by Susan Sontag
Don’t lean on it, she said. It was as if she could read his mind. It’s a surprise, you see, but it ain’t too steady. We wouldn’t want it to fall down!
Then she left him to join the Cavaliere, who was standing near the musicians. The dancing was about to begin, and he wondered how he would negotiate that. He did not want to be seen sitting down. But the dancing was not starting yet, for the musicians had struck up “God Save the King,” which the Cavaliere’s wife stepped forward to sing. What a beautiful voice she had! She seemed to give new life to the familiar inspiring verses, and then, yes, he had heard correctly, his name. “First on the rolls of fame,” she was singing.
Him let us sing;
Spread we his fame around,
Honour of British ground,
Who made Nile’s shores resound—
God Save the King!
And he was blushing as the thousands in the great ballroom began to applaud and cheer, and when she repeated the new verse, beckoning to the whole assembly to join her, they all sang his name, his praise. Then she and the Cavaliere came toward him, and the hubbub subsided as she pulled the flags from the mast-like object under the canopy to unveil a column on which was engraved the conqueror’s Veni vidi vici, and the names of the captains in the Battle of the Nile, his brothers-in-arms, almost all of whom were present, who came forward to clasp his arm and respectfully reaffirm their gratitude for the privilege of serving under him. The Cavaliere stood beside the column and made a short speech of welcome comparing him to Alexander the Great, the close of which the Cavaliere’s wife interrupted, crying that there should be a statue of him made of pure gold and placed in the middle of London, and would be if those at home understood how much they owed him—he felt quite aureoled. And then many others crowded around him, beaming at him, some pawing him, as people do here, and smiling, smiling. Oh, if only his father and Fanny could see him now!
He turned to the Cavaliere to make his speech of thanks for this magnificent celebration. The honor you do me, he began.
It is we who are honored, said the Cavaliere, and now it was he who took the hero’s arm.
Then the musicians began to play and the hero, supposing that the Cavaliere’s wife expected him to partner her in the quadrille, went toward her. No, no, not to dance, she would have to understand, but to try to express his thanks.
The Cavaliere, as besotted with the young admiral in his way as his wife was in hers, looked on fondly. How brilliant the occasion, as after an eclipse. All that was black now seemed resplendent, luminous. His house and all the bright and eloquent things in it which he feared he might soon have to abandon, his house—now the official quarters of the hero—harbors the future as well as shelters the past.
* * *
He had thought his expatriate paradise was foundering. In the earlier months of the year, as the international alliance against France seemed to be failing, Naples was bending to French will. First came the indignity of having to receive as the new ambassador none other than Monsieur Garat, the man who had read out the death sentence to Louis XVI. Then the influential anti-French prime minister had been dismissed and replaced by one favorable to an accommodation with the French. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s armies advanced with impunity and the young British admiral was still roaming the Mediterranean looking unsuccessfully to engage the French fleet.
The Cavaliere didn’t panic, that wasn’t his nature. Still, suppose the French army should start advancing down the peninsula from the papal capital, which they already controlled, and one morning he learned that they were just up the coast, beyond the Campi Phlegraei. There would still be time for him and his wife and any of their English guests (there were always guests) to flee; he had no worry about that. But he did fear for the safety of his possessions. Things that are valuable are also vulnerable—to theft, fire, flood, loss, mistreatment, the negligence of servants and employees, the lethal rays of the sun, and war, which to the Cavaliere meant mainly vandalism, looting, confiscation.
Every collector feels menaced by all the imponderables that can bring disaster. Which is to say that every collection—itself an island—needs an island. And grandiose collections often inspire grandiose ideas of proper storage and safekeeping. An indefatigable collector in southern Florida, who travels about on his buying expeditions in the last private train in the United States, has acquired a gigantic castle in Genoa to store his vast assemblage of decorative objects; and the Nationalist Chinese, who in 1949 packed up in rice grass and cotton all the portable masterpieces of the fine arts in China then above ground (silk paintings, small sculpture, jades, bronzes, porcelain, and calligraphy) to take with them to Taiwan, keep them in tunnels and vaults hollowed out of a mountain next to a huge museum with room to display no more than a tiny fraction of their booty. Most storage places need not be so fanciful or fortress-like to be safe. But stored in a place that does not feel secure, the collection is a constant source of anxiety. Pleasure is haunted by the phantom of loss.
Who knows, it may not be necessary to flee Naples. But if it is, three decades of accumulation are not easily packed, crated, moved. (The Wandering Jew can’t be a major collector, except of postage stamps. There are few great collections that could be put on someone’s back.) The Cavaliere thought it wise to have on paper exactly what he has, to make—for the first time—a complete inventory.
This was hardly his first list: collectors are inveterate list-makers, and all people who enjoy making lists are actual or would-be collectors.
Collecting is a species of insatiable desire, a Don Juanism of objects in which each new find arouses a new mental tumescence, and generates the added pleasure of scorekeeping, of enumeration. Volume and tirelessness of conquest would lose some of its point and savor were there not a ledger somewhere with one’s assorted mille e tre (and, preferably, a factotum to keep it updated), the happy contemplation of which at off-moments counteracts the exhaustion of desire that the erotic athlete is condemned to and against which he struggles. But lists are a much more spiritual enterprise for the athlete of material and mental acquisitiveness.
The list is itself a collection, a sublimated collection. One does not actually have to own the things. To know is to have (luckily, for those without great means). It is already a claim, a species of possession, to think about them in this form, the form of a list: which is to value them, to rank them, to say they are worth remembering or desiring.
What you like: your five favorite flowers, spices, films, cars, poems, hotels, names, dogs, inventions, Roman emperors, novels, actors, restaurants, paintings, gems, cities, friends, museums, tennis players … just five. Or ten … or twenty … or a hundred. For, midway through whatever number you settled for, you always wish you had a bigger number to play in. You’d forgotten there were that many things you liked.
What you’ve done: everyone you’ve gone to bed with, every state you’ve been in, country you’ve visited, house or apartment you’ve lived in, school you’ve attended, car you’ve owned, pet you’ve had, job you’ve held, Shakespeare play you’ve seen …
What the world has in it: the names of Mozart’s twenty operas or of the kings and queens of England or of the fifty American state capitals … Even the making of such lists is an expression of desire: the desire to know, to see arranged, to commit to memory.
What you actually have: all your CDs, your bottles of wine, your first editions, the vintage photographs you’ve purchased at auctions—such lists may do no more than ratify the acquiring lust, unless, as it is with the Cavaliere, your purchases are imperiled.
He wants to know what he has, now that it may be lost to him. He wants to have it forever, at least in the form of a list.
For the Cavaliere it is a rescue mission. But despite this unpleasant incentive, he rather looked forward to the task. To look at each item he has collected, put the items in some sort of sequence, lay out the exact state of variety, profusion, excellence, and, yes, incompleteness of each of his collections: that wo
uld be a pleasure as well as a labor, a voluptuous labor, and one he would not delegate to anyone of his household.
Starting from the hall that led to the lower staircase, he went from room to room, floor to floor, memory to memory (it was all there), trailed by his pair of English secretaries, Oliver and Smith, who took down whatever he chose to say aloud, by Gaetano with a taper and a measure, and by a page who carried a stool. He had never seen his house in this unsettling light, as a stranger might—a servile curator, a taciturn assessor, or the bullying envoy of an art-coveting foreign despot. He was impressed. It took nearly a week to make the inventory; for he dallied, he doted. Then he retired to his study and spent a full day writing it up. Dated 14 July 1798, two months ago, set down in his careless but legible hand in many manuscript pages, then bound in reddish leather and laid in a drawer of his locked desk—excepting his collections of volcanic minerals, fish skeletons, and other natural wonders, it is all there: the more than two hundred paintings, including pictures by Raphael, Titian, Veronese, Canaletto, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Chardin, Poussin, many gouaches of Vesuvius in eruption, and the fourteen portraits of his wife that he owned, the vases, the statues, the cameos, down to the last candelabrum and sarcophagus and agate lamp in the cellar storerooms, leaving out items that would be immediately recognized as illegitimately acquired from the royal excavations.
That was the mood this summer, when Naples was waiting for the French to charge down the peninsula, and the Cavaliere, fortunate in being able to anticipate well in advance the end of the privileged life he’d known (this is not Pompeii or Herculaneum), made his inventory and started to think about how to evacuate his most prized possessions.
And now the danger had been turned back by the great victory his peerless friend had won against the French fleet, surely the beginning of the containment of the French incursion into Italy two years ago—which they were celebrating here on his birthday tonight. The Cavaliere had made arrangements for a major portion of his holdings to be sent back to England: his second collection of antique vases, much larger and finer than the collection brought back and sold to the British Museum on his first leave home. These were being meticulously packed by his agents and servants, and in a few days would be put in crates and then loaded on a British storeship lying in the harbor. It would be foolish to cancel these arrangements just because the menace of French occupation or (even worse) republican insurrection had receded. Let the vases go to England and be sold, he had decided. I need the money. Money, always a need. That was the base side of the collecting cycle—for collecting is a cycle, not a progress. The gallantry of it emerged at the nadir of the cycle, when the objects are gone and one started again from scratch. He consoled himself with thinking of the joy of making a new collection of vases, even greater than this one.
He looked forward to beginning again.
* * *
The Cavaliere is down at the quay supervising the loading of his crates of treasure aboard the Colossus. The hero is still in bed, but feeling stronger. Mrs. Cadogan brings him broth and the Cavaliere’s wife sits with him while he works at his correspondence. To his brother, a parson like their father, he wrote to recount his victories and express concern that his services not be overlooked. Credit must be given me in spite of envy, he wrote. (He was hoping for a viscountcy for his victory on the Nile.) To Fanny he wrote letters even more frankly boastful. Like the Cavaliere’s wife, writing to Charles all these years, artlessly repeating any praise of herself she heard, the hero repeated every word of praise to his wife. Everyone admires me. Even the French respect me. They were very similar, the mangled hero and the exuberant matron—with something childlike about both which the Cavaliere noted and was touched by.
People follow me in the streets and shout my name. He was up now, and it was the Cavaliere’s wife who accompanied him to the royal palace for his parleys with the King and the ministers, to the harbor where his presence was needed to settle disputes between his sailors and the wily Neapolitans; I do all the enterprating for our grate guest, she wrote Charles. Her sympathies on behalf of his interests, his world, were tireless. She made friends with all his officers, and brought their concerns to the attention of their revered but distracted admiral. The avid learner having been supplemented by the indefatigable motherer, she helped the young midshipmen with letters to their sweethearts back in England and tried to teach Josiah the gavotte. When Josiah told her that it was he in the boat who had twisted the lifesaving tourniquet around his stepfather’s arm, she leaned over and kissed the boy’s hands. She sent presents and verses about the hero’s glory to his wife, and when word came that he had only been made a baron, the lowest rank of the peerage, albeit with an annual pension of two thousand pounds, she dashed off a letter to Fanny to express her indignation at the Admiralty’s ingratitude.
The Cavaliere, too, has written to the Foreign Office to protest the slight to the hero. They like nothing better than to be alone together. One evening in the Great Drawing Room, where forty of the paintings the Cavaliere owns are hung, they sketch out a homey routine. The Cavaliere plays the cello and his wife sings for the hero. At some point the Cavaliere tries to calm the hero’s exasperation over the indecisiveness of the King, while the Cavaliere’s wife watches with a deep feeling of happiness. One cannot expect such people to change, said the Cavaliere. By God, they must be brought to understand the disaster that lies before them, exclaims the hero, his left hand gesturing volubly and, as he becomes more agitated, the stump of his right arm visibly twitching inside the top of the empty sleeve. She gazes fondly at the Cavaliere, who is continuing his pithy exposition of the King’s lamentable mental deficiency. She stares at the hero intently, her ardor covering him with its healing warmth. Then the three stroll out on the terrace to look at Vesuvius, which has been unusually calm of late. Sometimes the Cavaliere is in the middle and they are on either side, like his two aging children, which they could well be. Sometimes she is in the middle, the hero (shorter than she) on her left—she can feel the heat of his missing arm against her body—and the Cavaliere (taller) on her right. And the Cavaliere continues to recount some of the local superstitions about the mountain to the hero.
* * *
What is a hero supposed to look like? Or a king? Or a beauty?
Neither this hero, nor this king, nor this beauty have what Reynolds would regard as an appropriate appearance. The hero doesn’t look like a hero; this king has never looked or acted like a king; the beauty, alas, is no longer a beauty. To put matters plainly: the hero is a maimed, toothless, worn, underweight little man; the King is a grossly fat man with herpes and a huge snout; the beauty, thickened by drink, is now large as well as tall, and at thirty-three looks far from young. Only the Cavaliere (aristocrat, courtier, scholar, man of taste) conforms to ideal type. He is tall, slim, fine-featured, intact; and, though much the oldest of these four future citizens of the universe of history painting, he is the one in the best physical condition.
Of course, it didn’t matter to them. What is interesting is that we, who are so remote from the time when painting was expected to represent an ideal appearance, and who claim to find ugliness and physical imperfection humanizing, nevertheless find it worthy of explanation, and a little unseemly, when the out-of-shape and the no-longer-young are romantic with each other, when they (foolishly, as we say) idealize.
* * *
Their trio seemed so natural. The Cavaliere had a new young man in his life, more son than nephew. His wife had someone she could admire as she had never admired anyone before. The hero had friends such as he had never had; he was genuinely flattered by the admiration of the elegant old Cavaliere, overwhelmed by the warmth and attentiveness of his young wife. And, beyond the exaltation of ever more intense friendship, they were united in feeling themselves actors in a great historical drama; saving England, and Europe, from French conquest and from republicanism.
The hero felt quite recovered and was preparing to go back to sea.
There were dispatches and letters to write, to ministers and influential titled friends in England and to other British commanders in the Mediterranean. There were meetings with Neapolitan ministers and with the royal couple and with the deposed but still powerful anti-French prime minister. The Bourbon government was perpetually in council about whether to stand up to the French, with the Cavaliere urging them to send an army to Rome and the hero eager for Naples to enter the fray, thereby becoming an open ally of (that is, military base for) England, adding his influential support to the plan. And once this ill-judged expedition had been approved, there were army maneuvers to review, and all this in an emotional brew of patriotism, feelings of self-importance, frustration, anxiety, and lively contempt for most of the local actors on the scene … as agents of a world empire always feel when struggling to have their way in a far-off southern satrapy rich in traditions of corruption and indolence, where they are trying to inculcate martial virtues and the necessity of resisting the opposing superpower.
His superiors sent word that he was expected with his squadron in Malta. Returning from a fruitless meeting with the Council of State, he had written Earl St. Vincent that he could hardly wait to sail away from this country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels. But he didn’t want to leave the Cavaliere and his wife.
After three weeks of convalescence and adulation, in mid-October, a few days after the Colossus left for England with the Cavaliere’s vases, the hero sailed for Malta in search of new engagements with the enemy. The King, knowing that he was expected to head an army and spend some time in his palace in the middle of stony Rome, went to Caserta to get some hunting in first. The Cavaliere removed to Caserta, too, after giving orders for the packing of his pictures to begin—just in case, just in case. And from the great lodge his wife wrote each day to the hero, telling him how much he is missed. In the evening the Cavaliere returned from a long day of exercise and the contemplation of gore, and added his postscript.
