Little Kingdoms
Page 19
A surviving sketch (on the back of a bill for canvas and stretcher) reveals that Moorash at one point attempted to depict the great hedge of thorns bursting into blossom, but there is no trace of this vision in the final painting, in which the spell remains unbroken. In this study of darkness we are in Dornröschen’s tower room; only as the eye adjusts to the predominantly black tones do we distinguish the thick thorn branches that have pushed through the open casement window and fill the small chamber entirely. Dornröschen remains invisible except for her hauntingly long and vinelike hair, which winds about the thorny branches and hangs in thick, disturbing clusters, although she may also be present as a kind of faint glimmer that appears to come from somewhere in the depths of the dark thorns and permits us to make out the sharp thornpoints, the hair, the tones of blackness. The general effect is uncomfortable, suggesting on the one hand a dark peacefulness, a brooding tranquility, a yearning for annihilation, and on the other hand the oppressiveness of living entombment.
Why did Moorash turn to this tale and this image in the early months of 1839? Unfortunately there can be no clear or certain answer. Was he, as Havemeyer suggests, thinking of his beloved Elizabeth, entombed at Stone Hill Cottage, enwrapped in the thorns of his art and waiting for the unthinkable prince to come? Havemeyer does not mention a brief but crucial entry in Elizabeth’s Journal on 2 January: “Visit by Vail and his new bride, Charlotte. Vail doting, Edmund charming, Charlotte pretty in a girlish way; shy; big clear eyes, pewter gray.” It is the first recorded visit of the forty-year-old Vail and his girlish wife, Charlotte (1823–1846), who was sixteen years old but looked two years younger. Moorash might have been thinking of the young bride, spellbound in marriage to the graying Vail—but in that case, whose footsteps would be heard on the tower stair when the thorns burst into blossom? Or should we rather think of Moorash himself as Dornröschen, asleep in the deep spell of his art?
[12]
FACES IN THE STREAM
1839
Oil on canvas, 25 × 32 1/2 in.
Moorash appears to have made a number of preliminary sketches, which have not survived, in April or May of 1839; the painting was completed in late summer, probably during the last week of July. The stream is almost certainly the picturesque rocky brook that flowed, and flows still, from the Saccanaw Hills across a wooded stretch of Moorash’s property to empty into Black Lake. A small, railed bridge, no trace of which remains, crossed the stream at the place where an old Indian trail led to the water. The bridge rail can be seen in the painting as a broken and scattered series of brown and yellow brushstrokes in the rushing water. The faces, though recorded as little more than energetic dashes of paint, are unquestionably those of Elizabeth, William Pinney, and Sophia Pinney, as an entry in Elizabeth’s Journal makes clear, although even without that entry the student of Moorash’s work can recognize the distinguishing marks of all three faces, however dissolved and scattered by the turbulent brook.
Sophia Pinney (1816–1846), William Pinney’s sister, had visited at Stone Hill Cottage on three occasions in the mid-1830s but began to accompany her brother regularly in the spring of 1837. In that year alone William and Sophia stayed at Stone Hill Cottage for a week in April, two weeks in May, ten days in June, three weeks in August, a week in October, and four days in November. The frequent visits continued in 1838, and in the spring of 1839 William, now an architect in Boston, built a summer cottage on the far shore of Black Lake at the foot of a wooded hill. The cottage, which was twice the size of the cottage at Stone Hill, included a music room, a library, and a housekeeper’s chamber; in a stable behind the cottage Pinney installed a pair of bays equipped with English saddles in the latest style. Sophia had become close friends with Elizabeth, and in the spring and summer of 1839 the two couples visited back and forth almost daily, often rowing across the lake at dusk to one or the other cottage and separating long after midnight. At the Pinney cottage, Sophia, at Elizabeth’s bidding, would play selections from Schumann’s recently published Fantasiestücke, op. 12 (1838), or Carnaval, op. 9 (1837), sometimes adding a Chopin étude or nocturne, while Edmund sat with tense fingers and half-closed eyes in a “paradoxical state of dreamy alertness” (Journal, 18 July 1839). Elizabeth was not simply liked by her younger friend (Sophia at this time was twenty-three, Elizabeth twenty-five); rather, she seemed to have inspired in Sophia an outpouring of ardent admiration. At the same time she woke in Sophia a kind of maternal protectiveness that made Elizabeth restless and a little impatient. Sophia would insist that Elizabeth wear a shawl on cool summer nights; she tried to change Elizabeth’s careless eating and sleeping habits; she became acutely sensitive to Elizabeth’s moods and began to share her headaches. Elizabeth was fond of her passionately devoted friend but refused to permit herself to be reformed. Once, when Sophia reproached her for staying up all night and paying for it with a savage headache, Elizabeth spoke sharply to her, whereupon Sophia burst into tears. The sharp exchange was an exception; the friendship was warm and ran deep, though one senses that Sophia was the more tightly bound of the two, perhaps because the deepest current of Elizabeth’s feelings ran toward her brother.
[13]
CLAIR DE LUNE
1839
Oil on canvas, 36 × 32 in.
This picture, which seems to breathe the air of a tranquil summer night, was in fact painted in the fall: begun in mid-September, it was completed during a week of snow flurries in early November. A curious stillness reigns (compare Moorash’s two other surviving night studies, the Nachtstück and August Night): the world seems to be caught in a spell of moonlight. The sense of spell, of enchantment, connects the painting to Dornröschen, but the feeling here is quite different: it is a study of calm, of harmony, of an almost weary peacefulness. As if to emphasize the harmony of earth and heaven, Moorash locates the horizon line at the center of the picture: a black line of hills, barely visible and dissolving at top and bottom into blue, divides the brilliant deep blue of the night sky and the slightly darker blues of the lake. The sky is in the lake, and the lake is in the sky, and all is mysteriously irradiated by the light of an unseen moon. Moorash here abandons his thick impastos for an uncharacteristically flat, even surface, though he gives his blues depth by the use of glazes. The dark, glowing blues, the mysterious stillness, the doubleness of earth and sky, all provoke in the viewer a sense of hidden meaning, as if the painting were on the verge of a revelation it refuses to make.
The lake is Black Lake, as a preliminary sketch, which includes identifiable foreground objects, clearly shows; among the black line of hills is the hill where William Pinney had built his cottage. A letter from Sophia to her friend Fanny Cornwall on 3 September 1839 reveals that on the night of 31 August William proposed to Elizabeth, whose Journal remains strangely silent about the entire episode. The proposal shocked Moorash, who was deeply bound to his sister, and who, in a sense that must not be misunderstood, was virtually married to her, but who believed profoundly in her right to lead whatever life she chose. Elizabeth’s feelings are more difficult to grasp, in part because of her refusal or inability to write a single syllable about Pinney’s proposal. It is clear that she liked William immensely; she may even have loved him; his proposal threw her into a profound state of uncertainty, amounting at times to despair, which lasted three days. On the fourth day, the day William was to return to Boston, she refused him. What she had to overcome in renouncing William, and therefore a “normal” life, cannot be known; certainly her love for Edmund played its part, but her ardent and complex love for her brother should not be twisted into a banal perversion. Among other things, she feared that her absence might harm him, for he was careless about himself in every way, and once quipped that if it weren’t for Elizabeth he would starve to death out of sheer absentmindedness. If she sacrificed anything—and it is far from certain that she ever was in love with William Pinney—it was for the sake of Edmund’s art.
Moorash was at work on Clair de lune by mid-Septem
ber, less than two weeks after Elizabeth’s refusal. It is possible to see in the painting a retreat from the violence of his sensations to an extreme calm, as he returned in thought to the early days of that summer, when the two brother-sister couples visited back and forth night after night across the enchanted lake. Many entries in Elizabeth’s Journal suggest his happiness that July and August, painting all day in the barn and wandering the warm and sweet-smelling summer nights in the company of his sister, his friend, and his friend’s sister, who was also his sister’s friend. It is difficult not to see the doubleness of Clair de lune as in some sense a reflection of the two harmonious couples, each itself a double. The friendship among the four was to last for seven more years, but it never recaptured the ease and innocence of that summer.
[14]
NACHTSTÜCK
1840
Oil on canvas, 38 1/2 × 30 5/16 in.
A more deliberate contrast to Clair de lune can scarcely be imagined: here all is oppressive, shut in, brooding, menacing, suffocating. A shadowy, unnameable creature hangs in the night like black smoke, looming over the dark landscape, which seems to shrivel beneath it. The placement of the black line of hills near the base of the picture creates a paradox that increases the sense of suffocation and menace: an eye accustomed to the expansive effects of immense skyscapes, which seem to lead the mind upward to a higher world far from the petty cares of earth, here confronts a dark, oppressive force that crushes it back to the frail line of hills that appear to be cowering under a blow. The sky-filling creature or monster is rendered with supreme skill, for the slightest touch of exaggeration would have pushed it into caricature; the creature is disturbingly elusive, at once present and absent, now a mere illusion produced by thundery cloud-shapes with swirls of black instead of eyeholes, now a shadowy form brooding over the world.
The title of the painting may seem to derive from Schumann’s Nachtstücke, op. 23, but Schumann’s “night pieces,” or nocturnes, were not published until 1840 and are never mentioned in Elizabeth’s Journal. It is more likely that the choice of title was influenced by Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, op. 12, the collection of eight piano pieces (including the stormy In der Nacht) that Elizabeth liked to have Sophia play for her when the four friends were gathered late at night in the music room of the cottage on the far shore of Black Lake. It nevertheless remains possible that the painting does not derive its title from Schumann at all, but rather from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s collection of stories Nachtstücke (1816–17). The effect of the title, whatever its origin, is to darken the painting with Germanic consonant clusters and so to oppose it in yet another way to Clair de lune.
It is not clear when Moorash began the Nachtstück, which appears to have been preceded by two or possibly three paintings that remained unfinished and presumably were destroyed. The first mention of a Nachtstück occurs in Elizabeth’s Journal on 30 March 1840, but on 18 June she records that “Edmund has begun his Night Piece again,” which opens the possibility that the Nachtstück of 30 March was one of the destroyed paintings, about which nothing whatever is known. What is certain is that Moorash took unusual pains with this canvas, which was not completed until the end of September.
It was during the long composition of this painting that an event occurred which must take its place among the more bizarre episodes in the annals of American romanticism. In late June, at Strawson, Edward Vail’s beloved wife, Charlotte, fell ill with a mysterious wasting disease. She could not rise from her bed; she ran a continual low temperature; she could scarcely eat. A local doctor diagnosed pleurisy and recommended mountain air, but a specialist in respiratory diseases summoned from Philadelphia declared her lungs to be sound and urged that the patient be moved to a warm, dry climate. A third physician, from Boston, noted for his work in nervous diseases, prescribed bed rest and absolute quiet and warned that under no circumstances should the patient be moved. In despair, Vail sat by the bedside of his bride from dawn to midnight, holding her limp hand and gazing at her with tender, moist eyes. As the days passed he watched her cheeks grow hollow, her dark eyes grow large, her face fill with weariness and suffering. One night when the end seemed near, Charlotte was seized with a sudden, desperate animation, and struggling up in bed she confessed in a torrent of tears that she had fallen in love with Edmund Moorash. Edward Vail was a mediocre artist, but he prided himself on being a good-hearted man, and he was capable of imagining a noble, perhaps too noble, gesture. Shattered by the news, he at once sat down and wrote a remarkable letter, which has not survived but is summarized in the diary of Elizabeth Moorash’s friend Ann Hudley. In it Vail revealed his wife’s terrible secret and earnestly entreated Moorash to come to Strawson and save her by any means in his power. Did he understand that he was asking Moorash to become his wife’s lover? After reading the letter Moorash stayed shut up in his studio for two days; on the night of the second day he walked the six and a half miles to Rose Cottage and did not return until morning. Precisely what happened during that visit will never be known, but Moorash began visiting Strawson three times a week, and Charlotte’s health swiftly improved. All of Charlotte’s letters to Moorash were later destroyed, but a fragment was discovered in a trunk in Boston in 1957. It reads as follows:
My dearest Edmund,
Today I looked through the window toward Stone Hill and saw you in the Heavens all fiery bright. Come to me come to me in a shower of fire—O my bright angel—my King—you are a stag of the forest—a lion of the mountains. How my soul aches for you. May God forgive
Vail’s journal was also destroyed, but the incidents at Strawson did not pass unnoticed and found their way into several diaries, in particular that of Vail’s brother Thatcher, from which we may reconstruct the apparent course of events. It appears that Vail absented himself every other day from Rose Cottage, leaving before dawn and returning late at night. For at least one month and probably two, until the end of August, Moorash visited Charlotte Vail regularly. They never left the house. Where could they go? Thatcher Vail’s diary speaks of “disgusting licentiousness” and the “shrill laughter of devils behind muslin curtains”; in assessing such statements it must be remembered that he speaks not only as the outraged older brother but also as a man who, two years earlier, unsuccessfully courted the fifteen-year-old Charlotte Singleton and was rejected in favor of his own brother. The love of Moorash and Charlotte Vail was certainly physical, and desperately unhappy. Charlotte, who had always admired and even loved her husband, was anguished by guilt; Moorash, always scrupulous to a fault, was conscious of injuring his friend in the very act of fulfilling his request; and despite his fierce attachment to Charlotte, he kept waiting for her to ask him to go, please go, and was always conscious of holding himself back. Vail himself could no longer bear the sight of his former friend; he was simply waiting for the hellish summer to end. In early September he wrote a second letter to Moorash, in which he offered to release his wife to him, on the condition that he marry her. This letter appears to have brought about a crisis: Charlotte declared hysterically that she could never abandon her husband, and she and Moorash vowed to “die” to each other forever. The vow was broken in a week, when Charlotte in a state bordering on madness arrived unannounced at Stone Hill Cottage shortly before midnight. Moorash would not see her; she spent the night in Elizabeth’s arms, weeping uncontrollably. In the morning Elizabeth returned with her to Rose Cottage, where Vail declared that he was leaving for Boston the next day, and that Charlotte was welcome to accompany him as his lawful wife or to leave him forever. Elizabeth spent the night at Rose Cottage and saw Charlotte into the coach the next morning. Vail settled in Boston and began his swift rise to fame as a portraitist, noted for the clarity of his flesh tones; he never returned to Strawson. A portrait of him in 1846 by Chester Calcott shows a man with melancholy eyes and a stern mouth. Charlotte remained his devoted wife; only, she was often tired, and liked to keep to herself, out of the social whirl. Moorash shut himself up in his studio and f
inished the Nachtstück before the end of September.
[15]
THE HOUSE OF USHER
1840
Oil on canvas, 39 1/8 × 37 3/8 in.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” was collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Although Moorash might well have read a copy of the book, there is no reference to it in Elizabeth’s Journal, which does, however, mention “The Fall of the House of Usher” in passing (8 December 1840) and never refers to any other tale by Poe. It is therefore possible that Moorash read the story in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (September 1839), a copy of which might have been brought to him or Elizabeth by William Pinney or any one of several other visitors during 1839 and 1840. The painting was begun some time in October and completed before Christmas.
The picture has been taken to represent the collapse of the House of Usher in the famous last paragraph (see Havemeyer, p. 79), but such a reading presents two difficulties: the word “fall” is conspicuously absent from the title of the painting, and the painting does not actually show the dreamlike house falling into the tarn. The second objection is perhaps the less decisive, for Moorash might well have intended to represent the fall in a non-literal fashion, but the title cannot so easily be explained away. The striking presence of red tints, like flakes of fire, that flash up among the browns and blacks are supposed by Havemeyer to represent the murky light of the blood-red moon, but the red tints may with equal justice be seen to allude to other reds in the tale, such as the “feeble gleams of encrimsoned light” that make their way through the trellised panes of Usher’s studio, or the drops of blood on Madeline’s white robes. It is more to the point that the dissolving, vanishing, visionary house, painted in nervous small strokes separated by intervals of brown or black, is mirrored in the dark tarn. The whole effect is less that of a fall than of the dissipation of a fever-vision: a dream-house over its dream-reflection vanishing into black depths. It is as if Moorash had imagined the House of Usher to be insubstantial by nature, to be perpetually on the verge of dissolving or disappearing.