Skinny Island

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Come by next week, Mrs. Kingsland. I’ll have some drawings of Adolph Gottlieb’s that may amuse you.”

  But if Rosa had reduced her husband to at least a sullen acceptance of her acquisitions, she had no such success with her son. Meredith seemed to have inherited all of the conservative genes of his great-grandmother but little of her ability to cope with the world. When she hung a Miro sketch in his bedroom as a surprise, she found it face down on the floor in the hall the next day.

  “At least let me have my own room to myself, Mummy!” he bawled at her. “You’ve got the whole rest of the house for your garbage!”

  Everybody considered Meredith a hopeless problem but Meredith himself. His self-confidence seemed to grow with the checks that life put in his way until total failure was crowned with total arrogance. Tall, awkward, with shiny, long black hair, and spindly limbs, his big, staring pop eyes and high, harsh, jeering voice seemed to be calling down the world for its idiotic failure to appreciate Meredith Kingsland. He could never be sent away to camp, boarding school or even an out-of-town college. He was simply too fumbling to take proper care of himself, yet not enough of a freak to win exemption from the physical hostility of his peers. He went for twelve years to a mild, genteel boys’ school on the east side of Central Park of which Amory was a trustee, and thereafter took endless courses in literature and history at City College.

  Insofar as Meredith seemed able to take in the dismal lacks in his life—lack of a job, lack of a girl, lack of any body of friends—he blamed “Mummy” for them. She had cared too much and too little about him. She had fretted unduly over his health and then criticized him for playing no outdoor games. She had puffed his imagined virtues, making an ass of him in their social circle, and had then been hypercritical of any composition he produced. She embarrassed him by her heaviness and dowdiness and then criticized him for spending so much time and money on his own appearance.

  Meredith’s greatest ally was whoever happened at the moment to be his psychiatrist.

  “Doctor Cranch thinks your real family are your pictures, Mummy. He says that’s what’s my basic trouble.”

  “Did he really say that, Meredith? Or did he suggest that one of your troubles might be that you thought it?”

  “Don’t you think I even know what my own doctor says?”

  “I think you sometimes edit him for my benefit.”

  “Why should I want to do that?”

  “To get even with me, dear. A son can’t lose, can he? He takes full credit for his assets and blames Mummy for his liabilities.”

  “Really, Rosa,” Amory intervened, “aren’t you being a bit hard on the boy?”

  “Oh, what does she care?” Meredith cried angrily. “What does she care for but her silly old art?”

  Indeed, Rosa had to admit, after one of these meals, that all she did want was to get back to her silly old art. She liked nothing better than sitting alone in a room with her pictures, looking at them and thinking about the things they conjured up in her mind.

  She understood that many observers of the art of Franz Kline found in his bold blacks and whites a sense of the violence and power of large, dark, coal-besmirched cities, and in the trajectories of hurtling black across passive white planes an image of encroachment and forcible possession. But what she chose to make out in her Kline was not a twisted mass of steel beams but a giant menacing insect, seen through a magnifying glass, whose only function was to destroy and consume its lesser fellows, and in this horned, multilegged monster she had no difficulty in identifying her late grandmother. Yet this interpretation gave her no pain or unease; on the contrary, it seemed to bind her father’s parent into a web of beauty that she could accept and love.

  Even more factitious was what she read into her Motherwell, one of his Elegies to the Spanish Republic. She had heard that Motherwell had not visited Spain until after the civil war, and she had taken this as her excuse to deviate from his title. Besides, were the titles of modern paintings not notoriously misleading? In the old academic days one had known just where one was. Henry IV Barefoot in the Snow before the Gates of Canossa meant just that. But did she have to identify the black pole-like figure and the two black spheres on either side as the phallus and testicles of a sacrificial bull nailed to a whitewashed wall? No. It was a beautiful evocation of the trunk of the old elm tree in the garden in Newport with the dumpy figures of her two maiden aunts, always in mourning, and the whole concept was death.

  Little by little her pictures had begun to fill the house. Amory continued to grumble, but he didn’t really care what she hung on the walls, and she put none in the dining room where the family conversations occurred. Meredith objected more vociferously, but she had given him a whole floor where he could surround himself to his heart’s content with his great-grandmother’s Turkish bazaars and Tuscan peasant girls. There were moments, however, when she had to remind him that it was her house. She dared not go further and suggest that he get his own apartment. Meredith, faced with the smallest threat of what he called “rejection,” was likely to become hysterical.

  The family friends and cousins, almost without exception, looked upon “Rosa’s daubs” as a kind of harmless mania to which it was kinder not to draw too much attention. They could not be unaware of the growing importance of abstract art in the city around them, but they maintained their silent but united front against it, lumping it as one of the not-to-be escaped evils of a decadent society, along with high taxes, drugs, over-stressed civil rights and the bad manners and promiscuity of youth. Yet even in their ranks there was an occasional deserter, and Rosa sometimes found an adventurous individual arriving ahead of the other guests at one of her dinner parties to have a peek at the little gallery off the hall.

  Silas Levine decided at last that she had gone far enough to justify him in seeking to penetrate her reserve.

  “You know, Rosa, in any other social milieu but yours you’d be considered a remarkable woman. Why do you cling so to your constipated little group of antediluvians?”

  “It’s my husband’s world. He hasn’t any other.”

  “But don’t you ever crave the company of people who care for the things you care about?”

  “Then I can come to you.”

  He laughed and gave it up. “All right, Rosa. Maybe you’re right. Maybe your pictures are enough.”

  Sometimes artists wished to see her collection, and she would make arrangements through Levine for them to come to the house at times when neither her husband nor son would be home. This became more difficult after Amory had his stroke and was permanently in the house, but the little hall gallery, discreetly used, still answered her purpose. Only if Meredith happened to be going in or out of the house at the time was the visitor likely to be startled by the shrill voice from the dark hall exclaiming: “Are you in there, Mummy? Who’s being polite enough to look at your zany show?”

  Meredith, in his late twenties, unoccupied except for his daily hour with his analyst, seemed to have nothing to do now but hound his mother. Family meals had become a torture to her.

  “All I really want to find out, Mummy—seriously—is how to tell the difference between a good abstract and a bad one. It can’t be by whether or not it resembles something, because it isn’t anything, is it? And you can’t say that a line or a curve is badly drawn, because the artist can always say that’s the way he meant it. So what standard have you left to go by? What do you look for?”

  “I guess I just look.”

  “Oh, Mummy, what kind of an answer is that? You have to look for something in a picture.”

  “Do you, Meredith? But, anyway, I think I can tell a bad abstract. There were some at the Junior League show.”

  “But how did you know?”

  “By what they did to me. They gave me a dead feeling. I wanted to turn away. I wonder if that isn’t the only way to teach art. Perhaps we make a mistake in dragging classes of children through museums’ past masterpieces. It might be mor
e effective to show them the discards in the cellar.”

  “So that’s your only criterion: a kind of gut feeling?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Amory, embittered by his stroke, tended to side with his son in these arguments, but not without getting in an occasional thrust at the latter. “Just as I suspected, the whole business is a kind of emotional pudding. But you ought to understand that, Meredith. Doesn’t your shrink explain those things to you? Don’t you suppose those dots and squiggles are sexual symbols to your poor frustrated mother? Why not? Married to an old man in a wheelchair she must dream of something better, mustn’t she? Now don’t get excited, Rosa, I’m blaming myself, not you. What can a poor, impotent creature like me…”

  But Rosa had already left the table. In the silence of her own chamber she contemplated the serene truth of the parallel lines of her Mondrian and turned her mind firmly from humanity as represented in the dining room below. For once she was not subjective.

  Not long after this conversation Meredith took too many sleeping pills and was revived only with difficulty. It was not clear that he had intended a fatal dose—he might have simply planned a melodrama—but his psychiatrist recommended commitment to the Dunstan Sanatorium, and once there, there seemed little possibility of any early release. Six years elapsed, and Rosa’s collection, one by one, ascended the auction block. She thought of them as the pale, proud victims of a reign of terror, silently mounting the steps of the scaffold. She never wished to learn who had bought any of them.

  When she went to Silas Levine’s gallery to tell him that she would have to sell the Gorky, he threw his hands up in anger and disgust.

  “You’ve said yourself, Rosa, that the whole thing is a kind of mad revenge on Meredith’s part. Well, don’t give in to it! Tell that monstrous minotaur of a sanatorium that it can no longer have its annual sacrifice. Your son will be no worse off at home than he is there. And you could at least keep the poor remnant of your glorious collection.”

  “But how can I be sure that Meredith, once out, won’t try it again?”

  “Well, you have to take some chances. What sort of a life does he have in that loony bin, anyway? Rosa, they’re gobbling you up, eating you alive!”

  “I see that, Silas. But what you don’t see is that I’ve deserved it.”

  “Oh, my God, you Puritans! How, pray, have you deserved it?”

  “Because I’ve given so little to my husband. And really nothing at all to poor Meredith.”

  “And what have they given you?”

  “Nothing, it is true. But they had nothing to give.”

  “No love?”

  “Some people have no love to give.”

  “Well, if they gave you nothing, and you gave them nothing—or very little, as you say—why aren’t you square?”

  “Because, you see, I did have something to give.”

  “Love?”

  “Love.”

  “And what did you do with your love?”

  “You, of all people should know that, Silas. I’m not complaining. I’ve had a good life. The time has come to pay for it, that’s all.”

  Levine, staring at her, at last gave up, as he always had to, with Rosa. “Let me do one thing for you, anyway. Let me put together a beautiful album of colored photographs of every picture from your collection!”

  She smiled as she shook her head. “Do you really think I need that, Silas?” There was a pause in which he made no answer. “Now tell me. What can I get for the Gorky?”

  The “Fulfillment” of Grace Eliot

  THE QUIET, EVEN ROLL of my retirement days, like the swelling of a sluggish sea, has been rudely shattered by my discovery of Grace Eliot’s love letters. They have erupted on the surface of my placid existence like a breaching whale, leaving a turmoil of tumbling white water which has threatened to drown me. It was not, of course, that the love affair of which they form the sole hard evidence was generally unsuspected. The name of the late great novelist has long been linked with that of Leonard Esher. But before the emergence of these letters no one but myself could have proved that Grace and he had been lovers. And I for thirty years have kept silent, believing as I did (and, despite everything, still do) that the affair had been uncharacteristic and basically unimportant, and that Grace, having recovered from a momentary lapse in taste and judgment, had been relieved to devote the balance of her life to her art with hardly a glance over her shoulder at a dead past.

  As her literary agent (not to mention her disciple and worshiper) I had been entrusted by her husband with the custody of her papers and with the task of making these available—at my discretion—to biographers and students. I had had all the documents catalogued and was confident of my familiarity with them all, but there was a bundle of snapshots tied together by an elastic band that I had never considered worth examining. It was labeled “Dogs,” for Grace, unlike myself, had been an ardent lover of canines. Last week, when I happened to move this package, seeking for something else in its drawer, the old band broke, and the photographs spilled out, exposing the five letters to Leonard Esher. Perhaps Grace had felt the doghouse to be an appropriate hiding place for her erstwhile pet! To me it was eminently fitting that he should have been kenneled with curs.

  She had presumably asked him to return the letters when their affair had ended. Grace’s breezy, complacent spouse, Andrew, who must have enjoyed a dozen adulteries to his wife’s meager one, might not have cared if they were published or not, but Grace, even in the easygoing nineteen forties, had had an intense sense of privacy. Her standards had been high for all human relationships and the highest of all—as expressed in her novels—for love. The mere idea of a vulgar word, a knowing shove in the ribs, would have been to her the vilest desecration. It was in keeping with her character that no word should have been spoken of her indiscretion and no memorial kept.

  But now I had painfully to revise my long enshrined opinion of this episode in her life. Not only was I faced with love letters; I was faced with passionate ones. It appalled me to find Grace, that high, proud soul who could hardly endure to sit in a room with an ugly chintz, whose garden had seemed an effort to redecorate the very landscape, a novelist whose jeweled allegorical tales were said to have rivaled Lafcadio Hearn’s, wailing like a raw schoolgirl in this appalling prose:

  Oh, love of my life, imagine Brunhild, having lain for years in dreamless sleep, lulled by the crackle of the flames that Loge, at his sire’s bidding, had kindled to protect her from the intrusion of any but the bravest warrior, awakening to the silver clarion of Siegfried’s horn only to discover that she is … old!

  The picture of Leonard as Siegfried is ludicrous enough, but the idea of Grace as old is even more so. In 1946 Grace, barely forty, was still a brilliant spectacle, tall and fair—what used to be admiringly called willowy—with rich golden hair, straight and shimmering, tied in a large knot at the nape of her neck, and the whitest skin, the bluest eyes, the most perfect features I ever saw. Leonard was older than she, at least ten years older, with gray hair and cold gray-blue eyes, so nattily dressed as to seem almost a parody of himself, and smiling, always smiling, as if smiles could protect him from the obvious charge of dilettantism. Leonard, in my uncharitable opinion, was too lazy and too egocentric to love anybody, too inert to bother himself with any but the pleasantest and most perfunctory news of his friends. It baffled me how Grace could have so admired this thin creature, even while seeing through him—for it was notorious that the shallow “villains” of her fiction were all modeled on Leonard. Was it a form of masochism?

  Such, anyway, was the man who for a decade before their actual affair had seemed to dominate her life, always at her parties, always at her side, the intimate of her husband as well as herself, a constant cool presence, giving off his advice and opinions in the languid tone of one accustomed to being listened to, judging everything and everybody, sneering at the universe, at the Eliots, at himself. Oh, people buzzed, of course. Was it a tri
angle? A design for living? Nobody could be sure.

  And now must I, the sole survivor, bring these letters to public light and see Leonard’s name coupled with Grace’s as the inspirer of her greatest work? For that is what will happen—make no mistake about it. Academics, scholars, critics, as greedy for a love interest as the most film-struck typist, will snatch at any lubricious bits of sexuality to bring the supreme artist down to their own pawing, clutching level. Have we not seen Emily Dickinson bedded with a minister and poor old Henry James doing the unmentionable with a young sculptor? Could I not already imagine the phrases in the literary journals: “Many of us have long suspected that 1946 marked a climacteric in the emotional life of Grace Eliot…” or “After that year a warm, roseate streak makes its unmistakable appearance in the once cool marble of her perfect prose…” or “Grace emerged from her love affair a completed woman and a greater artist.”

  Ugh! Can I bear it?

  But I am bitter and sour; I have to keep discounting that. I have spent my life with authors, some of them famous, at least two of them great, and I have not tried to ride on their shoulders, like scholars and critics. I have given myself to them dispassionately, wholeheartedly, entering into their very psyches; I have cajoled them, encouraged them, edited them, supplied them with ideas in dry periods, and even at times with story endings, and what do I have to show for it all? A small annuity, a three-room apartment, a life of long walks, movies and an occasional lunch or dinner with someone kind enough to remember “Old Bertie.” Is there a single line about me in the multitudinous volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography? In any of the many Who’s Whos of American letters? I have vanished like—why should I any longer even take the trouble to avoid a cliché?—like snow in springtime.