The House of the Prophet

by Louis Auchincloss

  “A glorious nightmare.”

  The next morning we returned to the Church of Santo Tome for another long session before El Greco’s masterpiece The Burial of Count Orgáz. I think that if Auntie could have had this painting for her collection at the price of a murder, some poor man’s life might not have been safe. She sat before it in the wicker chair that our guide had produced, like an El Greco Virgin herself, her eyes raised as if to heaven. But when she spoke at last, she was intense, busy, factual, her usual self.

  “You see, there are three levels of figures. First, there’s the body being lowered into the grave by the two priests. Then there’s the row of mourners. And finally, above, there’s the dead man, naked now, being presented to the court of heaven. But note that the bottom and top levels are united by the same note of magnificence, the same awesome majesty. You see?”

  “Of course. The priests’ robes are magnificent.”

  “That’s because they’re not really priests. They’re Saint Augustine and Saint Stephen. That was the miracle, you remember? They suddenly appeared at the funeral to inter the body with their own hands. So they are really part of the heavenly court. That is why their expressions, like those of the saints and angels above, are settled in serene reverence. They exist only to adore.”

  “How boring!”

  Auntie ignored me. “And now look at the mourners. They are here. They are mortal. They are clay. They are presumably good Catholics, and they trust that their friend, for whose death they sincerely grieve, has gone to heaven, but it is all still a mystery. They know that they cannot take in the answer. Oh, yes, they have faith, but it’s a muffled faith. They have a suspicion, but no real conception, of the splendor that surrounds them, right here, at that moment, in this church. But we see it! We see it because we share El Greco’s vision.”

  “Auntie, you sound like a Catholic! Aren’t you forgetting that we’re in Toledo, which was filled with Jews, some of whom were burned alive, possibly by the very Catholics painted in this picture?”

  “Well, of course, I know that. It was horrible, what they did to the Jews. I like to think it was our expulsion from the country that brought about the decadence of the empire. Served them right!”

  “And don’t you think El Greco himself may have approved of the burnings? After all, didn’t he paint an inquisitor?”

  “Ugh! I suppose so.” Poor Auntie hugged herself as she always did in moments of emotional distress. “I try not to think of it. Maybe his god has forgiven him this because he was such a good painter.”

  “His god? But wouldn’t his god have rubbed his hands in glee over the auto-da-fés? What would there have been to forgive?”

  “I mean that if there were a god, he must have been a good god. So El Greco’s god, whatever El Greco himself believed, would still have frowned on persecuting Jews. Or anyone else!”

  “I’ve never asked you. Do you believe in God?”

  Auntie became inscrutable. “I don’t know. But I know this. I know that I like El Greco’s feeling that what we see and hear is not all. That there’s another world all around us and in us. You can divide the people in his pictures into those who sense this keenly and those who sense it only dimly. I can’t think of any who don’t sense it at all.”

  “But why do you like that?”

  “Because it makes life more exciting! Anyway, it makes painting more exciting.”

  “And painting is your life.”

  “Oh, I have a few people in it, too,” she said, reaching over to pat my hand. “A few people like yourself, my child.”

  I was well enough now to go back to Paris, and we traveled north by slow stages, stopping for a few days in Madrid. There a dealer brought to Auntie’s suite at the Ritz a small painting that must have been an advance study for Mrs. Havemeyer’s great portrait of the Cardinal de Guevara. It was overpriced, in Auntie’s opinion, so she did not buy it, but we lived with it happily for a day. I was fascinated by the power in the hands grasping the arms of the chair and by the cold assessing stare of the eyes. It reminded me of the great Champaigne portrait of Richelieu that Auntie and I had looked at together in the Louvre so many years before.

  “Where is the other world that he sees?” I asked her. “Isn’t he an exception to your rule? He seems quite replete with the here and now.”

  “Perhaps,” she conceded. “Perhaps that is what being an inquisitor did to him. No matter how good a Catholic he was when he started, the tortures and burnings may have removed the other world from his vision. But doesn’t that prove what I was saying in the church in Toledo, that God, even their god, didn’t approve? So the Grand Inquisitor begins to lose the mystic sense that the others have. He is of the earth—earthy! He is trapped into one dimension of reality by the horrible things he thinks God wants him to do!”

  I thought Auntie was being a bit too neat, but I did not demur. That afternoon we went to the Escorial to see El Greco’s great Dream of Philip II. Here, as in the Burial of Count Orgáz, there is a heavenly court and a crowd below, but it is the Last Judgment; everyone in the canvas but the king himself is dead. It is the other world, as Philip II is allowed to envision it. All the figures are fully aware of it: with hope, in the case of the saved, and with horror, in the case of the damned. The king, in his mystic ecstasy, is almost translated to that higher sphere.

  But not quite. That I noted carefully. He is still the king. He still has power below. What saved him from being as earthy as the Grand Inquisitor? A greater faith? A greater fanaticism?

  And then I had an idea that filled me with sudden elation. It happened just like that! My depression, my illness, or the last shreds of it, simply exaporated. I knew now that I was going to be able to live in the world of 1919, bad as it might be. For if El Greco could find beauty in all the horror of Toledo in the Inquisition, so could I find it in a Europe that was preparing for a new war even before it had finished licking its wounds from the old one. If he could find relief in mysticism, I could find it in drama, which was very possibly the same thing.

  The book that I planned that very night was The Irreconcilables, a study of the conflicting personalities of Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge. I would present their personalities dramatically; they would symbolize, respectively, the dream of world peace and the illusion of isolation. But behind the dream of peace would be the ruthless fanaticism of Philip II, as projected in Wilson, and behind the illusion of isolation would be the clever opportunism of the Grand Inquisitor, as seen in Lodge. Idealism marred by compromise would be pitted against selfishness tempered by high-mindedness. What could the poor world do but lose in such a tussle?

  My aunt recognized at once that I was preoccupied and left me to myself. She made no inquiries, no fuss; she was tact itself. But she told me later that she had known I was “saved,” By the time we reached Paris, I had prepared an outline for my book.

  I found that I had been adequately replaced in Mr. White’s office; in any event, our role was almost completed. No objection was made to my returning at once to New York and my family. For six months I worked night and day in the New York Public Library, and The Irreconcilables made its appearance in the full heat of the national debate over the treaty and the league. My first books had attracted considerable notice but nothing like what this one did. I enjoyed the experience of Lytton Strachey, who said, of the publication of Eminent Victorians in that same year, that he woke up to find himself famous.

  It was through this book that I obtained my joint chair of government and constitutional law at New York University, which I held for ten years.

  The Chapter on Marriage in the Privately Printed Memoirs of Frances Ward Leitner, “My Life and Law.”

  MY FAMILY and friends have always clung to the idea that Gladys Satterlee single-handedly broke up what had been, until her advent, a blissfully happy marriage. It seems to me that if this little book has any functions, one should be to correct such a misapprehension, and in this chapter I shall try to describe
how my relations with Felix had altered before her “raid.” I do not write it to excuse her, for Gladys was not a woman to have let anything stand between herself and a goal. If she had decided to smash my marriage, it little mattered to her whether it was blissful or not. But I want to be fair to Felix. I cannot leave my posterity under the illusion that I was a model wife. I always loved him, yes. I never, as the saying goes, so much as looked at another man. But a loving and faithful wife can still be a pain in the neck. Oh, yes! That should be the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not be a pain in the neck. Or, as I am writing for a blunter generation, in any other part of the anatomy. It is going to be a painful chapter to write. I have been staring at my typewriter now for fifteen minutes. But here goes.

  I had better start by admitting that during all of the year 1936 I was undergoing the tension of a difficult and somewhat premature menopause. It did not make me any easier to live with. It certainly did not improve my judgment or balance. I was inclined to make decisions emotionally just when I most needed calm and reflection.

  It made matters worse, too, that I was not working. Felix had resigned his post in the Department of Justice to write a book, and I had decided to do the same. I had long wanted (or thought I had wanted) to write a monograph on legal aid, its problems and its future, and we agreed to take over my parents’ summer house in Seal Cove and winterize it. Aunt Renata had died and left Felix a handsome legacy. The great fortune, of course, had been her husband’s and “went back,” as we used to say, to his nephews and nieces, but she had saved enough from her income to make us independent if we were sufficiently frugal. Felix, in the uncharacteristic role of Omar Khayyam, endeavored to persuade me that a winter on the lonely, beautiful Maine coast with just our books and ourselves, would be “paradise enow.”

  But everything seemed to go wrong from the very start. My book went badly; I had been too out of touch with legal aid during our Washington years. The ideas came slowly, and they struck me as banal and dated. Our daughter, Felicia, was away at boarding school and happy there, but our son, Frank, now thirteen, was beginning to show signs of the terrible depression and disorientation that were so to plague him later. He hated his new school and had to be taken out and tutored by Felix and myself. Felix was very good about this, but he obviously minded the loss of time from his book, so I eventually took over the whole job of teaching Frank and held it against his father. Oh, I was full of resentments! It was that time of my life.

  But worst of all was my aching nostalgia for the immediate past of our wonderful three years in Washington. Felix had been only nominally in the Justice Department; his real role had been as a member of the president’s famous “brain trust,” dedicated to framing the legislation of the New Deal. I had taken a leave of absence from my New York office and worked as a volunteer drafter with Felix’s group. We lived and breathed the New Deal. Even when we went to parties, and we went to a good many, it was principally to discuss how the statutes were working out and what new ones were needed.

  I find it hard to convey the exhilaration of Washington in those days. Perhaps the best I can do is quote Wordsworth’s great lines on the French Revolution:

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven!

  Perhaps we weren’t so young in years, but we were in spirit. I had a glorious sense of being part of the making of a new and better world. Felix was less exuberant—he never forgot his disillusionment at Versailles—but he was still intensely interested in what he was doing. Never had he and I been closer, never more of a team.

  I think it was early in 1935 that I first became aware of a change in Felix’s attitude. It struck me now as more that of a historian than of a reformer. He was more detached about his fellow workers and, at last, frankly critical of them. At dinner he would tell me stories about their ineptitudes, the folly of some of their visions. It simply amused him that I obviously hated this.

  “You have the look of a grand inquisitor who scents apostasy in the air,” he told me.

  “Have you lost all faith in what we’re doing?”

  “Do we even know what we’re doing? At the White House today I had the distinct impression that we were a bunch of kids building a fort with toy bricks. Who cares what tumbles down? It might even be part of the fun. Crash! Try Anything Once is Roosevelt’s motto.”

  “I suppose you’d like us to go back to the bread lines! Until, as the great Mr. Hammond puts it, the ‘natural bottom’ of the market has been reached, and we can climb back up.”

  “Those bankers are not all crazy, you know. I talked to Ridley Hammond for two hours after his testimony before the Senate Finance Committee. He makes a lot of sense. And he’s a good bit more open-minded than some of the men we work with.”

  “Oh, Felix, don’t give me Ridley Hammond! Any other banking firm in the country, but not his. They’re the very apostles of greed.”

  “There’s no use talking to you about these things, Fran. You’re too prejudiced.”

  “You’ve got to have some prejudices if you’re not going to be totally wishy-washy. And I suggest that Ridley Hammond should be one of them.”

  It was here that I made my first big mistake. I should not have closed any door that gave me access to Felix’s mind. It did not take much to make him avoid a topic altogether, and as a result of this initial outburst of mine—and, I fear, a few others—Felix began to tell me less and less of his growing doubts of the New Deal. Indeed, when he at last informed me of his decision to leave the government to write a book, it took me quite by surprise.

  “A book? What sort of a book?”

  “On what we’ve been doing down here.”

  And that was all he would say.

  Seal Cove was a good enough place to write a book, if one had one to write. It was an intellectual summer community, full of camps and shingle houses, occupied largely by professors and artists, accessible to the excellent stores of nearby fashionable Butterfield Bay without any necessary involvement in the more hectic social life of that community. Felix was perfectly happy with his book and the long solitary walks by the ocean during which he would puzzle out his chapters, but when I began to find my material inadequate for the work that I had projected I became bored and restless. I found the cold, damp weather and the bleak, slaty sea oppressive. I yearned for the summer when the rest of the colony would return and when my parents, as agreed, would join us in the cottage. But the summer, when it came, brought another problem.

  Felix’s “great banker,” Ridley Hammond, senior partner of Harris, Tweed & Sons, had an estate just south of Butterfield Bay in Jaffray Harbor. I mention the name of this village only because Mr. Hammond always insisted on it, loftily refusing to be identified either with the trivialities of Butterfield Bay or with what he called the “academic priggishness” of Seal Cove. To the big, rambling stone house that he had erected on a rocky peninsula jutting out to sea he invited economists, political philosophers, politicians and, of course, his own partners. His house parties were more like conferences. It almost seemed as if he used the summer vacation to educate the members of his firm to a higher concept of the role of banking in modern society. That, at any rate, was how Felix saw it.

  Mr. Hammond was in the habit of borrowing a tycoon from Butterfield Bay or a brain from Seal Cove to add variety to his dinner parties. He made a great point of asking Felix, and of course I had to go, too. But I was determined that I would not be “summoned” by the great man.

  “I am told you never go to anyone else’s house in the summer,” I said to my host after our second evening at his table. “But if we are to come again, you will have to dine with us first.”

  The answer startled me and all who overheard it. “But, my dear Mrs. Leitner, nothing would give me greater pleasure!”

  I make immediate disclosure of my dislike of Mr. Hammond, so my readers may be on notice of possible prejudice in my description of him. But as a good lawyer I should be able to draw h
im as he was. He was certainly an attractive old man, lean and limber with a thick crop of wiry gray hair. His face was long and brown and wrinkled, his nose sharp, his chin pointed, but his small intent eyes were of a clear baby blue. He never showed temper. Perhaps he never felt it. It was as if he had long since decided that life was too short for him to be anything but rational.

  He was, like so many financiers of his generation, the son of a New England Presbyterian minister, and he was inclined to be proud of his simple and austere background. It seemed to provide the needed contrast to the Tudor mansion on Seventieth Street in Manhattan, with its great library of Jacobean folios and quartos, and the huge, dark-paneled office that overlooked Trinity Church. Hammond loved to pose as the “intellectual” of Harris, Tweed & Sons. He had not only written a book on the King James version of the Bible; he had even been known to vote the Democratic ticket! You might have said it was one of his missions in life to keep people from taking him for granted.

  Not only did he dine with us in Seal Cove; he actually drove over on occasion to talk with Felix and to take little strolls with him by the sea. When I asked Felix what they talked about on these excursions, he would simply say “everything under the sun.” But I became jealously convinced that they were discussing Felix’s book, and I noted one day that the old man left with a thick roll of typescript, which he handed to the driver of his big black car. Was he trying to influence Felix’s book? Were they even collaborating? But when I put this to Felix, he roundly denied it.

  “Why is he so interested then?”

  “Because it’s a passionately interesting book.”

  “What makes it so passionately interesting?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Won’t you even tell me what it’s about?”

  “I have told you. It’s about the first two years of the New Deal. I am showing the origin and development of its political and economic concepts.”