  the year before.  
A short novel but surely not slight, The Garden Of The Finzi-Continis evokes the dream world of youth where summer never ends and the machinations of a dictator are no more consequential than a passing cloud.  The Jews of Italy could date their existence back to the Roman Empire.  When Mussolini took power in 1922, they were  quite assimilated into Italian society.  Although historians have debated Mussolini's enthusiasm for Hitler's policies, in the end the result was similar.
Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000), a native of Ferrara, studied history with Benedetto Croce, was arrested for his participation in the anti-Fascist resistance and, after the war ended, moved to Rome where he worked as an editor and discovered Tomasi di Lampedusa's great novel of the Risorgimento, The Leopard. His own novel was published in 1962.  An ambulance driver in Italy during the war, William Weaver stayed on for several years, befriending the writers whose works he has since translated.  His English version  of Il gardino del  Finzi-Contins  was published by Atheneum  in 1965.  Vittorio da Sici directed the film version of the book in 1971.

Image:

Camillo Innocenti - The Summer Visitors, 1912, National Gallery of Santa Lucia, Rome.

"Some Hard Captious Star": Djuna Barnes

"Someday beneath some hard
captious star -
Spreading its light a little
Over far,
We'll know you for the woman
That you are."
- From Fifth Avenue Up in The Book Of Repulsive Women by Djuna Barnes,New York: 1915.

"Reading Djuna Barnes is like reading a foreign language, which you understand." - Marianne Moore

Before she was a novelist and before she had Paris, Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was a journalist and women's suffrage militant in Greenwich Village. She published The Book Of Repulsive Women in 1915.  In later years the book's extreme frankness about 'the new woman' embarrassed Barnes  but it remains one of her most often reprinted works.

“I came to Europe to get culture.  Is this culture I’m getting?  Then I might as well go back to Greenwich Village and rot there.” - Djuna Barnes (There are alternate versions, but this is the one given by publisher Matthew Josephson.)

Djuna Barnes is famed for her modernist fiction, particularly the novels Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1936). Nightwood was hailed by T. S. Eliot as the greatest novel written by a woman in English.   Ryder  was banned twice in Great Britain, even the expurgated version.  

 

Her father told her that it would take the rest of her life to untangle the knots of her childhood.  In the event, it wasn’t long enough.

Wald Barnes dabbled in music and painting, but devoted more energy to the practice of polygamy.  His house was always full of women: his wife Elizabeth, a violinist, his mother Zadel who was convinced that her son was a misunderstood genius, and assorted mistresses. 

The family lived in Cornwall-on-Hudson, a retreat for the New York intelligentsia.  Nevertheless, Wald found it prudent to keep his children out of school to avoid public scrutiny.  Eccentricity descended to moral turpitude when the sixteen year old Djuna was raped by a neighbor, possibly with her father’s connivance. 

Four years later Elizabeth took her four children and moved to Brooklyn.  There Djuna studied drawing at Pratt Institute until the family's need for money forced her to find a job.  First a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, Barnes joined the competitive world of Manhattan freelancers. 

She moved to Greenwich Village, but still felt herself an outsider, despite successes, poems  published in Harper’s and drawings exhibited at Mabel Dodge’s Fifth Avenue salon.   She wrote in her journal,  “- And yet I was in awe of no one.  I attempted not to show the arrogance of my upper lip that would persist in an attempt to curl, probably because I wanted to cry and wouldn’t, and I felt cold because I wanted so dreadfully to feel warm and hopeful and one with them.”  

A talent for finding representative individuals is the mark of a superior journalist. In Barnes' hands the interview became an art form.  Her subjects strike us as startlingly contemporary: the two-career couple; the sex symbol; the preacher as performer; the celebrity fashion designer. 

Barnes tripped from uptown dance halls to lowdown Coney Island., finding a city of dance-mad people, the fans of Vernon and Irene Castle. A professional husband and wife dance team, the Castles made their  debut in 1912, introducing new dances and igniting a ballroom dance craze that swept the country. They danced on Broadway in Irving Berlin's Watch Your Step (1915). In Yes, the Vernon Castles Have a Home and They Occasionally Tango Past It, Barnes captures the hectic life of the airborne duo as they perfect the dual-career marriage.

Barnes also recognized the travails of the sex symbol. Lillian Russell, the woman who made the 1890s ‘Gay’, was wildly successful at stage, screen and light opera yet she also endured failed marriages and relentless public prying into her personal life, which included a long-running relationship with the notorious "Diamond” Jim Brady. In I Could Never Be Lonely Without A Husband, Barnes questioned Russell about her home life. Russell parried with, "So many pleasing episodes of one's life are spoiled by shouting. You never heard of an unhappy marriage unless the neighbors have heard it first."

Barnes was clearly delighted with her interlocutor in Nothing Amuses Coco Chanel After Midnight.. Chanel allowed Barnes to see her hardness as well as her charm. "The figure is more important than the face, and more important than the figure is the means by which you keep it."

She lied her way into an interview with the elusive impresario Florenz Ziegfeld at the height of his fame in 1914.  The man who adapted the Folies Bergere for an audience that wanted its women idealized as well as exposed (a little) explained one of the French songs in his show to Barnes.  “A vampire is a good woman with a bad reputation, or rather a good woman who has had possibilities and wasted them." He could be describing Nightwood's protagonist, Robin Vote.

Refusing to be confined to the women's pages, Barnes covered night courts, prisons, and the lives of elderly workers.  This  undoubtedly explains why her account of How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed is so matter of fact as it describes her own harrowing ordeal. Barnes convinced the New York City Police Department to let her undergo the same punishment meted out to the militant British feminists she admired. The resulting article documented her ordeal. "The spirit was betrayed by the body's weakness. There it is - the outraged will. If I, playacting, felt my being burning with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my own functions, how they who suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror must have flamed at the violation of the sanctuaries of their spirits.”

Fifty years before a man in a white suit announced the arrival of a New Journalism, Djuna Barnes had done it all.

Two collections of the journalism of Djuna Barnes, with her illustrations are publsihed by Sun & Moon Press: 

New York (1913-1921), Los Angeles: 1989

Interviews (1914-1931), Los Angeles: 1985.

Images:

1.  unidentified photographer - Djuna Barnes, c. 1921, courtesy of New Directions.

2. Djuna Barnes - drawing for The Book of Repulsive Women, New York, Guido Bruno: 1915.
3. Edith Bry -  Adolescent Dream, 1911, Loeb Art Center, New York University.
4. Djuna Barnes - Portrait of Marsden Hartley, 1916, New York Morning Telegraph.
5. William Glackens - The Orange Car At Washington Square - Greenwich Village, 1910, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
6. Maurice Brange - Djuna barnes And Solita Solano - Au Cafe - Paris, 1922, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris.
7. Cecilia Beaux - After The Meeting, 1914, Toledo Museum of Art.

In A Japanese Mood: Adelaide Crapsey

"Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
I read your heart in a book.

And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.

And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.

 

And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:
Mother of God, I’m so little a thing,
Let me sing longer,
Only a little longer.
 

And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand. " - Adelaide Crapsey by Carl  Sandburg

There are echoes of Japanese tanka and haiku  in Adelaide Crapsey's cinquains,  the five line poem.of her invention.  Crapsey wrote them during a brief three year period from 1911 to 1913.   After her early death from tuberculosis in 1914, other poets like Carl Sandburg (above) and Lola Ridge kept her work alive, following her example and testifying to her continuing presence in their own work.  In her academic career, Crapsey  became a scholar of meter and rhythm, publishing a major work on metrics shortly before a physical collapse.   It's all there in  her version of the classic tale of Susannah And The Elders.

"Why do

You thus devise

Against her?"  "For that

She is beuautiful, delicate,

Therefore."

"The old

Old winds that blew

When chaos was, what do

They tell the clattered tress that I

Should weep."

Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914)  was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Rochester, New York, the third of nine children of an Episcopal priest, whose areer ended with his expulsion from the clergy. She attended Vassar College and taught at Smith College until she became ill . Artist Dwight William Tryon, also an admirer of Japanese arts, taught at Smith with Crapsey. 

The strengths of her combination of diverse aesthetic interests are evident in Blue Hyancinths.

"In your
Curled petals what ghosts
Of blue headlands and seas,
What perfumed immortal breath sighing
Of Greece."

Although she taught at an elite college, Crapsey conducted her artistic career outside the mainstream of American culture.  Long years of illness punctuated her short life.  In her best poems, we experience the interior life of a lone individual as she contemplates the the passing, never to be retrieved, moment.

"Still as

On the windless nights

The moon-cast shadows are,

So still will be my heart when I

Am dead." 

"Look up …

From bleakening hills

Blows down the light, first breath

Of wintry wind…look up, and scent 

The snow!"

"Listen

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisped, break from the trees

And fall." 

"The cold

With steely clutch

Grips all the land…alack,

The little people in the hills

Will die!" 

"Well and
If day on day
Follows, and weary year
On year…and ever days and years…
Well?"

 "Not these hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these."

 excerpted from THE COMPLETE POEMS AND COLLECTED LETTERS OF ADELAIDE CRAPSEY, edited by Susan Sutton Smith, Albany, State University of New York Press: 1977 – Alfred A. Knopf: 1922.

Images:

1.Philip Bacon - Kesa, 1900, National Gallery of Art, Melbourne.

2. Dwight William Tryon - Dawn, 1893, Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C.

3. Dwight William Tryon - Winter, 1893, Freer Gallery, Washington, D.C.

4. Wilhelmina Seegmuller - Flower Study, c. 1908, Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The Master's House

He doesn't even rate an entry in the Grove Dictionary of Art but in his day the American painter Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939)  was the leader of the expatriate art colony that settled in the small Norman village of Giverny.  They all wanted to be near Claude Monet but only Frieseke succeeded in renting the house next door on the River Epte.   

Like his idol, Frieseke painted certain images repeatedly.  Judging by his paintings, Frieseke's wife (who often modeled for him) either possessed several striped dresses or must have become quite bored with wearing the same outfit on so many occasions.

Frieseke's painting of the house is one of his stronger works, as his canvases tended toward the overly  busy.  As you can see from the contemporary photograph below, the house is much the same but the gardens have grown formidable.  Frieseke also liked to set up his easel in the yard by the bank of the Epte and also shared Monet's fascination with all things Japanese.  

The Friesekes came to Giverny in 1906 and stayed for fourteen years.  Then they bought a farm in nearby Mesnil-sur-Blangy where the midwesterner died on the eve of World War II.

 Images:
1. Frederick Carl Frieseke  - The House at Giverny, 1912, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.
2. Frederick Carl Frieseke - On The River Epte, undated, Sotheby's, NYC.
3. Jean Baptiste-Leroux - Garden at Giverny,  undated, Collection Jean-Baptiste Leroux, Paris.

Just Another Day in The Studio

The romance of the artist as genius has for long been a story of male tribulation and triumph.  Here in the Roman studio of visiting French painter Alfred Jules Giess (1901-1973) it looks more like it takes the concerted efforts of a phalanx of women to make possible this one picture.  The model poses (when else does a woman lie with her weight resting on one hip and her other slightly elevated, like an offering?).  The wife bends over her mending, close enough to monitor the child rolling its ball on the floor.  Meanwhile, we see a nursemaid taking a baby into another room.  Without knowing much about the artist, I am torn between two thoughts: either this man was utterly clueless or he had tongue firmly in cheek when he painted this picture.

Image: Alfred Jules Giess  - My Studio In Rome, 1932, La Piscine - Musee Andre Diligent, Roubaix.

Queues de Paon

In French  cobblestones are pavés ronds or round paving stones.  But they are also something more.  The French also call them by another name, the more evocative queues de paon which  means literally, peacock feathers.

 

I like to think that it is no accident that it was the immigrant Brassai who looked for romance in the humble pavement of Parisian streets and the native Frenchman, Marcel; Bovis, who was blase about the stones of the city.

Albert Besnard's bravura watercolor/pastel of a nude woman trailing peacock feathers bridges the divide in its ambiguity.  From the placement of her hand you can infer that she is holding the feathers but, on closer inspection, maybe.  She may be a representative of an as yet uncatalogued species, a kind of human-peacock.

 

This gift for seeing beyond the prosaic in our surroundings  is longstanding, from the 17th century court artist Jacques Bailly whose peacock feathers become part of the foliage to contemporary artist Marie-Anne Hamaide.  Hamaide's peacock imagery is created in the Turkish tradition of ebru or cloud painting.  Often used to marbelize endpapers in books, the technique invites the imagination to wander, much as Brassai's deserted nighttime street does.

 Images:
1. Brassai (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) - Le Rousseau serpent, 1932, Pompidou Center, Paris.
2. Marcel Bovis - Buvette O. Brisset, 1934,  Mediatheque, Paris.
3. Albert Besnard - Femme nu avec queue de paon, 1892, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
4. Jacques Bailly - Le Labyrinth de Versailles, 17th century, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.
5 Marie-Anne Hamaide, motif peigne, 2009, Paros.