The Death of Picasso Read online

—Our boys. And I’ll have a Scottish wife from the Hebrides. Dad talks about you, and keeps up with you. He doesn’t want to meet you. He still feels the hurt of our going away in the middle of the night, with Magnus and without a word to him.

  —You’ve reconstructed it all from Marcus’s talk? You and I have a budget of things to discuss. But you need your shower and warm clothes.

  Steam vapor in the shower stalls took up where the fog had made a screen of mist outside. There was a muddled controversy afterwards as to whether there had been a tall soldier (beret, blue uniform, infantry boots, dog tag, athletic build, the grandfather of all chronometers on his wrist) who undressed quickly and got in a shower with Mikkel Havemand, the two of them speaking Copenhagen dockside Danish. Some hadn’t seen any tall soldier, and charged those who had with being psychotic.

  —The soap in my day was carbolic, Mikkel Rasmussen said, and we smelled decidedly chemical. The water was at best tepid.

  —To discourage self-abuse, Mikkel Havemand grinned.

  —Didn’t discourage your dad.

  —Grandma tells about visiting dad in his first year. When he went off to school he was shy, vain, and stuck-up. Old Colonel Rask, the Head back then, sent for dad, who turned up looking like an urchin and smelling like a gymnasium (I’m quoting Grandma) in ratty jeans and filthy shirt.

  —Mine, Major Rasmussen said. He would have had on my underpants, too.

  —Grandma was delighted. She said Dad was confident, full of self-esteem, and was speaking real Danish! So you’re responsible for the Havemand Endowment. Soap my back, huh?

  —So do you want to know what Magnus and I did after we skedaddled in the middle of the night?

  —I know some. You kept me, and grew up around me. There was that trigonometry exam in officer’s school, when you asked me to help, and I did. And when you told Magnus that you were going to marry Susanna you used my voice.

  —I couldn’t have done anything without you. I thought for years that I couldn’t be out of Magnus’s sight. We still talk almost daily on the phone. He’s in my command, you know, in Special Forces. Every time, in front of others, he calls me Major Rasmussen, a lizard runs up my spine.

  —We can’t see the long room over the stables. There’s a young couple there now, with a baby. Dad says it was the most wonderful room in the world. It was.

  —We’d had no other home.

  —I think I’ve seen the Sortemosen house, not clearly. I could recognize Susanna in a supermarket. You’ll have to show me pictures of Adam and Henry.

  —The willow oak at Kastellet.

  —A quintillion photons on every square centimeter of leaf per second.

  STILL LIFE WITH TEA POT

  —You must think me daff, Major, introducing you to a boy whose name I cannot think of as Mikkel Havemand. Havemand sprained his ankle early on this afternoon and was in the infirmary when we walked over to the practice field.

  RUSKIN

  A hundred years ago the eighty-year-old John Ruskin died at Brantwood, his home on the shores of Coniston Water in Lancashire, the Lake District made famous by Wordsworth and Coleridge. For ten dark years he had been out of his right mind, only intermittently recognizing his cousin Joan Severn, a long-suffering woman who had been adopted by the Ruskin family thirty-six years before to nurse Ruskin’s aging mother. In 1871 Joan Agnew, as she then was, had married the son of the Joseph Severn who closed Keats’s eyes. Ruskin had met Joseph Severn on a staircase in Rome in 1841, Ruskin ascending, Severn and George Richmond descending. Richmond had closed the eyes of William Blake.

  Ruskin’s life was like that, a fortuity of encounters. As a child he had seen Wordsworth asleep in church. Later, at Oxford, Wordsworth would hand him the coveted Newdigate Prize for Poetry. He came to think of his life, and all life, as a maze of unexpected turns, a labyrinth (or crinkle-crankle, the Chaucerian word Ruskin liked to use) of fortunate passages and obstructing dead ends. From 1871 to 1884 he elaborated this idea in a series of monthly essays addressed to the “labourers of Great Britain.” Fors Clavigera he called this work (he liked Latin titles). This is a pun as elaborate as the work itself: a claviger is the bearer of a clava (a cudgel, like Hercules’), or of a clavis (a key, like that of Janus, god of doors), or of a clavus (a nail, like Jael’s in the Bible, which she drove into the head of the tyrant Sisera). Fors means “luck” and is, Ruskin said, the “better part” of the English words “force” and “fortitude.”

  When the club-bearing Theseus ventured into the Cretan labyrinth to slay the monstrous Minotaur, his key to getting back out was a ball of thread, or clue (etymologically kin to clava, clavis, and clavus), paid out by Ariadne.

  The Cretan labyrinth was built by the archetype of all builders and designers, Daedalus: sculptor, architect, aeronaut, inventor of sails and ship rigging, designer of mechanical cows in which the Cretan queen Pasiphae could mate with a bull. The offspring of this trans-species coupling was the Minotaur, who ate Athenian children. He lived at the center of the maze Daedalus built for him, the Labyrinth. This myth has figured in European poetry and painting for three thousand years.

  Little John Ruskin’s first labyrinth, as Professor Jay Fellows explained in his brilliant Ruskin’s Maze, was the back garden at Herne Hill, the London house in which John Ruskin grew up, where long brick walls enclosed trees, flowers, grass, and walks. Here the red-haired, blue-eyed boy thought acorn cups and snail shells the most delightful things in the world. He also liked keys and pebbles.

  His father, a rich wine merchant, importer and wholesaler of sherry, port, and bordeaux, was a handsome Scot, also named John. His mother, Margaret, was a strict Calvinist who unflinchingly faced up to the Bible’s being “so outspoken.” The Ruskins began every day with reading aloud from Scripture, right through, year after year, from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, at which point they began again. Ruskin knew the Bible by heart.

  Ruskin’s upbringing, so beautifully remembered in his fragmentary autobiography, Praeterita (Shakespeare’s “things past,” Proust’s temps retrouvé), was a careful and loving education in piety, character, and intellectual curiosity. His parents hoped he would be a clergyman; Ruskin was all for being a geologist. He was a brilliant child. He was taken around England in comfortable coaches, and on European tours to see paintings and cathedrals. He fell in love with crystals, glaciers, alpine valleys, landscape painting, poetry, Greek and Latin, Gothic architecture, a daughter of the Domecq family (the wine business’s French connection) and played with her in the Hampton Court topiary maze (Ruskin’s first real labyrinth, though he’d seen the mazes on the floors of French churches, at Amiens and Chartres, and the Italian one at Lucca). He learned everything except the facts of life.

  When, after Oxford, where he wrote two books as an undergraduate, he married Effie Gray, he did not know what to do on the wedding night, and—for six years—did nothing. Effie was beautiful, charming, and perhaps as ignorant as Ruskin about where babies come from. Ruskin’s most recent biographer, Tim Hilton, author of the magnificent new John Ruskin: The Later Years (sequel to The Early Years: 1819–1859) and of a forthcoming volume on Fors Clavigera, treats this peculiar marriage with understanding and tact. He makes it clear that Ruskin, with awesome ignorance or unconscious planning, put Effie and the pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais in such deliberate proximity on a painting excursion that nature would do what it always does with twenty-year-olds sharing a bedroom in a rustic cabin. Effie filed for divorce, married Millais, had a large family, and lived happily ever after.

  Ruskin in a deposition to the divorce court said that the female body was not what he thought it was. Hilton puts it bluntly: “He was a paedophile”—four laconic words in an 875-page work. This naked fact, however, becomes the leitmotif of the rest of Hilton’s biography, as it was of Ruskin’s life. Sexual obsession can, as in Nabokov’s Lolita, lead to a blinding madness. It can also give us the Alice books of Lewis Carroll, Ruskin’s fellow don at Oxford, or create c
huckling pagans like the English novelist and travel writer Norman Douglas, voluptuous satirists like Frederick Rolfe, or ironic Germans like Thomas Mann. Or, for that matter, the philosophy of Socrates and the mind of Leonardo.

  When Ruskin fell in love with the ten-year-old Rose La Touche, the sprite-like daughter of a well-to-do evangelical Anglo-Irish family, he was meeting his daimon. Hilton shows how Ruskin began to fancy prepubescent girls in 1853, when he was thirty-four: an almost naked Italian peasant girl luxuriating in a sand pile acted as an epiphany, as when Dante first saw Beatrice, age nine, on the Ponte Vecchio, or when Stephen Dedalus was transformed by a girl wading in the sea’s edge, in Joyce’s Portrait.

  Rose, and others like her to follow, was purest symbol. She was a petulant, teasing, illiterate religious fanatic wholly unworthy of Ruskin’s adoration. We know nothing of Beatrice Portinari, or of Petrarch’s blonde Laura; it’s a good guess that they were practical Italians, afraid of owls and the evil eye, good cooks, and strong-armed beaters of dirt out of laundry on washing day at the river. And Shakespeare’s Mr. W.H. probably couldn’t follow the plot of Hamlet and smelled like a wet dog.

  The girl in the sand pile was an event on Ruskin’s road to Damascus. He had long before ceased to believe in the historical truth of the Bible. The study of the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, a “sun-worshipper,” and of Italian art had humanized his fundamentalism. The Victorian period saw an earnest questioning of Biblical truth and of Christian doctrine. Matthew Arnold thought that the apostles, none of whom were Eton and Oxford material, misunderstood what Jesus tried to teach them. Geology, Darwin, Bishop John William Colenso (author of The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined, 1862), and German scholarship were outing closet atheists by the dozen. Ruskin’s religion began to admit an appreciation of how God appeared to Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, even Catholics. He progressively came to see his Protestantism as restrictive, mean, and perhaps inhuman.

  If Ruskin’s erotic emotions were fixed in a perpetual preadolescence, his genius for the synthesis of knowledge derived from perception became as extensive as that of Leonardo. His Modern Painters, begun as a survey of landscape painting in order to place Turner foremost in that art, grew through four more volumes to include Renaissance and medieval painting, and to be a richly eccentric study of geology, botany, and geography. The other two multivolume works among Ruskin’s books, The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, grew in the same branching way, putting out digressions that are books in themselves, the main text pushing along through an undergrowth of footnotes, waving a dragon’s tail of appendices.

  There are 250 titles in Ruskin’s complete works, not counting many volumes of letters and diaries. Some are technical pamphlets about drawing and perspective; some are about geology, weather, political economy, glaciers, history, wildflowers, the morphology of leaves. All of these passions flow into Fors Clavigera, where they are enlisted into the service of a vast enterprise, an all-but-imaginary Guild of St. George, a widely varied round of activities distributed all over England, duly registered as a corporation, the purpose of which was no less than to return to the culture of medieval handicraft (in an England that was supplying the world with locomotives and rails) and medieval values: the lord in his manor, the peasant in his cottage. Its purpose was also to cleanse the air, rivers, and streets. Friends of the Guild swept the pavement in front of the British Museum (in Ruskin’s pay), ran a London tea shop with the best tea, cream in daily from the country. Guild members wove linen in Yorkshire, translated Xenophon, copied details of French cathedrals, measured buildings in Venice, illustrated manuscripts, set type, collected crystals, milked cows, and taught drawing. The Guild began with Ruskin’s Oxford students (Oscar Wilde among them) in the 1870s, the dawn of the Aesthetic Movement, when Walter Pater urged the young to “burn with a hard, gem-like flame.”

  Ruskin chose to live in an old stagecoach inn outside Oxford when he became the first Slade Professor of Art. He rose before dawn, read his Bible and prayed, translated a page or two of Plato (Jowett’s translation being “a disgrace”), walked into Oxford with his dog, gave a lecture on Carpaccio (with visuals held up by a servant), repeated the lecture (out of necessity, for no hall at Oxford could hold the crowds who came to hear him), then rolled up his sleeves to work with spade and pickax on the road to Ferry Hinksey that he and his students were building. The long evening of reading and writing lay ahead.

  His energy was boundless. He never passed up a game of chess (and kept games going by mail). He loved the theater (the more vulgar the play, the better), the Christie minstrels, military bands, dancing (he could do a memorable highland fling). He knew everybody: Prince Leopold and Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Rosa Bonheur and Charles Eliot Norton, Carlyle and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He loved visiting girls’ schools. He loved rowing and mountain climbing. If there was a subject he was not knowledgeable about, Hilton hasn’t found it.

  Ruskin relaxed with Euclid (in Greek) all his life. He built scaffolds in Italian churches and climbed them to inspect frescoes that hadn’t been seen close-up for centuries. He collected manuscripts and books, maps and paintings. He endowed and built museums. (At one time I thought I knew the range of Ruskin’s interests, only to be surprised by an exhibit, at the Ashmolean in Oxford, of archaic Greek sculpture of the kind that became appreciated after World War I, when Gaudier-Brzeska, Brancusi, and Modigliani made us aware of its severe, primitive beauty. Ruskin had got there first, bought it Lord knows where, and given it to the museum, to be appreciated when the world’s eyes caught up with his.)

  It took a while for the world to catch up with Ruskin’s discoveries. He recognized, for example, the Countess of Pembroke’s and her brother Sir Philip Sidney’s metrical translation of the Psalms (each psalm in a different meter) for the splendid work it is, “the most beautiful book in English,” forgotten and critically neglected, and republished it. His familiarity with Dante was, for the time, daring and unusual, as was his love of Chaucer.

  A story of Edith Wharton’s “False Dawn” (1924), nicely illustrates Ruskin’s aesthetic pioneering. The story is about an old and wealthy New York family that sends a son abroad to buy Old European Art as the basis for a museum. In Switzerland he meets up with Ruskin at an inn, is captivated by his talk, and is advised to collect not Baroque but Trecento and Quattrocento Italian paintings. So he returns to New York with Carpaccios, Cimabues, and Giottos. His father is horrified. The newspapers are satirical. The paintings are hidden in an attic for two generations, until a dealer is shown them and they sell for millions, a Piero della Francesca returning to Europe, others going to California. The sweet irony of the story is that the son had a list of advisers to show him what the Americans like. Worse luck, he falls in with this nobody John Ruskin.

  Ruskin’s influence on his contemporaries was pervasive. Proust worshiped him and translated two of his books, The Bible of Amiens (with his mother’s help) and Sesame and Lilies. The presence of Ruskin in the Modernist movement is evident in the similarity of Pound’s Cantos to Fors Clavigera: their labyrinthine twists and turns, their concern with economic systems that benefit from frequent wars, their interest in Venetian history and the Italian Quattrocento in architecture, poetry, and politics.

  Beatrix Potter recorded in her diary seeing Ruskin at the Royal Academy. He was showing some friends around, commenting on the paintings. Seeing Ruskin in public was a jolly surprise, but what fascinated her artist’s eye was that Ruskin’s trouser leg was caught in the top of his boot and that he was surreptitiously trying to shake it loose. Kafka, too, would have noticed Ruskin’s plight. It is a detail that exposes the protocol of biography, which must decide what’s relevant and what isn’t. The life of a person born 180 years ago was lived in a world wholly different from our own. We no longer respond to some of the most important things in Ruskin’s life; his drawing, for instance. He founded a school of drawing at Oxford. He drew all of his life, taught drawing (at
Working Men’s College in London, as well as by correspondence for many years), wrote about drawing, breathed drawing. Hilton keeps us aware of this, but I wonder if, in an age when drawing is something artists are ashamed of and masterful draftsmen like Norman Rockwell and Paul Cadmus are considered despicable, this attention won’t prove invisible.

  Then there’s Ruskin’s world. His Venice, every stone of which he knew the history of, may as well be a different place than the one backpackers look in on. Our Venice is another Italian city; Ruskin’s was another world. He traveled in a comfortable carriage, like Montaigne in his day. He stopped to draw wildflowers, clouds, rivers.

  In all of Ruskin’s travels there is an urgency—not like ours, to see notable places before we die or are too old to travel, but to see them while they yet exist, to see Venice before it sank into the sea, before Austrian shells destroyed more of San Marco, before fire and earthquake and renovation had their way. He had a prophetic sense that the darkening of European skies by industrial smoke portended some disaster. He rages in Fors at the burning of the Tuileries Palace in 1871. Within a few years of his death the Germans burned the medieval library at Louvain and German shells began to hit the cathedral at Amiens, about which he had written his most fervent study of Gothic architecture. Seventy French cathedrals were blown to rubble by German artillery in the First World War.

  When Sir Edward T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn brought out their Works of John Ruskin between 1903 and 1912 (thirty-nine volumes), a masterfully edited and annotated work, Ruskin’s popularity was in sharp decline. In his lifetime he had attracted all manner of idealists, from a bottle-cork-cutter who belonged to the Guild of St. George, to Prince Leopold, who attended his Oxford lectures. We need only look at his centrality to Henry Adams’s Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904), at the romantic Socialism of William Morris and Oscar Wilde, at Adrian Stokes’s Stones of Rimini, at Pound’s early Cantos. We need a study of Ruskin’s rayonnement: Rodin’s study of French cathedrals, Charles Sheeler’s photographs of Chartres, Proust’s preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies (1905), three lectures on the availability of culture to everybody, in libraries (“Kings’ treasuries”) and nature (“Queens’ gardens”). It can be demonstrated that the Arts and Crafts Movement that spread across Europe and the United States was largely inspired by Ruskin, and that his medievalism and championing of organic design flowered in Art Nouveau (the first international style since the twelfth century). One might even argue that this century’s Modernism, whose theories were incubated at the Bauhaus and in Moscow—Art Nouveau with the lines straightened—comes out of Ruskin and Morris.