John Soane’s problem was that he couldn’t stop collecting fantastic things and cramming them into his house on Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. Soane is long gone, but the house (actually three adjoining houses that he ingeniously remodeled and strung together to accommodate his ever-expanding collection) is now — as it has been for 160-some years — the eclectic Sir John Soane’s Museum, and it is still chock-full of fascinating, often bizarre stuff. In deference to his wishes, the look of the house and the way the objects are arranged has been left virtually unchanged since Soane gave it to his nation (instead of his disappointing, “flint-hearted” sons) in 1833.
Soane was one of the late 18th and early 19th centuries’ most prominent, prolific architects — he designed the Bank of England, among numerous other public and private buildings — and walking through his rambling home is much like wandering through his quirky, acquisitive brain, or the world’s largest Joseph Cornell box, or a multistory wunderkammern. He was one of those splendid and productive wackos who make life worth living for the rest of us by leaving behind something astonishing to remind us that the secret to being interesting is being interested.
The compulsion to collect seems almost genetic in the English, and there is no city in the world that houses more collections — great and small, scholarly and fanciful — than London. Collecting is a way of pointing, of selecting something, holding it up, mounting it, encasing it, of calling special attention to it with the hope that your interest will be contagious, and that others will see the same importance in the thing that you see. In the case of Sir John Soane’s collection, his still very much alive enthusiasm is hard to resist, as is the architectural exuberance with which he transformed his house.
Working with narrow hallways and mostly small rooms, Soane employed mirrors (many of them round and convex), skylights, mezzanines, glass, brick floors, curling staircases, alcoves, walls made of giant doors and various other architectural sleights of hand to give the crowded quarters a feeling of spaciousness and grand scale that is entirely illusory. (The only wide-open spaces on view are Canaletto’s panoramic portrait of Venice and the marmalade skies in several paintings by England’s romantic god of the sable hairbrush, J.M.W. Turner, who was Soane’s fishing buddy.)
The point of Soane’s collection was, so he said, to educate aspiring young architects, but it’s really a monument to the state of wonder and a celebration of glorious relics and beautiful fragments, especially, though not exclusively, architectural ones (“Cast from the cornice of the temple of Castor in the Roman Forum, AD6,” states the hand-printed label on one plaster confection). The selections, of course, were filtered through his singular sensibility, which was sometimes peculiar, but never dull.
Soane’s vast cabinet of curiosities, which you enter through a heavy green door (admission is free; you ring a buzzer to be let in, then sign your name in a book while a man in a mold-colored lab coat supervises), is packed with more than 3,000 objects. These include plaster casts, bronzes, gems, jewelry, medals, Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, an 8,000-volume library, silver, clocks, barometers, Peruvian pottery, Chinese ceramics, all manner of sculpture, paintings and drawings (including Hogarth’s picaresque eight-canvas series, “The Rake’s Progress,” and another series, “The Election,” drawings by Piranesi and a winning red crayon sketch of a dog done by Rubens), roughly 150 architectural models, the head of a mummy, mummified cats, the sarcophagus of Seti I (which was let in through a hole Soane knocked in the back wall) and a mummified rat. Oh, and the tomb of Mrs. Soane’s lap dog is outside in what’s known as the Monk’s Yard. “Alas, Poor Fanny” reads the inscription.
The tidy chaos of Soane’s Museum is what makes it so enchanting — unlike other museums, the collection is not organized according to any perceivable linear or thematic thread. He arranged his exquisite hodgepodge the way he wished, juxtaposing objects for his own aesthetic satisfaction. Great cooks don’t bother with recipes. Chronology, style, country of origin and similar concerns were of little interest to Soane as organizing principles. It is a welcome contrast to, say, the British Museum, which bludgeons the visitor with its daunting volume of antiquities.
After walking through Soane’s great house three times, I’m finally sated. Across the street I sit on a bench in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a large rectangular park, and watch a young man and woman standing in the middle of the sunlit walkway necking while an older woman takes pictures of them. Sitting on the bench next to mine are two men in suits talking on cell phones, though not to each other. A teenage girl walks by wearing a daffodil behind her ear. She’s followed by a rakish Great Dane decked out in a red neckerchief.
Spring has come early to London this year and either the “Cool Britannia” marketing campaign is jamming my radar or there is indeed a new climate of optimism in the city. And why not? Hyde Park is in blossom, New Labour is on the job, the pub flower boxes are overspilling, the Spice Girls (say what you will, they seem harmless) are coptering off to Highgrove for tea with the young princes, traditional British irony has a new polish on it (Nick Hornby is producing one shining novel after another) and there may be a real peace in Ireland. Credit for every bit of the above, many seem to think, should go to the supernaturally buoyant prime minister, Tony Blair. “The sense of well-being he generates is as undeniable as it is infuriatingly undeniable,” grumped the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, one of the few outposts of the Fourth Estate that still supports the Conservative Party. And the Telegraph’s former editor, the right-wing and stupendously named Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, concedes, “I am disposed to like him, but I don’t quite know what I am liking.”
Even the old gray Times has acquired an
ingenuous, rose-tinted outlook: Its report on the Parole Board’s
refusal to free murderer Reggie Kray, half of the monstrous Kray
Twins — the psychopathic, sword-wielding ’60s gang lords of the East
End — is almost weepy when it tells how Kray’s hopes have been
“dashed” and he won’t be able to “settle with his new wife in East
Anglia …where he planned to run a recording studio.” (Boo-hoo!)
Reggie Kray’s disappointment notwithstanding, life seems good in
London nowadays, or at least the possibility that it can be is under
serious consideration by the city’s inhabitants. That’s why I’m a
little shocked when some thug shoves me aside one morning on the
steps of my hotel, the Royal Garden next to Kensington Palace.
“You want to move now,” he whispers gruffly.
“Yeah, you bloody
wanker,” I’m about to say, “and you want to stop using that goat
cheese toothpaste.” But I don’t because suddenly there’s a flurry of
activity and a whole flock of edgy security types — blue-suited
sleeve-talkers with cryptic-looking lapel pins — comes pouring out of
the Royal Garden’s revolving door. Cameras click, walkie-talkies
squawk and police escorts in fluorescent chartreuse jackets rev
their motorcycles meaningfully. In the middle of the mob is Japanese
Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. He looks tired and worried, and who
wouldn’t in his position? The Japanese economy is in a power dive
headed for hell and threatening to take the rest of the world with it
(he must lie awake nights wishing he were Tony Blair). What’s worse,
a grumpy, tousled Jacques Chirac, the president of France, is now
standing next to me on the steps waiting impatiently for Hashimoto’s
dark blue Rover Sterling sedan to move on so his dark blue Rover
Sterling sedan can pull up, and they can all go through the same
choreography again only in reverse 10 blocks away, where the Asia-Europe
meeting is being held.
Once we get the world leaders on their
way, a black cab pulls up and I climb in. My time’s short in London
so I take cabs everywhere, even though it gets expensive. As I ride,
I keep a running list of pub names — the whole reads like a guest
register for a mate-swapping mixer on Noah’s Ark: The Dog and Duck,
The Elusive Camel, The Essex Serpent, The Falcon, The Greyhound, The
Griffin, The Grouse and Claret, The Intrepid Fox, The Magpie, The
Jugged Hare, The Old Red Lion, The Peacock, The Polar Bear (not to be
confused with The White Bear), The Porcupine, The Rat and Parrot, The
Stag, The Hogshead, The Nag’s Head, Queens Head and Artichoke (winner
in the surrealism category), The Antelope, The Cat and Canary, the
always comforting Friend at Hand (somewhere near Russell Square, I
think) and overall winner for the most lyrical moniker of the bunch:
The Moon Under Water.
As we drive past the Prince Albert Memorial
(now undergoing restoration and sheathed in scaffolding, it resembles
nothing so much as a Nebraska grain silo), the cabby and I exchange a
few pleasantries before he asks, “California, isn’t it? Your accent?”
“You got it,” I say. “Good ear.” And off we go on the subject of
accents.
“They’re all trying to change them now, you know, it’s
the fashion,” he says. “We have a new one here in London. They call
it the Estuary accent. You hear it in people like Emma Thompson
– middle- or upper-class folks trying to sound lower class. Even the
queen has changed her accent. If you ever listened to her early radio
addresses, she sounded all high-pitched and like she had grapes in
her mouth and now, you know, she doesn’t at all. It’s quite the
fashion, you see.”
London must have some of the world’s most
erudite cabbies. “This is Westminster Bridge we’re crossing,” he
says. “Have you heard of Wordsworth?” Have I heard of Wordsworth? How
charming. Should I take that as a compliment, or simply
acknowledgment of the fact that I’m a Californian and therefore a
feather-headed, illidurat twit? I let it hang, knowing that I’ve got
a bloke at the wheel who can fill silence quickly and without my
assistance. “Wordsworth wrote a poem about this bridge in 1802, about
the view from it,” he continues, not waiting for me to answer his
question. “Do you know it? Lovely really.” And he proceeds to quote
the entire poem (flawlessly, I later discover) while a cloudburst
makes it impossible to see what Wordsworth got so fired up about. In
any case, it starts like this:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent bare …
“It’s a monstrosity,” the cabby
tells me. He’s talking about South Bank Centre, the massive
architectural calamity perched next to the Thames at the end of
Hungerford Bridge. We’ve just pulled up in front. The Centre is a
giant concrete arts and theater complex built in the 1960s. The cabby
is right. It’s magnificently ugly. One building is the Hayward
Gallery, where I’m about to catch the last day of “Francis Bacon: The
Human Body,” a major retrospective of paintings by the artist — he
died in 1992 — whose emotionally ferocious oils make the work of
Hieronymus Bosch look like Muzak for the eyes in comparison. The show
has attracted over 120,000 people in its two-month run. As I walk in,
there are about 400 waiting in the ticket line, all of whom glare at
me bitterly as I skip up to the will-call table, collect my
previously purchased ticket and leisurely saunter into the gallery,
glancing back just once with a
guess we’ve learned a little something about planning ahead haven’t we now smile. They all look back at me with a consolidated
interstellar death beam, but it’s too late, I’m already inside.
Bacon’s work is majestic and wrenching — famously so. But the
dazzling nightmare solemnity of his subject matter — the screaming
popes that most people know him by, and the anguished figures, some
based on the early sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge –
is lightened and made bearable, even beautiful, by Bacon’s
eloquent use of color. Standing in the middle of a room surrounded by
his giant gilt-framed canvases makes it possible to imagine what the
woodcuts of Japan’s ukiyo-e period might have looked like if they’d
been conjured in the nether world by an Irishman under siege from the
hellhounds.
Still, though Bacon’s imagery is often grim, it can
also be funny, bittersweet and bawdy in the street opera sense of
Kabuki. Often the paint is applied so sparingly that there is a
distinct Shroud of Turin effect (if the Shroud could shriek), as if
the faces or figures were photographically blasted onto the canvas
the way silhouettes were imprinted on the walls of Hiroshima by the
flash of the atomic bomb. However, the detonation in this case took
place inside Bacon’s ground zero brain. “I would like my pictures to
look as if a human being had passed between them,” he once remarked,
“like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace
of the past events as the snail leaves its slime.” And they do.
Ironically, or maybe not, in the cab on the way back I read an
article that might have amused Francis Bacon. An artist named
Anthony-Noel Kelly, a nephew of the Duke of Norfolk, has just been
sentenced to nine months in jail for stealing human body parts from
the Royal College of Surgeons and using them to cast sculptures
covered in silver and gold. According to the Daily Telegraph, Kelly
made off with “three heads, part of a brain, six arms, 10 legs and
feet and sections of three torsos … One leg, nicknamed Hopalong, was
kept in a tower room at his family’s estate in Kent.”
I hop out of the cab at the Victoria and
Albert Museum mostly because on the British
Airways flight from San Francisco the lovely
sky-blue Valium I took to lower me into Limboland had no effect
whatsoever. Consequently, I stayed up late sipping luscious claret and
watching “Mrs. Brown.” I now feel a certain obligation to the royal
couple to give their collection at least a cursory going-over.
Time’s running out, but there is one small object I must see at the
V&A. It resides in a poorly lit glass case in
the Fakes and Forgeries Gallery. For reasons I can’t quite
articulate, this specimen sums up what is so fascinating about
fascination and the obsessive acts of those who become fascinated,
and the charlatans who prey on them. The V&A’s Fakes and Forgeries
has a variety of counterfeit paintings and ceramics and items of
supposed religious significance that are not what they appear to be.
Some are hundreds of years old, and most have been executed with
nearly as much craft and artistry as the originals. Two-thirds of the
way through the gallery, I find the one I’m looking for. It was the
Wordsworth cabby who told me about it. He was adamant that I see it.
I’d mentioned to him that I was interested in unusual collections.
“Well then,” he said, “you’d like my collection.”
“What’s it a collection of?” I asked him.
“Spurs. Spurs of historical
significance. I’ve got over 300 of them. Even have a few from the
U.S. Civil War.”
“Really.”
“Yes, but this one I’m telling you
about, I’d love to have. I go see it sometimes. You ought to take a
look if you have the time, really ought to.”
And I have and now
here it is in front of me, just beneath the glass — a tarnished
metal spur embedded in a branch. The spur itself is authentic. It was
found on the battlefield of Agincourt, where, during the Hundred Years
War, the vastly outnumbered English under the command of Henry V
defeated the French in October 1415. Sometime in the 19th century
some idle, imaginative fellow decided to soak a tree root and bend it
around the spur, but why? To imbue it with greater drama perhaps. To
give it a more direct link with the violence and speed and
person-to-person savageness of battle. Or maybe just to heighten its
appeal as a way of upping the price to a collector. Finding the
great centerpieces of history is relatively easy. But it’s these
little oddities from the fringes of history, flotsam and jetsam from
the peripheries of human drama, that seem to get hold of certain
people. The cabby, for example.
“How did you come to collect
spurs, of all things?” I’d asked him.
“Well, I started as a lad,
you see. Like my wife said to a friend of ours who asked the same
question, ‘I reckon if it wasn’t for some of Jimmy’s spurs here, a
lot of your big historical battles would never have happened. The
horses would’ve just stood there looking at each other.’ “
The
cabby laughed and I laughed and I think that even Jacques Chirac, who
was just walking in the Royal Garden Hotel as we drove up, was
laughing. However, the reason for Chirac’s laughter, it turned out,
was that he’d just spent part of the afternoon drinking pints and
shots at a pub. But Mr. Hashimoto, who I passed in the lobby, was not
laughing.
John Soane’s problem was that he couldn’t stop collecting
fantastic things and cramming them into his house on Lincoln’s Inn
Fields in London. Soane is long gone, but the house (actually three
adjoining houses that he ingeniously remodeled and strung together to
accommodate his ever-expanding collection) is now — as it has been
for 160-some years — the eclectic Sir John Soane’s Museum, and it is
still chock-full of fascinating, often bizarre stuff. In deference to
his wishes, the look of the house and the way the objects are
arranged has been left virtually unchanged since Soane gave it to his
nation (instead of his disappointing, “flint-hearted” sons) in 1833.
Soane was one of the late 18th and early 19th centuries’ most
prominent, prolific architects — he designed the Bank of England,
among numerous other public and private buildings — and walking
through his rambling home is much like wandering through his quirky,
acquisitive brain, or the world’s largest Joseph Cornell box, or a
multistory wunderkammern. He was one of those splendid and productive
wackos who make life worth living for the rest of us by leaving
behind something astonishing to remind us that the secret to being
interesting is being interested.
The compulsion to collect seems
almost genetic in the English, and there is no city in the world that
houses more collections — great and small, scholarly and fanciful –
than London. Collecting is a way of pointing, of selecting something,
holding it up, mounting it, encasing it, of calling special attention
to it with the hope that your interest will be contagious, and that
others will see the same importance in the thing that you see. In the
case of Sir John Soane’s collection, his still very much alive enthusiasm
is hard to resist, as is the architectural exuberance with which he
transformed his house.
Working with narrow hallways and mostly
small rooms, Soane employed mirrors (many of them round and convex),
skylights, mezzanines, glass, brick floors, curling staircases,
alcoves, walls made of giant doors and various other architectural
sleights of hand to give the crowded quarters a feeling of
spaciousness and grand scale that is entirely illusory. (The only
wide-open spaces on view are Canaletto’s panoramic portrait of Venice
and the marmalade skies in several paintings by England’s romantic
god of the sable hairbrush, J.M.W. Turner, who was Soane’s fishing
buddy.)
The point of Soane’s collection was, so he said, to
educate aspiring young architects, but it’s really a monument to the
state of wonder and a celebration of glorious relics and beautiful
fragments, especially, though not exclusively, architectural ones
(“Cast from the cornice of the temple of Castor in the Roman Forum,
AD6,” states the hand-printed label on one plaster confection). The
selections, of course, were filtered through his singular
sensibility, which was sometimes peculiar, but never dull.
Soane’s vast cabinet of curiosities, which you enter through a heavy
green door (admission is free; you ring a buzzer to be let in, then
sign your name in a book while a man in a mold-colored lab coat
supervises), is packed with more than 3,000 objects. These include plaster casts, bronzes, gems, jewelry, medals, Greek, Roman and
Egyptian antiquities, an 8,000-volume library, silver, clocks,
barometers, Peruvian pottery, Chinese ceramics, all manner of
sculpture, paintings and drawings (including Hogarth’s picaresque
eight-canvas series, “The Rake’s Progress,” and another series, “The
Election,” drawings by Piranesi and a winning red crayon sketch of a
dog done by Rubens), roughly 150 architectural models, the head of a
mummy, mummified cats, the sarcophagus of Seti I (which was let in
through a hole Soane knocked in the back wall) and a mummified rat.
Oh, and the tomb of Mrs. Soane’s lap dog is outside in what’s known
as the Monk’s Yard. “Alas, Poor Fanny” reads the inscription.
The
tidy chaos of Soane’s Museum is what makes it so enchanting — unlike
other museums, the collection is not organized according to any
perceivable linear or thematic thread. He arranged his exquisite
hodgepodge the way he wished, juxtaposing objects for his own
aesthetic satisfaction. Great cooks don’t bother with recipes.
Chronology, style, country of origin and similar concerns were of
little interest to Soane as organizing principles. It is a welcome
contrast to, say, the British Museum, which bludgeons the visitor
with its daunting volume of antiquities.
After walking through
Soane’s great house three times, I’m finally sated. Across the street
I sit on a bench in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a large rectangular park,
and watch a young man and woman standing in the middle of the sunlit
walkway necking while an older woman takes pictures of them. Sitting
on the bench next to mine are two men in suits talking on cell
phones, though not to each other. A teenage girl walks by wearing a
daffodil behind her ear. She’s followed by a rakish Great Dane decked
out in a red neckerchief.
Spring has come early to London this
year and either the “Cool Britannia” marketing campaign is jamming my
radar or there is indeed a new climate of optimism in the city. And
why not? Hyde Park is in blossom, New Labour is on the job, the pub
flower boxes are overspilling, the Spice Girls (say what you will,
they seem harmless) are coptering off to Highgrove for tea with the
young princes, traditional British irony has a new polish on it (Nick
Hornby is producing one shining novel after another) and there may
be a real peace in Ireland. Credit for every bit of the above, many
seem to think, should go to the supernaturally buoyant prime
minister, Tony Blair. “The sense of well-being he generates is as
undeniable as it is infuriatingly undeniable,” grumped the Sunday
Telegraph newspaper, one of the few outposts of the Fourth Estate
that still supports the Conservative Party. And the Telegraph’s
former editor, the right-wing and stupendously named Sir Peregrine
Worsthorne, concedes, “I am disposed to like him, but I don’t quite
know what I am liking.”
Even the old gray Times has acquired an
ingenuous, rose-tinted outlook: Its report on the Parole Board’s
refusal to free murderer Reggie Kray, half of the monstrous Kray
Twins — the psychopathic, sword-wielding ’60s gang lords of the East
End — is almost weepy when it tells how Kray’s hopes have been
“dashed” and he won’t be able to “settle with his new wife in East
Anglia …where he planned to run a recording studio.” (Boo-hoo!)
Reggie Kray’s disappointment notwithstanding, life seems good in
London nowadays, or at least the possibility that it can be is under
serious consideration by the city’s inhabitants. That’s why I’m a
little shocked when some thug shoves me aside one morning on the
steps of my hotel, the Royal Garden next to Kensington Palace.
“You want to move now,” he whispers gruffly.
“Yeah, you bloody
wanker,” I’m about to say, “and you want to stop using that goat
cheese toothpaste.” But I don’t because suddenly there’s a flurry of
activity and a whole flock of edgy security types — blue-suited
sleeve-talkers with cryptic-looking lapel pins — comes pouring out of
the Royal Garden’s revolving door. Cameras click, walkie-talkies
squawk and police escorts in fluorescent chartreuse jackets rev
their motorcycles meaningfully. In the middle of the mob is Japanese
Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. He looks tired and worried, and who
wouldn’t in his position? The Japanese economy is in a power dive
headed for hell and threatening to take the rest of the world with it
(he must lie awake nights wishing he were Tony Blair). What’s worse,
a grumpy, tousled Jacques Chirac, the president of France, is now
standing next to me on the steps waiting impatiently for Hashimoto’s
dark blue Rover Sterling sedan to move on so his dark blue Rover
Sterling sedan can pull up, and they can all go through the same
choreography again only in reverse 10 blocks away, where the Asia-Europe
meeting is being held.
Once we get the world leaders on their
way, a black cab pulls up and I climb in. My time’s short in London
so I take cabs everywhere, even though it gets expensive. As I ride,
I keep a running list of pub names — the whole reads like a guest
register for a mate-swapping mixer on Noah’s Ark: The Dog and Duck,
The Elusive Camel, The Essex Serpent, The Falcon, The Greyhound, The
Griffin, The Grouse and Claret, The Intrepid Fox, The Magpie, The
Jugged Hare, The Old Red Lion, The Peacock, The Polar Bear (not to be
confused with The White Bear), The Porcupine, The Rat and Parrot, The
Stag, The Hogshead, The Nag’s Head, Queens Head and Artichoke (winner
in the surrealism category), The Antelope, The Cat and Canary, the
always comforting Friend at Hand (somewhere near Russell Square, I
think) and overall winner for the most lyrical moniker of the bunch:
The Moon Under Water.
As we drive past the Prince Albert Memorial
(now undergoing restoration and sheathed in scaffolding, it resembles
nothing so much as a Nebraska grain silo), the cabby and I exchange a
few pleasantries before he asks, “California, isn’t it? Your accent?”
“You got it,” I say. “Good ear.” And off we go on the subject of
accents.
“They’re all trying to change them now, you know, it’s
the fashion,” he says. “We have a new one here in London. They call
it the Estuary accent. You hear it in people like Emma Thompson
– middle- or upper-class folks trying to sound lower class. Even the
queen has changed her accent. If you ever listened to her early radio
addresses, she sounded all high-pitched and like she had grapes in
her mouth and now, you know, she doesn’t at all. It’s quite the
fashion, you see.”
London must have some of the world’s most
erudite cabbies. “This is Westminster Bridge we’re crossing,” he
says. “Have you heard of Wordsworth?” Have I heard of Wordsworth? How
charming. Should I take that as a compliment, or simply
acknowledgment of the fact that I’m a Californian and therefore a
feather-headed, illidurat twit? I let it hang, knowing that I’ve got
a bloke at the wheel who can fill silence quickly and without my
assistance. “Wordsworth wrote a poem about this bridge in 1802, about
the view from it,” he continues, not waiting for me to answer his
question. “Do you know it? Lovely really.” And he proceeds to quote
the entire poem (flawlessly, I later discover) while a cloudburst
makes it impossible to see what Wordsworth got so fired up about. In
any case, it starts like this:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent bare …
“It’s a monstrosity,” the cabby
tells me. He’s talking about South Bank Centre, the massive
architectural calamity perched next to the Thames at the end of
Hungerford Bridge. We’ve just pulled up in front. The Centre is a
giant concrete arts and theater complex built in the 1960s. The cabby
is right. It’s magnificently ugly. One building is the Hayward
Gallery, where I’m about to catch the last day of “Francis Bacon: The
Human Body,” a major retrospective of paintings by the artist — he
died in 1992 — whose emotionally ferocious oils make the work of
Hieronymus Bosch look like Muzak for the eyes in comparison. The show
has attracted over 120,000 people in its two-month run. As I walk in,
there are about 400 waiting in the ticket line, all of whom glare at
me bitterly as I skip up to the will-call table, collect my
previously purchased ticket and leisurely saunter into the gallery,
glancing back just once with a
guess we’ve learned a little something about planning ahead haven’t we now smile. They all look back at me with a consolidated
interstellar death beam, but it’s too late, I’m already inside.
Bacon’s work is majestic and wrenching — famously so. But the
dazzling nightmare solemnity of his subject matter — the screaming
popes that most people know him by, and the anguished figures, some
based on the early sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge –
is lightened and made bearable, even beautiful, by Bacon’s
eloquent use of color. Standing in the middle of a room surrounded by
his giant gilt-framed canvases makes it possible to imagine what the
woodcuts of Japan’s ukiyo-e period might have looked like if they’d
been conjured in the nether world by an Irishman under siege from the
hellhounds.
Still, though Bacon’s imagery is often grim, it can
also be funny, bittersweet and bawdy in the street opera sense of
Kabuki. Often the paint is applied so sparingly that there is a
distinct Shroud of Turin effect (if the Shroud could shriek), as if
the faces or figures were photographically blasted onto the canvas
the way silhouettes were imprinted on the walls of Hiroshima by the
flash of the atomic bomb. However, the detonation in this case took
place inside Bacon’s ground zero brain. “I would like my pictures to
look as if a human being had passed between them,” he once remarked,
“like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace
of the past events as the snail leaves its slime.” And they do.
Ironically, or maybe not, in the cab on the way back I read an
article that might have amused Francis Bacon. An artist named
Anthony-Noel Kelly, a nephew of the Duke of Norfolk, has just been
sentenced to nine months in jail for stealing human body parts from
the Royal College of Surgeons and using them to cast sculptures
covered in silver and gold. According to the Daily Telegraph, Kelly
made off with “three heads, part of a brain, six arms, 10 legs and
feet and sections of three torsos … One leg, nicknamed Hopalong, was
kept in a tower room at his family’s estate in Kent.”
I hop out of the cab at the Victoria and
Albert Museum mostly because on the British
Airways flight from San Francisco the lovely
sky-blue Valium I took to lower me into Limboland had no effect
whatsoever. Consequently, I stayed up late sipping luscious claret and
watching “Mrs. Brown.” I now feel a certain obligation to the royal
couple to give their collection at least a cursory going-over.
Time’s running out, but there is one small object I must see at the
V&A. It resides in a poorly lit glass case in
the Fakes and Forgeries Gallery. For reasons I can’t quite
articulate, this specimen sums up what is so fascinating about
fascination and the obsessive acts of those who become fascinated,
and the charlatans who prey on them. The V&A’s Fakes and Forgeries
has a variety of counterfeit paintings and ceramics and items of
supposed religious significance that are not what they appear to be.
Some are hundreds of years old, and most have been executed with
nearly as much craft and artistry as the originals. Two-thirds of the
way through the gallery, I find the one I’m looking for. It was the
Wordsworth cabby who told me about it. He was adamant that I see it.
I’d mentioned to him that I was interested in unusual collections.
“Well then,” he said, “you’d like my collection.”
“What’s it a collection of?” I asked him.
“Spurs. Spurs of historical
significance. I’ve got over 300 of them. Even have a few from the
U.S. Civil War.”
“Really.”
“Yes, but this one I’m telling you
about, I’d love to have. I go see it sometimes. You ought to take a
look if you have the time, really ought to.”
And I have and now
here it is in front of me, just beneath the glass — a tarnished
metal spur embedded in a branch. The spur itself is authentic. It was
found on the battlefield of Agincourt, where, during the Hundred Years
War, the vastly outnumbered English under the command of Henry V
defeated the French in October 1415. Sometime in the 19th century
some idle, imaginative fellow decided to soak a tree root and bend it
around the spur, but why? To imbue it with greater drama perhaps. To
give it a more direct link with the violence and speed and
person-to-person savageness of battle. Or maybe just to heighten its
appeal as a way of upping the price to a collector. Finding the
great centerpieces of history is relatively easy. But it’s these
little oddities from the fringes of history, flotsam and jetsam from
the peripheries of human drama, that seem to get hold of certain
people. The cabby, for example.
“How did you come to collect
spurs, of all things?” I’d asked him.
“Well, I started as a lad,
you see. Like my wife said to a friend of ours who asked the same
question, ‘I reckon if it wasn’t for some of Jimmy’s spurs here, a
lot of your big historical battles would never have happened. The
horses would’ve just stood there looking at each other.’ “
The
cabby laughed and I laughed and I think that even Jacques Chirac, who
was just walking in the Royal Garden Hotel as we drove up, was
laughing. However, the reason for Chirac’s laughter, it turned out,
was that he’d just spent part of the afternoon drinking pints and
shots at a pub. But Mr. Hashimoto, who I passed in the lobby, was not
laughing.
I was not ready to be a student of the world, but there I stood in the ancient heart of European learning, picking up platters of melba toast and putrid herbal balls. All night I’d been running in and out of a roaring, candlelit hall, doing whatever the person in front of me did. I was lost in an army of hired servants, clearing the appetizer and serving the fish, clearing the fish and serving the roast — and pouring gallons of wine at the same time. The guests, apparently alumni and faculty of this distinguished Oxford college, had shown great appetite until we’d brought in this palate-cleansing dish, artlessly called “green butter.” Now they’d broken away from their tables, clotting the aisles with an exuberance that terrified me.
“Ohhh, who did it?” a man in a tuxedo moaned. “None of us! It just wafted over!”
I’d come to Oxford a couple weeks earlier through a work-exchange program, the kind that lures students to Europe with the promise of legal employment, a virtual vacation abroad. The invitation extended only through the first six months after graduation, so I’d flown across the Atlantic right out of college. Years before I had briefly visited Oxford and longed to return to its confusing spoke of streets, yellowed stone and dew-covered pastures. After majoring in English, and seeing as many BBC documentaries as I could, I figured I knew everything there was about life in England — especially that it could be awful, in a fortifying sort of way. Of course, I had no idea.
Work-exchange programs exist because students, it is thought, need to learn about life in foreign lands — therefore students, of all people, deserve special dispensation from the world’s complex immigration and employment laws. But there is one problem with the equation. Of all travelers, students are probably the least equipped with the sense of humor required to survive in countries with bad food and double-digit unemployment rates. I needed a few more years on the job market to offset the very earnest effects of my education. Landing fresh and green in England, I did not find England, or myself, funny at all.
Back in the banquet hall, the sleeves of my white catering shirt were stained with red wine, green butter and sweat. During a break between courses, I milled around with the other waiters in the kitchen. “They just eat till they frow up,” one woman muttered. “It’s disgusting.” I found myself talking with an American my age who was headed to Glasgow the next day to study political science. Lucky bastard. I told him about my new day job, filing and typing for an academic program that studied the plight of refugees. He pointed a half-eaten piece of melba toast at me. “What is the definition of a refugee?” he demanded.
I shivered with joy. Here was an invitation to the sort of pointless intellectualizing I’d relished just weeks before on my own campus. “From what I can ascertain, it’s anyone forced to leave their native country for any reason,” I said.
“How about, then, the Jewish diaspora in relation to the present state of Israel …” he started, but couldn’t finish because it was time for me to clear the coffee and serve port and sauterne.
I got nine pounds for my three hours of banqueting — money I desperately needed as I waited for my end-of-the-month paycheck. I hadn’t been able to shake an obvious association between British currency and weight. Nine pounds seemed like a lot of money, a hefty sack of change that could help me do all the British things I wanted to do: see plays, ride trains, buy Yardley soaps. It got me, instead, less than a week’s worth of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches. I begged the temp agency for more banquet jobs just for the variety the leftovers gave my diet.
I’d also heard other work exchangers say they planned to stay longer if they could find under-the-table work at a pub or restaurant. Six months were the limits of our horizons, stamped on our passport, registered with the police and Her Royal Highness’ Secretary of Employment. Staying wasn’t an option anymore, I just didn’t have the special something to make it in England’s underground food-service economy.
In Dorset-on-Thames, I drew the wrath of a demonic headwaiter by getting fingerprints on the polished silverware. I broke a glass before a pubful of thick-headed Welsh golfers. I could not uncork bottles. At Magdalen College, my hands trembled as I poured coffee before smirking portraits of Addison and Steele. I had been assigned to stand at the college president’s door and open it when his guests arrived, but they’d remained, perplexed, on the other side while I tugged and tugged at the unyielding oak slab. Finally, the president had swept by and pulled it open with a flick of his wrist. The wrought-iron handle turned just like a doorknob, I marveled. How modern.
At my day job, meanwhile, I cataloged articles about Ethiopian Jews starving themselves from woe; about Mozambican children forced to see their parents murdered; about outbreaks of pellagra in Africa caused by incompetent aid administrators. “More refugees,” the secretaries in the crowded academic office would sigh with every coup d’itat abroad.
“Home” was not much relief. I lived for a while in a house with a Pakistani family of nine, who squashed themselves together so I could have my own room. Though they made a tidy illicit profit, I felt bad about taking up so much space and hid in my room, listening to BBC Radio and reading “Emma.” Really, I did not read novels anymore, I freebased them. Sometimes a violent thwacking would disturb my junkie stupor. It was either someone breaking into a car by the factory next door or my drifting neighbors on the canal doing aerobics atop their houseboats.
Each day I’d walk to work through a graveled alley by the railroad, the sort of patch of nowhere that could be anywhere. If I squinted a great deal, and blocked out the sight of Gothic spires, I found I could imagine myself at home in Texas, listening to trains rumble across the flat landscape. It seemed the most pathetic thing of all, to be homesick in the very country I’d dreamed of when I had been home and thoroughly sick of it. But the alley still lured me. One morning I was nearly blindsided by a little boy running out his back gate with a school bag. “G’bye, Mum!” he shouted and sped on, dodging puddles full of sky. I saw every smeared gray foot of the road in front of me clearly for the first time. To the boy, this was the most familiar place on earth, I realized. It would always be the center of his private map of the world.
It was then, somehow, that I finally got the hang of England, the dampness, the brown food, the wretched wages. I had no more banquet jobs to help me get by — a perky agency representative said I seemed frustrated by catering. But I lost my frenzied urges to see every manuscript in the British Museum and own every Laura Ashley dress on the rack. I did the washing and watched the telly.
Soon frost rimmed Oxford’s every cobweb and gargoyle, suddenly giving the winter mornings a radioactive nostalgic glow. During my last week, the temp agency called me and asked, out of the blue, if I could do another banquet.
The dons at St. John’s College were dining with American oil men. I arrived to find the wait staff almost outnumbering the dozen or so diners. We cleared some plates, poured some wine and then had very little to do. The head butler, a serious-looking man in a green frock coat, scowled at us and strode out of the kitchen. I waited, with a familiar sense of ineptitude, to be dismissed.
But the butler reappeared with a 15-year-old bottle of Beaujolais. He poured us each a glass. “Plenty more where that comes from,” he said. “Cellar goes all the way back under St. Giles.” The St. Giles Road outside was as wide as a city block.
The butler sipped from his glass, flashed us a poker face and pushed through the swinging doors back to the dining room. He had been laughing all night long without cracking a smile. The Beaujolais tasted mellow and sweet, and the kitchen staff would not let us stop drinking until long after the banquet was over. Oxford was frozen and empty when I finally stumbled home over streets I’d never known were stuffed with wine.
For the past 50 years, Welsh writer Jan Morris has been dauntlessly exploring the world and eloquently describing her explorations, initially for British newspapers, later for Rolling Stone magazine and then for magazines and newspapers around the world. During those decades, she has also produced some 30 books, many of which are considered travel classics, including “Pax Britannica,” “The World of Venice,” “The Matter of Wales,” Spain,” “Oxford,” “Sydney” and “Hong Kong.”
Her new book, “Fifty Years of Europe: An Album,” is in many ways the culmination of her career as a traveler and a writer. Brilliantly organized as a series of vignettes grouped around five themes — religion, ethnic identity, nation-building, commonalities and attempts at union — “Fifty Years” brings together all the qualities that distinguish Morris’ best travel writing: an eye for the telling detail and anecdote; an immense knowledge of history, politics, literature and art; a sensitivity to the common and everyday; an extraordinarily vivid and musical prose; and finally an unfailing cheerfulness, humility and sense of humor.
To my mind, Morris is the greatest travel writer alive today — “travel writer” in the grandest sense of one who captures a place in all its fullness and profundity. And “Fifty Years” embodies and illuminates the wide-ranging riches of this art. In its innovative organization, the book is a departure; in its range and depth of subject, it is a synthesis. In total — as the excerpts we offer here can only barely suggest — it is Morris’ chef d-oeuvre.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + —>
+ + + + + + + +
In the country
The French countryside of my youth often looked (at least in my memory now) like a slow ballet of horsedrawn plows — plows wherever you looked, some going one way, some another, serenaded by soaring songbirds and watched by rich fat cattle. France seemed to me then permanently old-fashioned. It was still peasant country, I used to think. The Alpine village I settled in for a while in the 1950s was several generations behind the times. In the autumn it used to be visited by an itinerant steam distillery, and with much chuffing and hissing its apple crop was turned into a powerful kind of schnapps, to be tasted in back kitchens beside steaming cauldrons of soup more or less permanently simmering on the stove. I collected our mail each day from the village bar, for there in midmorning I knew I would find the postman enjoying his cognac.
I doubt if a single Percheron draws a single plow in France now. Most of the birds seem to be of the invisibly chirpy persuasion, twitching about in copses, and the cattle are mostly anaemic Charollais, which look as though they have been drained of their blood for the making of black puddings. Even in our village of Savoie the ski culture has fallen upon the old ways, the high cow chalets have been turned into holiday homes, and I doubt if the postman has time for his midmorning brandy. For me the lost innocence of Europe, itself no more than the product of a romantic imagination in its youth, will remain always a memory of long ago in France.
+ + + + + + + +
An Invitation
Allow me to invite you to Sunday lunch at a French country restaurant of the old kind, circa 1955. Neither fast food nor gastronomic pretension has yet corrupted the establishment, which is in one of those ancient towns of central France where the streets wind upward from the railway track, through scowling walls of medievalism, until they debouch in the square outside the cathedral door, surveyed by huge stone animals from the cathedral tower and prowled around on Sunday mornings by cats and desultory tourists. The restaurant displays its menu in a large flowery script in a brass frame, and in most respects remains more or less as it has been for several centuries. Madame the proprietress looks an epitome of everything false and narrow-minded. One waiter seems to be some sort of duke, the other is evidently the village idiot. At the table next to ours sits a prosperous local family out for its Sunday dinner, well-known to the proprietress and esteemed throughout the community — solemn, voluminously napkined, serious and consistent eaters who eye us out of the corners of their piggy eyes as they chew their veal. The veal is, as a matter of fact, rather stringy. I do not doubt the bill will be erroneous. I am sure Madame despises us as much as we distrust her. But what a contrary delight it all is, is it not? How nourishing still the vegetables, fresh from Madame’s garden! How excellent the wine, from the vineyard down the hill! How stately that duke! How endearing the idiot! How mollifying the farewells of the family at the next table, when with bows and cautious smiles they fold their napkins and leave us! How persuasive, after all, even the steely charm of Madame herself! With real gratitude we wrap the old-fashioned Frenchness of that luncheon around us like a cloak, and return cherished to the world of the 1990s. Ah, oy sont les dijeuners d’antan?
+ + + + + + + +
All is not lost
But all is not lost! More successfully than most countries, France has achieved an equilibrium between the old and the new. As the twentieth century draws toward its close the French are indeed a very modern people. I first really felt in touch with cyberspace in the 1980s when, visiting a French country inn somewhere, I found the chef calling up his day’s luncheon menu on a computer, from some central database of gastronomy. Today nothing seems to me quite so elegantly futuristic as the solar-powered telephones that gently revolve, like sunflowers, beside French autoroutes. No capital in Europe is more smoothly organized than Paris, and a true image of our fin de sihcle is the spectacle of the great Paris-Lyon-Marseilles Train ` Grand Vitesse sweeping down the Rhone valley at 180 mph.
Yet by most standards life in the French countryside still seems amiably and enviably close to the soil. The songbirds may have gone, but the swallows still whirl around on summer evenings. Widowers shout greetings to each other as they wobble home on their bicycles, long loaves protruding from their saddlebags. Gentlefolk stroll in the autumnal gardens of their villas. At the wood’s edge the logs are still chopped and Virgilianly piled. Aromatic smoke lingers. The buzz of the vilomoteur merges comfortably — well, fairly comfortably — with the buzz of the bees. Picnic parties spread their cloths beside dragonfly pools as in painters’ fancies long ago. More happily than anywhere else trees and rivers, cities and highways, seem to coexist by mutual arrangement, a harmonious balance between the natural and the invented.
For me one of the most comforting components of this arrangement is the continuing French attitude toward animals. French people seem to recognize what Montaigne, the patron saint of animal equality, called, “a certain obligation and mixed commerce” between man and beast. We may forcefeed you for your liver, they seem to say to their fellow creatures, boil you alive, snare you on migrations or bottle you in brine, but at least we will deal with you man, so to speak, to man. I raised the matter once at a cafi beside whose door a very fat and surly golden Labrador lay sluggishily where everyone would trip over it. It was a very old dog, said the proprietor, one did not care to disturb the animal: but when I mentioned Montaigne’s notion of commerce and obligation he seemed to think it mere sophistry. “I owe the dog nothing, it owes me nothing, one day it will die and then — pfft!” The dog did not budge an inch as, precariously balancing my coffee cup, I stepped across it to find a table on the patio outside: but remembering where I was, I restrained myself from giving it a good kick as I passed, to hasten the pfft.
+ + + + + + + +
A fling of France
What I love to do is to drive on a bright sunny day, with the roof of the car open, at a scudding speed around the Piriphirique, the ring road that surrounds the city of Paris. The scudding speed is advisable, or awful French drivers will more or less run you off the road. The sunny day is essential, because it turns an expedition that could be dismal, exhausting or even alarming into an exhilarating fling of France. The road snakes around the capital, rather than circling it, and offers jerky flashes of Frenchness as in an avant-garde silent movie: now a drab industrial quarter, now a pictorial row of poplars — a tedious white housing estate, barges chugging down a canal — a grand boulevard for an instant, a cluster of medieval houses, the sudden swoosh of a tunnel, a couple of vast juggernauts deafeningly overtaking you — and always present, brooding but radiant, just off-stage the most magnificent capital in Europe.
This is not only France encapsulated: to my mind it is 1990s France all over. For most of us by now, for most of the time, France is a sequence of flashes, a kaleidoscope repeatedly shaken as we hurry across its varied landscapes to the particular French spot that means most to us. When the milords traveled this way in their creaking high-wheeled carriages it must have been more of a continuum, and the slowly passing scenes had a classical clarity, shaped and ample despite the frightful bumps in the road. Now we are all surrealists, and as France hurtles through our windshields and away through our rearview mirrors its images are disjointed and contradictory. You want tragedy? It hangs to this day over the elegiac trench-landscapes of the north. You want hedonism? Napkined tables beckon to us through the windows of snug and steamy restaurants as we rush by, wine awaits the tasting in a thousand hospitable caves. Wildness? Bleak bare places are around us now: granite places, moorland, heroic monasteries, uninviting hotels on mountain passes. Romance? Here is the sweet creeping in of violets, ochers and tawny browns that speak of the Mediterranean. Marsh country of the Gypsies, pale estuaries of oystermen, windy grasslands where menhirs stand and Celtic names jump out at us from roadside signs in the rain — all this, all this grand fling of France, comes into my mind as I drive around the Paris ring road: and now that France itself is so relentlessly, so furiously on the go, I sometimes feel that the grand old nation itself is pounding, head down, foot on the floor, radio blaring, around its own historical Piriphirique.
+ + + + + + + +
+ + + + + + + +
How they looked
There used to be a specifically English look, too. I used to be able to recognize an Englishman anywhere in the world, not simply by his bearing or his manners, but actually by his face. Now I am never so confident. The English Gentleman, one of the most easily identifiable people on earth, is virtually extinct, and the rest of the nation has lost its distinctive appearances. This is partly biological. The English are no longer the homogenous Caucasian islanders who stood so complacently in island isolation, and hundreds of thousands of Asians, Africans and Latins have contributed their genes to the stock during my half-century. Turn on London television in the 1990s and you would get the impression that half the population were immigrants. Although this is partly the distortion of positive discrimination, still there are not many parts of England that do not have their immigrant residents, some of them as English as anyone in everything but look.
But the changed appearance is not merely ethnic. Even the purest English face is different now. It is more blurred, less Northern-looking. Diet has contributed, and wider education, and the changing manner of speaking, and central heating (considered sissy fifty years ago, and still a bit wimpish to me), but I think it is chiefly a matter of history. Fifty years ago the English were enormously proud of themselves. They had won a fearful war in epic style, led by a statesman of charismatic genius, under the aegis of a royal house that was so universally admired and believed by 40 percent of the population, so surveys showed, to be divinely chosen. The English knew themselves to be special. When I went to London in the 1940s I felt I was visiting the heart of an immense historical organism, spread around the globe, to which hundreds of millions of people of every faith and color looked in something approaching reverence. When I was abroad, the grave sound of Big Ben on the BBC World Service, and the resonant, almost ecclesiastical way in which the announcer declaimed “This is London” over the often crackling and fluctuating airwaves, made me feel that England was somewhere permanently unique on the planet. London might be battered and impoverished, but it was still in most British minds the center of all things, the best, the biggest, the oldest, the eternal.
No wonder the English face was so distinctive, and no wonder that in the half-century since then it has lost its edge. It was the face of confidence, whatever its class. One can imagine a citizen looking at it in a mirror in those days, when people still knew their Gilbert and Sullivan, and thinking with horror that it might have been the face of a Rooshian, a Frenchman or a Prooshian. Thank God he had resisted all temptations to look like other nations! It remained unmistakably the face of an Englishman.
From A Stranger in Venice
(1906), by Max Beerbohm
Often, after passing through the streets of London, I have wondered what on earth the inhabitants would look like if they had no longer the thought of their preeminence to sustain them.
+ + + + + + + +
City of Culture
What a pleasure to stroll through the streets of Weimar, a little German city whose distinction has traditionally been elegantly cultural! In the late eighteenth century the young Duke Carl August made his capital a happy retreat for artistic geniuses, and ever since Weimar has basked in the memory of their names. There is a pleasant restaurant, you will be told, behind the Liszthaus. Turn right at the Goethehaus to get to the bus station. You want the Schillerhaus? That’s easy: just go straight down Schillerstrasse from the Goethe and Schiller statue. And agreeable indeed it is to amble around the town among these illustrious shades, now and then taking an ice cream beneath its trees. The streets are mostly quiet and gentle. Small boys wade across the little river Ilm with fishing rods. Street musicians agreeably play. Delectable parks and gardens are everywhere. It is easy to imagine young Carl August promenading with lyricists on each arm, bowing right and left to his affectionate subjects. I know of no city so instinct with the idea of beauty as a political conception, as part of the established order — and not the beauty of pomp and majesty, either, but an amiable, entertaining, chamber-music kind of beauty.
But here’s a terrible thing. As the literary capital of Germany, the repository of its immortal poetic spirit, a retreat of nature-worship and mythic dreams, Weimar became beloved of the Nazis, and it loved the Nazis in return. Its mixture of Hitler and Goethe, wrote Thomas Mann fastidiously in 1932, was “particularly disturbing.” In the market square stands the Elephant Hotel, and all the waters of Ilm cannot wash the taint from this unfortunate hostelry. It is a handsome 1930s building, but redecorated inside in a glittery, chromy style that irresistibly suggests the imminent arrival of swaggering gauleiters and their women. This impression is all too true. Hitler and his crew were particularly fond of the hotel, and more than once the Führer spoke from its balcony to enthusiastic crowds in the square outside.
So enamoured were the Nazis of Weimar, in fact, that they erected there one of their most celebrated and characteristic monuments. The site they chose was on the lovely hill of Ettersberg, just outside the city, which Goethe himself had long before made famous — he loved to sit and meditate beneath an oak tree there. One evening I paid a reluctant visit to this place, now a popular tourist site well-publicized in the town. My taxi-driver, a gregarious soul, chatted cheerfully to me all the way. Had I enjoyed my stay in Weimar? Did I visit the Goethehaus? What did I think of the food? Did I know that Weimar was to be the European City of Culture in 1999, at the end of the millennium? Congratulations, I said. Recognition once more for the city of Goethe and Schiller. “Exactly,” said the taxi-driver, and just then we turned up the side road to Buchenwald.
+ + + + + + + +
Country style
In the days of the Communists, East Germany seemed to me one of the most terrible places of all, and the legacy of industrial pollution was to linger for years and years. On the other hand, the Communists having been less than advanced in their agricultural methods, the wide plains of the Brandenburg countryside were mercifully unsterilized by chemicals, which left them wonderfully fresh and natural — unkempt, since half the fields had gone to seed, and half the trees needed trimming, but still gloriously organic. All day long the skylarks sang above my head, when I traveled among those lovely landscapes, and there were meadows full of poppies, and long avenues of fruit-laden cherry trees, and now and then storks’ nests, those fairytale emblems of old Europe, comfortably on chimneys above cobbled hamlets. Once I saw three storks flying high and majestically over Berlin itself: I suspect mine is the last generation ever to see such a sight.
+ + + + + + + +
Ashamed
Once in the 1980s I found myself a trifle lost when driving through Rostock, on Germany’s Baltic coast, and I faltered and swerved as I tried to find my way on the street map. Immediately there was an irritable blast of the horn from the car behind. Rostock was notorious at that time for recent racist attacks upon Turkish immigrants, and my blood boiled. “Damned Germans,” I found myself saying, “They never change. Can’t the brute see I’m a stranger here?” — and I turned around in my seat prepared to give him that rude gesture of the Welch archers, as in Vienna. Gott in Himmel, he was a very intemperate Asian. I blushed, even to myself, especially as I have experienced almost nothing but kindness from Germans of all kinds, under communism as under capitalism, during my fifty years of Europe.
I am a child of the wars, though, and have not always been so generous in return. With a pang I remember still the young Germans I met at a party in Baden-Baden in the early 1950s, when the nation was still sunk in shame and disillusion. They were about my own age, bred by Hitler Youth out of defeat, and our conversation was wary. We skirted around recent history, we evaded questions of morality, but even so I found, when we parted company at last, that one woman was in tears — tears of mortification, to compare her self-doubts, her guilt and her sense of undeserved bad luck with the unabashed pride of nation which in those days I could not help displaying. Thirty years later I made a television film with a German television crew, traveling through several European countries. Strangers often asked us what we were up to, and I always made a point of saying that while the director and his crew were German, I was from Wales. “You are ashamed to be thought one of us,” the director accused me mournfully one day: and though I declined to admit it, so I was.
These are people of God, too. More than any other European people they have been the instrument of the most divine of the arts, music, perhaps because of the special rhythms of their language, perhaps because Martin Luther, their greatest prophet, made music intrinsic to his religion. Even at their most degraded they have honored this spark within themselves — even sadistic officers at concentration camps felt the necessity, whether in truth or in charade, to show themselves lovers of music. Out of this tormented and often cruel national psyche have come the glories of Bach and Beethoven — a cliché indeed, but still a mystery. Nothing moves me more than to enter one of the great German cathedrals, very likely in its day a positive cauldron of racialism, and to hear one of the tremendous Bach chorales thundering down the nave — an ultimate expression, to my mind, of human aspiration, and a supreme glory of Europe.
I went to Berlin in 1991 for the two hundredth anniversary of the Brandenburg Gate, an anniversary of awful possibility. The gate was a triumph of Prussian vainglory, undeniably an arch of hubris. It had been restored at last after the mutilations of war, and its shining quadriga was once again equipped with the Iron Cross and Prussian Eagle pointedly absent during the Communist years. Through it overblown victory parades had passed, and the plumed pageantries of state visits, and the railway coach from Compiègne towed in vindictive triumph. The long anniversary celebrations ended with a perfomance of “Deutschland Über Alles,” and what a nightmare that might have been! I prepared to scowl. But it was played by a string quartet, in Haydn’s delicate last version of the melody: and its gentle cadences, drifting over the silent crowd, through the lights of the great reviving city, were enough to melt a Junker’s heart.
The nanny did it. So said the Cambridge, Mass., jury in the so-called nanny murder trial on Thursday night, ending for now a tabloid-like spectacle that had talk shows across America buzzing about the parental responsibilities of working mothers, well-to-do-parents and teenage baby sitters. After three days of deliberation, the jury found 19-year-old Louise Woodward guilty of second-degree murder in the death of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen. The English nanny inflicted the two-inch fracture in Eappen’s skull that caused his death, the jury found. Middlesex County Judge Hiller B. Zobel sentenced Woodward on Friday to life in prison; she will be eligible for parole after 15 years. Her lawyers say they will appeal.
The trial, which was televised and widely viewed in both the United States and Great Britain, pitted two starkly differing views of mothering. The prosecution portrayed Woodward as a bad girl, an out-of-control teenager armed with a fake ID whose late-night escapades left her unable to perform her duties professionally. According to the prosecution, Woodward was so upset over a newly imposed curfew and the baby’s crying that she violently shook him and then threw him against a hard surface, actions that caused his death five days later. For its part, the defense, which was paid for by the au pair agency that sponsored her, claimed that Matthew’s injuries had been inflicted earlier. More controversially, it played the “working mom card,” attacking the infant’s mother, Deborah Eappen, as a part-time mom whose work as an ophthalmologist resulted in her neglecting her family.
Talk show callers went further, saying that Eappen was a yuppie who worked not to make ends meet but to improve her “lifestyle,” leaving her children, Matthew and his then-2-year-old brother, Brendan, in someone else’s care when she didn’t have to. Almost lost in the finger-pointing was the fact, as Matthew’s father, Sunil Eappen, reminded CBS, that “the poor baby died here.”
According to Lauri Umansky, co-editor of “Bad Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth Century America” (forthcoming in November, NYU Press), although the defense’s playing of the working-mother card didn’t work, the outpouring of sympathy for Woodward after the verdict illustrates how conflicted our culture still is about the relationship between motherhood and work. Salon spoke with Umansky about the lessons of the trial.
Why did everyone watch this trial so closely?
Louise Woodward is very young, and the family is prominent in terms of
education and profession. But one of the biggest factors here is
Anglophilia. We in this country love the British — we love to talk about
them, we get involved in their scandals. The British nanny, from Mary
Poppins to “The Sound of Music,” is a cultural icon. She’s supposed
to be a proper, buttoned-down figure. So we’re dealing with a cultural icon transgressing the norms of her proper behavior, at a time when how to accomplish good day care is very much on our minds.
What was this trial really about?
I think that there are two mothers who are being blamed for being bad
mothers. One is Deborah Eappen. What we’re hearing is if a woman doesn’t
need to work for financial reasons, then she shouldn’t work.
And the other mother on trial is Louise Woodward. Because child care
providers are really viewed through the same cultural lens as mothers,
they’re viewed as surrogate mothers. So Louise Woodward isn’t only being
held to high standards as a worker, she’s being held to the standards of a
mother. She’s supposed to be good in the same way that mothers are
self-sacrificing, absorbed in the kids, never tired, never fed up.
It’s not considered proper for someone who’s caring for children to be out there in the thick of social, sexual night life, to have a fake ID, to stay out late. We’re taught that good mothers submerge those needs, especially her sexual needs. And once she falls into that bad mother territory, the fear is, God knows what can happen.
Who was responsible for the death of Matthew Eappen?
Oh, Lord, I don’t know. All we know is, there’s a dead baby.
Why do you think there is such an outpouring of support for Louise Woodward? Is everyone shocked?
Yes, I think everyone thought it was going to go the other way. I had 100 students in my class at Suffolk University this morning and only one felt it was the right verdict. I think my young students identify with a 19-year-old and think that a lifetime in prison is a harsh penalty. They think there was reasonable doubt, and they say that these rich people should have never put Woodward in that situation.
Do we hold poor mothers to a different standard than wealthy
ones?
Yes, I think it’s always been viewed differently according to class. We blame poor women for staying home with their children; they’re considered good mothers if they go out and work instead of burdening the system with welfare
dependency. Whereas middle-class and professional mothers are seen as bad for
working.
Why shouldn’t day-care workers be held to “mother” standards?
They are, in a sense, acting as mothers.
I think what needs to be recognized is all mothers are held to
standards that are too high. Clearly, the standard needs to be high enough so
children don’t end up dead or hurt or neglected, but we have these
unrealistically high standards and they’re contradictory. You’re not
supposed to be too self-sacrificing, you’re not supposed to
live through your kids, but you’re also supposed to be almost entirely
self-sacrificing — you’re never supposed to be tired, bored, fed up,
angry. Well, if we acknowledge that mothers get tired, bored, fed up and
angry, as do child-care workers, then we could look for ways to deal with
that rather than denying it. Every mother feels at wit’s end at some
point, every nanny does, every day-care worker does. The perfect child-care
worker is going to be no more perfect than the perfect mother. Good enough
is what we’re looking for.
Do you think that movies like “The Hand that Rocked the Cradle” and videotapes of nannies strangling babies played into the guilty verdict — playing into our fears about nannies and those who watch our kids?
I think blaming nannies is a more comfortable way for us to talk about all the difficulties and problems surrounding mothering in our culture. By putting the blame onto nannies and day-care providers, we, as mothers, distance ourselves from it.
Why hasn’t the father been blamed in this child’s death? Is
society’s definition of a “bad father” different than that of a bad
mother?
Yes. Traditionally a bad father is one who doesn’t provide for his
family. A bad mother is one who, at least for the class into which
Deborah Eappans falls, works outside the home, who puts her career before
her children, who doesn’t submerge all her needs to her child. And there’s
a good deal of class resentment going on here: Here are these doctors who on just one income
earn much more than most Americans do, choosing
to have two incomes and leave their children in day care.
One of the lawyers for the defense, Barry Scheck, is known for his
tabloid-style tactics. What purpose was served in going so far away from
the facts — playing the “working mom” card the way he played the
race card in the O.J. case?
I think that mothers are highly symbolic cultural figures. It is a very
powerful image to see Deborah Eappen grieving, and a grieving mother is
a sign of a good mother. She has had something taken from her; it’s
everyone’s worst fear. I guess the defense felt that Scheck needed
to make her a less sympathetic figure. And again, he did this around the
axis of motherhood, playing one version of mother against another. And so he made her out to be a mother whose primary
devotion was to work. I think that’s easy to do because those stereotypes
are out there. You don’t have to dig deep to access them. As in the O.J.
case, they didn’t have to fish around too hard in the deck to find the race
card.
Nannies have also gotten a lot of flack in this case. Did the
prosecution attempt to taint the image of nannies? Did it work?
The prosecution talked about au pairs being poorly trained, here
for the glitz of a year abroad, opportunists taking on the duties of a
mother. The au pair agencies have been criticized for doing
poor screening. On the other hand, the
Eappens were criticized for choosing an au pair as opposed to a different kind of day care.
Poor Deborah Eappen is caught in the middle of this. I assume that many of
us who choose au pairs or nannies do it so we can give our kids as little
disruption as possible. After all, if you have an au pair, your kids stay
home — you are trying to be a good mother by choosing that.
Do you think it’s unrealistic to believe that a teenager can watch a baby responsibly?
I think it’s not realistic to think that your baby is going to end up dead. I don’t think the family should have had a real fear of that. So should this family have not hired this nanny? I don’t think you can put this in those kind of stark terms. It’s not a question whether mothers should go out to work — that’s a reality. This isn’t a new issue about our loss of innocence as a culture, that suddenly mothers are going out to work. We need to deal with the fact that we need strong, reliable day-care policy. It shouldn’t be a privatized issue, it shouldn’t be what it is in this case, a battle between a mother and a mothering figure.
I understand that you know a lot of nannies in Boston. What are they
saying?
What I have heard a lot of is au pairs are worked unfairly, that they
work excessive hours and that even though the legal limit is 45 hours, many
work more. They don’t get paid well. Although having an au pair is not that
cheap for parents, more than half of the fees go to the agency. So the au
pairs feel that they’re underpaid.
What’s the distant connection you have with Louise Woodward?
Our friend’s nanny was friends with her. She said, “God, I can’t
believe this. She’s a nice girl, I spoke to her three hours before, she
sounded calm as can be. She’s like the rest of us, she likes a good time,
no more, no less.” I think there is a general feeling among the nannies
that when Louise Woodward expressed resentment, she was in no way
alone in saying she was exploited. They get here and realize that
it’s not a cultural exchange, they’re being used as a primary day care for
the families, worked to the limit, asked to do things beyond what they’re
supposed to do, and held accountable in households and not paid minimum
wage by American standards. I think there was a feeling that Louise was being
worked a lot, but I don’t think there was any insinuation that she was over
the edge. To say that she was cracking up and over the edge to be getting a
fake ID and going out night after night — she was 18. My students said, if
that’s a crime, we’re all guilty.
What kind of aftershocks will this have on the nanny/day care industry?
It’ll recover very quickly. They’ll have to do some PR and there might a lull in recruiting, but I don’t think it will have a lasting impact because it’s a business that meets a need.
Will this guilty verdict exonerate working mothers?
I don’t think any one case changes something so deeply entrenched as this culturally lagged belief that women shouldn’t work outside the home. I think the Deborah Eappens are still going to hear, “Well, she made a bad choice in choosing an 18-year-old au pair. It was her fault.”
London, England — The inevitable deluge started weeks before my husband and I
departed for London. The suggestions. The questions. The advice.
Friends who’d never been there vicariously vacationed via our itinerary;
relations who’d breezed through the city in two days in 1978 assumed an
expertise. “Will you be going to the Tate?” “Oh, you’ve got to do the
British Museum.” “Let me tell you about the National Portrait Gallery.”
“Are you having high tea at the Savoy?” “Or the Ritz?” I listened patiently
to all of it, while in my mind, two words kept repeating over and over:
Screw That.
As it happened, I was already on intimate terms with the seat of
kings and Carnaby Street. I’d lived for a year in London during my college
days, and had managed to make a few brief return visits since. But even
though the last time I’d set foot on English soil had been in 1990, I still
had not worked up to wildly missing its stuffy old museums and milky tea.
So I didn’t go to the Tate. Instead I sought out London’s more
decidedly eccentric museums. And I didn’t drown myself in tea. Rather I
indulged in the daring new flavor sensation the British had discovered
since I’d last visited — coffee.
Coffee culture took the scenic route to England:
Continental-style cafes had to first catch on here in the colonies before
leaping successfully back over the pond. Frankly, I credit Seattle. I
imagine upstart English cappuccino mavens getting wind of a company called
Starbucks and thinking, “There seems to be a predisposition for latte
addiction in cold, damp cities with lots of bookstores and a hip music
scene. Sayyy …” Whatever the reason, England’s biggest tastemaker right
now is neither Elizabeth Hurley nor Liam Gallagher, but Juan Valdez. In
London, you can’t swing an official Manchester United scarf without
whacking into an Aroma — the hot new coffee bar chain that audaciously
proves that Brits are as adept at foaming milk as they are at blending tea
leaves.
I’d anticipated some changes in the town’s terrain, but by God,
this was a new one. And it was at once both oddly comforting and downright
unnerving to find myself in the midst of a java explosion. On the one hand,
I admit that I am powerless over my mochaccino habit, and the fact that I
was able to slake it during my trip probably staved off a midweek freakout.
On the other hand, there is something profoundly disturbing about seeing a
“Seattle Coffee Company” a stone’s throw from Covent Garden, or a brand new Bodum superstore being built on Kings Road. French press coffee plungers rolling into the city by the truckload — I’d have sooner imagined Camilla Parker Bowles becoming queen than this.
If, after centuries of contented, isolationist tea drinking, London
can suddenly embrace the cappuccino-sipping, biscotti-dunking habits of our
Pacific Northwest brethren, perhaps the sun truly is setting on the empire.
I hadn’t expected London to stay frozen in time, Austin Powers-style, all
these years — this after all is now the London of Tony Blair, an
all-but-defunct monarchy, advanced dentistry and even exquisite, non
sausage-based haute cuisine. Even so, if you ever want to rock your
idealistic notions that anything on earth has any permanence, go watch a
Londoner deftly order a decaf Sumatra blend latte with a shot of vanilla
syrup.
Despite the inevitable, times-a-changing mood, it was heartening to
see that some things about London do remain constant. The ravens still
stroll the grounds of the Tower; bushy-capped guards still prance in front
of the Palace; and the Victoria and Albert, the Tate and their like still
reel in the visitors. As my spouse and I sat outside the British Museum
sunning ourselves one afternoon, I couldn’t help but marvel at the
Paddington Station-like stream of human traffic coming in and out. Five
million visitors a year pass through the British Museum. This year, we were
not among them. Maybe it’s heresy to laze within spitting distance of one
of the world’s premiere museums and not cross its portals, but I had other
great works on my mind. Like vacuum cleaners.
A yearning for some Bauhaus-based pleasures led me London’s Design
Museum — a temple to the magnificence of form and function that brims with items both practical (dig that Tupperware!) and ridiculous (a Phillipe
Stark teapot that originally came with the warning “Do not touch while
hot”). The Design Museum, housed in a former warehouse in the rapidly
yuppifying Butler’s Wharf neighborhood, could never be accused of not
upholding the image its name implies. The gift shop sells trash cans too
elegant to ever throw any actual garbage into, and even the toilet paper
dispenser in the ladies’ room is a paragon of crisp efficiency.
The museum is a haven for the kinds of exhibits you won’t find
anywhere else. When I visited, the institution was hosting an extensive
tribute to a fabulous new vacuum cleaner, currently only available in
Japan. I educated myself about how expensive and wasteful vacuum bags are
and how the arduous process of creating a reusable dust repository had
baffled designers for decades. As I at last feasted my eyes on the chic
little pink and gray final product, I felt a fascination with vacuuming
that has never once encroached upon my own domestic Hoover pushing.
But the highlight of the Design Museum was the special exhibition
devoted to “The Power of Erotic Design” that’s running through Oct. 12.
Here were all manner of sexy household goods for my consumerist
delectation. Some were subtly sensual — a fluidly designed Carlo Mollino
coffee table that vaguely suggested a woman’s back, a curvy crystal perfume
bottle reminiscent of a pair of pouty lips. And some designs were a little
more obvious — like the leather-clad mannequin serving as a hat rack, or
the impressive array of ancient dildos. My favorite item was Sigmund
Freud’s chair — supple, broad on top, plumply cushioned. It was the kind
of thing I can’t imagine anyone resting his body in all day and arising
again without absorbing a whole lot of Mommy issues. Could the National
Portrait Gallery offer such insights? I think not.
Further along the Thames, right near the National Theater,
is another museum that’s not your usual Rembrandtfest — the big, brassy
and excessively playful Museum of the Moving Image. “Whoever designed this
place must have been completely out of his mind,” whispered my spouse as we
stood in the glow of a “Spitting Image” puppet display. Indeed, the museum
oozes loopy charm. That sacred cow of film students, “Potemkin,” is
screened in a proletariat-friendly meeting room while a museum employee
waxes enthusiastic in a hilariously fake Russian accent. A D.W. Griffith
clone brandishes a riding crop and barks choreography instructions to a
group of young visitors, who obligingly offer their best shuffle-shuffle-kick steps. There’s memorabilia from the earliest days of cinematography to
“Star Wars,” even classes in creating your own cartoons. And everywhere you
go, staffers dressed as movie ushers, inventors and casting directors pull
you into the action in truly cinematic style. Of course it’s hokey. But
wouldn’t the Smithsonian be so much more entertaining if instead of just
displaying the Fonz’s jacket, it
had its own Fonz to “Ayyy” all day at the passers-by?
The MOMI and the Design Museum may exude a hip, modern allure, but
London’s more unusual museums aren’t necessarily the most cutting-edge. At
Charles Dickens’s small, inauspicious-looking house in Bloomsbury, we
sought inspiration from the vibes off the desk at which he wrote “Oliver
Twist,” we peered out the window at the same view the author once enjoyed
and we got close to his private side. Plenty close. “Look at this,” sighed
my husband as he lovingly ran his fingers along a dark wooden chaise. “I
can’t believe I’m touching the same chair Dickens sat on.” “He did more
than sit on it, honey,” I replied, lifting the seat. “That’s his commode.”
Once you’ve peered into a great man’s chamber pot, you’ve seen all you need
to see.
What is so appealing about London is all that is constant about it
– the chimes of Big Ben, the bookshops of Charing Cross Road, the
cholesterol a-go-go rashers and eggs breakfasts. But equally enticing is
all that’s novel about it. I came to London and asked it to surprise me.
And it did. Instead of the Rosetta Stone I found oversexed household
appliances; instead of tea at elevenses I found afternoon espresso.
London’s got a brand new bag — and it ain’t filled with Darjeeling.
