The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  The seventeenth century was an epistolary century. The postal service started to function almost as well as in Roman times, many Dutchmen were on the sea or in colonies, the literary culture of the middle class was high; therefore, conditions were favorable for a lively exchange of correspondence. Those who did not know how to express their feelings artfully had different aids at their disposal; a manual, Le secrétaire à la mode by Jean Puget de la Serra5, appeared in Amsterdam and by the middle of the century had already been through nineteen editions. Characteristic in this manual is the distinct division of roles. Gentlemen were allowed to reveal stormy feelings and an abyss of melancholy; ladies charmed with the soothing depth of lakes.

  He: “Since your departure I lead a life sad beyond words. I confess I have lost appetite and peace; I spend entire days without food and nights without sleep.” She: “If I could only soothe the suffering caused by my absence you would see me in person instead of this letter. But I remain in the custody of my mother and father, and I don’t have enough freedom even to write you.” Then words of consolation follow, and a veiled hope of a meeting.

  In Dutch painting the theme of the letter was extremely popular. Formally it is simply a portrait, always of a female, a girl or a woman who puts down the letter or else reads from a piece of paper. For us this does not contain anything extraordinary: a simple monodrama played by one actress with a single prop. For the Dutch of the seventeenth century this kind of painting was particularly exciting, because the piece of paper was not, after all, an object emotionally indifferent like a mug or ball of yarn. As a rule, the women represented in these paintings are reading love letters. Thus we are looking at an intimate scene, intruders in a dialogue with an absentee, but we will never learn the reproaches, complaints, or confessions. The words, conceived in solitude, read in silence, are enclosed by the solemn silence of the painting as if with a seal.

  Terborch paints “Young Lady Writing a Letter” (in The Hague) against a background of a bed’s dark red curtains arranged in the shape of a tent. On the table, disorder—inkstands, a sheaf of papers, a colorful cloth in brick-brown, pearl-gray, and blue patterns hurriedly pushed aside. The girl, shown in profile, is dressed in a jacket that has a lively orange, luminous tinge. Amid the disquiet of the objects and colors, her face does not express any emotion. She recalls, rather, a student scrupulously doing her homework. Similarly, “Lady Reading a Letter” in the Metropolitan Museum is dressed in a deep funereal black, and even in her light hair there is a black lace scarf. She has a beautiful young alabaster face without a shade of sadness, without a wrinkle of worry. She reads the letter (perhaps an offer of marriage, since widows were highly valued on the Dutch matrimonial market) with the sober objectivity of a notary.

  Sometimes, however, Terborch has pity for our curiosity and sinful habit of peeking. The “Woman Reading” in the London Wallace Collection does not conceal her feelings. All-absorbed in reading a letter, she smiles at the piece of paper held in her hand, which emanates warmth and light. Her face is blissful, as if she found in the letter all the long-expected words and entreaties. In the Alte Pinakothek in Munich there is a painting by Terborch that has the content of the letter written out for different voices: a military courier enters the room dressed in a long brown coat decorated with black stripes—a beautiful Braque-like juxtaposition—and a trumpet on his shoulder, a lady with a white bonnet on her head is clearly interrupted in her morning toilet, and in addition a servant girl looks at the scene with indescribable amazement. The courier holds a letter in his outstretched hand; the mistress’s face expresses a spiteful coldness, and she has crossed her hands on her chest in a pathetic gesture signifying rejection, a rebuff, and a final break in the relationship. It would move one to tears if the toilette were not in the way: it is difficult to play a heroine in morning attire, or Penelope in pajamas.

  The “Fatherly Admonition” in Berlin’s Dahlem Museum is my favorite Terborch, one might say the fullest Terborch at the peak of his painterly potentiality: the enclosed fragment of an elegant room (its box conception of space brings to mind the dramas of Ibsen and nineteenth-century naturalists). Against deep browns the screen of a bed with a baldachin and a curtain falling perpendicularly like a backdrop with a matte red shade. The same color, only gradually more intensive and saturated with light, is repeated in the coverlet on the table and upholstery of a chair. Three persons are in the room. A young soldier seen in profile, his leather jacket and trousers painted with light warm ochre; in the left hand on his knee he holds a hat decked with fantastic feathers, in the right hand lifted to his face the thumb and index finger touch, as if he wanted to stress with this gesture the importance and subtlety of the spoken words. A woman in black faces the spectator, her eyes drowned in a glass of wine. And finally, her—the heroine of the painting, with her back turned to us, haughty, slender, precious. Terborch dressed her in a lordly manner. Her blond hair, combed up and gathered in a black ribbon, reveals a beautiful neck, a black, wide, velvet shawl-like collar, puffed sleeves, a dress with a high waist and silvery undulating satin that flows down from the waist, forming a small train on the floor. Terborch, who painted with such reticence gray and black portraits, gives in “Fatherly Admonition” a concert of coloristic mastery in difficult chromatic compositions: red, black, matte white, the subdued red of the bed curtain, the low deadly black of the model’s collar, and the light, dazzling, joyful white of her dress. Whenever I try to recall this painting of Terborch, I close my eyes and see first of all the heroine of the scene, a “beauty with her back turned” who brightens the darkness like a candle in a precious candlestick, while other persons, objects, details remain unclear, blurred and wavering.

  In his novel Die Wahlverwandschaften6, Goethe describes a popular game of the time in which a tableau was acted out. A work of art was reconstructed as faithfully as possible by persons in appropriate costumes; they imitated the gestures, expressions, and atmosphere of the original. In a word: painting transposed for the stage of a theater, frozen in immobility and silence.

  One evening they performed Van Dyck’s “Belissarius,” Poussin’s “Ashuarus and Esther,” and then Terborch’s “Fatherly Admonition.” Precisely this painting provoked the unusual enthusiasm of the spectators, thunderous applause, and calls of “encore.” It was the figure of “the girl with her back turned” that won their hearts most of all, her artfully arranged hair, the shape of her head, her lightness. One of the enchanted spectators called out, “Tournez, s’il vous plaît,” others joined in, but the artists who knew the rules of the game remained indifferent and unmoved.

  A few centuries passed during which a dispute, even a scandal, broke out about the interpretation of “Fatherly Admonition.” Those who “read paintings” announced that the title had been invented by bigots and in fact the painting represented—fearful to admit—a scene from a public house. Dutch painters often composed the interiors of brothels with tipsy men and concubines pouring wine, intently staring at the purses of their clients (not to leave any doubts, they would also add copulating dogs). However Terborch did everything to mislead us. The interior in “Fatherly Admonition” is really the interior of a well-to-do bourgeois home. The whole scene is steeped in an atmosphere of honesty, peacefulness, and reticence. Not a trace of violent gestures or unbridled lust. Such is the general impression. Inexorable realities indicate something different. Could a young soldier in his twenties be the father of “the beauty with her back turned”? Why has the golden coin that he temptingly holds in his right hand been erased (traces of retouching are visible on the canvas)? Is the woman in black sipping wine a mother, or simply a procuress—paintings with similar subjects show them—an intermediary in a sinful relationship? In emblematics all this game of meanings in which Terborch delighted is called a paradox; it consists in showing a morally reprehensible event with irreproachable decorations, saturated with virtue and nobility.

  Compared to the boring, obsessively “scientific” s
tudies of contemporary scholars, dry as sawdust, how favorably the old art historians’ manner of writing stands out: a flowing style not without charm, always appealing to our ability to see, always hitting the mark with short, synthetic silhouettes of the masters under consideration. The incomparable Max Friedländer7 characterizes Terborch in the following way: “Good taste, tact, and sense of proportion inform his work. He endowed the Dutch bourgeoisie with a touch of French grace and Spanish grandezza, and it seems he possesses all the traits of a diplomat: elegance full of dignity, and a reserved spirit of conciliation.” The subtle drawing of Terborch, his avoiding of violent coloristic compositions, the cool, silvery tonality and gradations of gray all the way to the majestic black that encloses the painting, do not escape Friedländer’s attention. Also Terborch’s mastery in rendering the consistency of objects, especially fabrics, from rustling cool silks to meaty wool that absorbs light. Finally, the peculiar eroticism of the artist: puritanical, coded, barely mentioned but so much the more intriguing.

  Indeed Terborch gives the impression of an artist who is one of a kind, without genealogy, influences, or evolution—therefore easily recognizable. But is this really so? At least two of his paintings do not give me peace. The first is the “Grinder’s Family” in Berlin’s Dahlem.

  At the rear of a courtyard, a murky shed patched together with boards—the atelier of an artisan who at this moment bends over his wheel waiting for a client. On the right, something that once might have been a house but has been reduced by time to one floor made of bricks, with peeling stucco. Three dark openings imitate windows and a door. A mother who is delousing a child, a courtyard paved with cobbles, an overturned chair, tools in disarray. The whole is a study of abandonment, dilapidation, and poverty. With what obstinate precision this painter of elegance and synthesis traces all the repelling details and horrible minutiae. The naturalists of the middle of the nineteenth century painted this way trying to evoke compassion for the fate of the urban proletariat. But how did the elegant Councillor Terborch hit upon this alley-way of misery?

  The “Procession of Flagellants” from the Rotterdam Museum Boymans van Beuningen I took without hesitation to be an error of an absentminded curator who hung a Spaniard among the Dutch. The “Procession” is a scene of violent, sharp contrasts of chiaroscuro. The atmosphere of menace and mysteriousness oscillates between a rending shout and deadly silence. Light falls from the lit torches, creating puddles of brightness amid thick, almost fleshlike darkness. On the left, something like an altar or a tribune. In the center, three exorcists in white frocks and white conical hoods recall predatory animals in an atlas of nightmarish hallucinations. We also see a man tied to a fence or wall with stretched-out arms, bare to his waist, on whom a storm of whiplashes will fall in a moment.

  When later I looked at this painting, many times I invariably thought: But this is Goya, no one else but Goya—his subject matter, his way of painting, his violence and cruelty. How can it be that a painter from a northern country, where other tastes and traditions govern art, has anticipated by a century and a half the great Spaniard? A memory from Terborch’s youthful travels? Very likely, but this does not explain the similarities or identity of style. A lesson in humility. We will never solve all the secrets of the imagination.

  In the Mauritshuis, a self-portrait of the master: a large head somewhat out of proportion with the rest of the body, a rather common face, thick nose, gluttonous lips, and sharp eyes looking at us with unconcealed irony, as if he were saying, Yes I knew well the world of poverty and ugliness, but I painted the skin, the glittering surface, the appearance of things: the silky ladies, and gentlemen in irreproachable black. I admired how fiercely they fought for a life slightly longer than the one for which they were destined. They protected themselves with fashion, tailors’ accessories, a fancy ruffle, ingenious cuffs, a fold, a pleat, any detail that would allow them to last a little longer before they—and we as well—are engulfed by the black background.

  STILL LIFE WITH A BRIDLE

  For Józef Czapski1

  Car je est un autre2

  ARTHUR RIMBAUD

  1

  THIS IS HOW IT happened. Years ago, during my first visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I was crossing a room with the marvelous “Married Couple” of Hals and the beautiful “Concert” of Duyster3 when I came upon a canvas by a painter unknown to me.

  I understood immediately, though it is hard to explain rationally, something very important had happened; something far more important than an accidental encounter in a crowd of masterpieces. How to describe this inner state? A suddenly awakened intense curiosity, sharp concentration with the senses alarmed, hope for an adventure and consent to be dazzled. I experienced an almost physical sensation as if someone called me, summoned me. The painting registered for long years in my memory, sharply etched and insistent, but it was not an image of a face with fiery eyes or even a dramatic scene, but a calm, static still life.

  Here is an inventory of the objects represented in the painting: on the right side a potbellied pitcher of burnt clay in a warm, saturated brown; in the middle a massive glass goblet, called a roemer, half-filled with liquid; and on the left side a silver-gray pewter pitcher with a lid and spout. In addition two porcelain pipes, a piece of paper with music, and a text on the shelf where the utensils were standing. At the top, metal objects I could not at first identify.

  The background was the most fascinating of all: black, deep as a precipice and at the same time flat as a mirror, palpable and disappearing in perspectives of infinity. A transparent cover over the abyss.

  At the time I jotted down the name of the painter, Torrentius. Then I looked for more information about him in various art histories, encyclopedias, and dictionaries of artists. But the dictionaries and encyclopedias were silent, or I found only confused and deceptive references. It seemed Torrentius was a hypothesis of scholars, but in fact never existed.

  When I finally went to the original sources and documents, the amazing life of the painter suddenly appeared before my eyes—an unusual, dramatic, stormy life completely different from the banal biographies of most of his professional colleagues. For the few who wrote about him he was an enigmatic, disquieting figure. His glittering career and tragic end did not form any logical or clear pattern, but made an entangled knot of many threads—artistic, social, moral, and finally, it seems, political.

  In good bourgeois fashion his name was simply Jan Simon van de Beeck. His Latin nom de guerre comes from the word torrens, which in its adjectival form means “hot, incandescent,” and as a noun means “a wild, rushing stream”—the two unreconciled, antagonistic elements of fire and water. If one could write one’s own destiny into a pen name, Torrentius did it with prophetic intuition.

  He was born in Amsterdam in 1589. We do not know who his master was, but we know that from the beginning of his artistic career Torrentius was a famous, fashionable, and wealthy painter. His still lifes in particular enjoyed tremendous success. “In my opinion,” Constantijn Huygens wrote in his Observations on Painting, “he is a magician in representing still objects.”

  The Orpheus of the still life. He was surrounded by an aura of mystery, and legends circulated about what took place in his atelier, tales about supernatural forces he brought into his work. Probably Torrentius thought a certain dose of charlatanism did not harm art (differing here from his modest guild brothers of the Fraternity of Saint Luke), but on the contrary helped it. For example, he used to say he did not in fact paint but only placed paints on the floor next to his canvases; under the influence of musical sounds they arranged themselves in colorful harmonies. But is not art, every art, a kind of alchemical transmutation? From pigments dissolved in oil arise flowers, towns, bays of the ocean, and views of paradise truer than the real ones.

  “As for the life and conduct of that man,” Huygens adds as if in passing, “I would not want to assume the role of a Roman judge in a toga.” Discretion worthy of praise,
because it was just this subject that was much discussed, universally and with fierce relish. Torrentius was handsome, dressed with sophisticated elegance, led a magnificent life, had a lackey, and rode a horse. What is worse, he surrounded himself with a group of friends and admirers, wandering from town to town with them like Dionysus leading a crowd of satyrs, organizing sumptuous, not-quite-decent feasts in taverns, inns, and public houses. The notoriety of a scandalizer and libertine followed him; the claims and grievances of seduced women increased as well as his unpaid bills. In the Leyden tavern Under the Rainbow alone, his debt for food and drink amounted to the not trivial sum of 484 florins. Some gently called him an epicurean, others did not spare stern words of condemnation: in summa seductor civium4, impostor populi, corruptor juventutis, stupator feminarum.

  If all this was not enough, Torrentius had a Socratic streak, namely a predilection for discussions on the subject of faith. He was intelligent, well-read, brilliant, and missed no opportunity to get the better of a pastor or theology student. It is hard to say what religious views he represented. Most likely his disputes were only displays of dialectics, and their motive was the pure pleasure in making fools out of others.

  Torrentius must have realized he was playing with fire, and pursued a dangerous game. But he counted on his lucky star, his talent, and his irresistible personal charm. The role he first assumed, lightheartedly and for show, became part of his self, and began to direct his destiny.

  Dark clouds began to gather over the painter’s head, and they took on quite unexpected shapes. A suspicion arose that he was a member and even leader of the Dutch secret association of Rosicrucians (a kind of freemasonry avant la lettre), whose goal was mystical reform, renewal of the world, and preparation for a divine kingdom on earth. Different elements united in the philosophy, or what they called Pan-sophy or Omni-wisdom, of this movement: the Kaballa, Neo-Platonism, Gnosis, the esoteric interpretation of Christianity, and most of all the views of the German theologian Johann Valentine Andreae5. At the end of the sixteenth century and later the Rosicrucians had a sizable number of adepts, particularly in England, France, and Germany. Among them were many distinguished personalities of the time, princes, scholars, and thinkers. Indeed it was a very appealing current, since it attracted fine minds like Komensky, Leibniz, and Descartes.