Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  Take Leonardo da Vinci, for example, who, with his polymath imagination and sci-fi instinctuals, seems to have been to art what Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were to fiction. Indeed, though many of his designs and sketches seem plausible even today—his tanks and fortifications, his flying machines, catapults, machine guns, hoists, and gears—all the heavy arsenal of his Armageddon heart—there’s something comic about Leonardo, some after-the-fact humor laid on by perspective and hindsight, the joke, that is, of the primitive, like Fred Flintstone propelling his car by foot power, some principle of the dated operating here. And if this isn’t fair, isn’t, in fact, specious at the root, if it suggests that a principle of the dated is always operable, chipping away like a kind of erosion at what was once thought true and beautiful, the water, wind, and temperature of age, why not accept at the outset that most things left out in history like the open air oxidize, tarnish, become, finally, subject to the simple human joke of time? The moving finger writes, paints, makes, and having writ, painted, or made, moves on to the next thing. Because a lot of what we talk about when we talk about art is, well, fashion. Not so much in flavor-of-the-month ways as in retrofit or adaptive ones. Since nothing is made out of whole cloth and even genius is incremental, even, I mean, at its most perverse, when it’s weighed down by the social or even only personal mood swings of the artist and is simply reactive. (It’s impossible to imagine a giant of cubism, say, arising out of the neoclassical tradition.) Because there’s something always at least a little nostalgic about even the greatest art. Not the hommage of a young film director to an admired, established elder, or even a sly joke or slipped-in referential, so much as the conventional givens of a particular medium, subject matter, or point of view, even if it’s only the plain true fact of canvas.

  Add to my charge against da Vinci that he was a “visionary,” this intellectual rover and time traveler, and it’s possible to see a kind of instability in him, a certain failure of sitzfleisch, an inability, that is, to sit still in his talent, almost as if he took too seriously the burden of being a Renaissance man or was the sort of guy who parted his hair.

  Now, about this Mona Lisa.

  See her there in her cat-who-ate-the-canaries, her smug repose and babushka of hair like a face on a buck. A study in browns, in muds, and all the purplish earthens of her jaundiced, low-level, f-stop light. See her, see her there, this, well, girl of a certain age, with a faint streak of bone structure blowing off her skin like a plume of jet trail all she has for brow. See her, see the rightward glancing of her color-coordinated eyes inside the puffy, horizontal parentheses of her lashless lids. See the long, low-slung nose dropped inches below the painterly rules of thumb. Now see her famous statelies, her upright, comfortable aplomb, her left forearm along the arm of a chair, her fat right hand covering it, as clubby and at ease as one foot crossed over another. Look at the background through the open casement, the queer topography like mounds of green volcanic vegetable, the strange striated water and all the wavy switchback of the road like something carved from earth by one of the maestro’s anachronistic machines, a backhoe, say, some plow or grader of the yet-to-be.

  Focus. Focus!

  In and closer in to the central occasion of her odd, asexual face, in where the mystery lives, the secret agenda, in toward her giacondas, her giaconundrums, the hidden mystery of her guarded gingivitis smile!

  Because I’m changing my mind here, a little I am, and thinking maybe it’s Nat Cole’s version I’m not that crazy about, his viscous syrups I’m thinking of, confusing the box-step cliché and sentimentals with the fact of her face. Because what levers our attention is that nose and those lips, and a truth about art is the company it keeps with the slightly askew, the fly in that woodpile of symmetry, mere balance in painting, equilibrium, a stunt of the “beautiful.” What commissions the eye is face. No likeness hangs on the wall of hair, hands, breasts, behind, the soles of one’s feet. Indeed, faces are the most private part. It’s the face that draws the eye in the Mona Lisa, but I was only kidding about the mystery of that smile. There is no mystery. No one ever had to solve a face, and the notion of this face’s enigmatics has always been a kind of anthropomorphism, only paint’s pathetic fallacy, facial phrenology, a horoscopics by bone structure, an astrology of the eye, the palmistry of character, wrongheaded, literary, the racism of beauty, unreliable, finally, as any other pseudoscience, as if to say, oh, as if to say “Read my lips.”

  Next slide.

  Georgia O’Keeffe was a painter who rarely depicted human beings. Her desert subject matter is, in a way, the flip, parched, only apparently sunnier side of Turner’s wet coin—blanched, bleached landscapes of polished, picked-clean death. This hermit—in New Mexico she lived at “Ghost Ranch”—this prospector type whose unpopulated, desiccated paintings, save for the fossils that appear in them, seem studies in an almost relished absence. The bones and white skulls in O’Keeffe’s work signify not decay so much as the evidence of a fled, efficient hunger—the art of the buzzard, the art of the scavenger hunt. Even her rather wonderful cityscapes (East River No. 1; Shelton Hotel, New York, No. 1; East River from the Thirtieth Story of the Shelton Hotel, New York; New York Night) are alternative versions of shapes found in the desert paintings—the mesa, canyon, adobe variations—seem deliberate, even perverse, essays in exclusion, as though both Nature and the man-made contain value only to the extent that they not only avoid but actually proscribe the human. (Only in New York Night, and only if you look carefully, can you make out, in the lower left-hand corner, any people at all, four stick figures of black paint rather more like exclamation points than human beings.) It’s as if O’Keeffe were driven by some wilderness, Sierra Club will, vaguely snobbish, a restrictive, country-club vision. She’s Edward Hopper without people, without even the saving grace of their dignified loneliness. She’s interested only in shapes (my favorite O’Keeffe paintings, her Sky Above Clouds series, have always seemed rather like New Yorker covers to me), but where there is no “face” there can be no interest. Even her suggestive, almost gynecological and phallic flora (which almost never appear in bunches and are rarely “arranged”) seem parodic, sterile, lush enough, but in their issueless isolation really only a sort of sexual floor plan.

  Like other private artists she became her greatest achievement, a beautiful woman whose bone structure was her fate and who posed, in a literal sense, in her black clothes, white scarves, and black hats, paring herself down and paring herself down into a piece of art quite like sculpture, a leathery, unsmiling woman of manipulated style, editing herself and disappearing at last behind the very image of a collective, hermaphroditic animism, some perfected, deliberated simulacrum somewhere between ancient squaw and old manitou, a final, showy mysticism complete and functional as the bony infrastructure of those skulls she preferred to the faces that covered them. I think narcissism infrastructures the infrastructure here, the dangerous virus she contracted by being both a subject—all those portraits she permitted Stieglitz to make of her—and an arranger of subjects.

  But it’s hard to talk about art. Maybe there should be a law against it, some First Amendment gag order like crying Fire! in a crowded theater. Still and all, if one knows what one likes, well where’s the harm, eh? And anyway this is the war news, day thirteen or fourteen into the Mother of Battles, though it seems longer, of course, deeper into time than anything I can remember—and I’m sixty if I’m a day—and I’ve seen, well, not a lot, but my share, more than, and what I haven’t seen, like everyone else, I fill in the blanks, make an allowance, do the Kentucky windage adjustments, write off if not to experience then to helplessness and despair this, well, looting of end times everywhere, this breaking and entering the other guy’s turf, with wiser heads figuring—this is a big benefit of the doubt I’m giving away here—that damn-near no one has led the right life. The Gulf’s a floating filling station, Marines have died, civilians on all sides in God knows what apocalyptic positions fallen on what rubb
le and hoisted on what shrapnel, and I see that over on the “Home Shopping Club” Operation Desert Storm sweatshirts are going for $19.75, over four hundred sold and counting, and, Jeez, if the world made it, it would have been the millennium in nine years and, in another one-and-a-half, the semimillennium of the discovery of the New World. Some millennium. Some semimillennium. So it’s pretty late in the day to be having any Mother of Battles. Ain’t going to study no war no more! And I take it back about injunctions on art talk, prior restraint. Because maybe that’s the only thing we ought to be allowed to talk about, stuff above our station, playing catch-up with culture, sucking up to civilization. And the point is, well, God bless the artists the point is. Here’s to those with the paints, whether we know whereof we speak or not. Here’s to artisans, folks who make violins, cast bells, throw pots, have perfected their pitch. Here’s, I mean, to all those whose attentions are engaged in innocent acts, to everyone everywhere who doesn’t know where the time has flown. To minders of their own determined business who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Here’s to occupational therapy even, to doodle and whittle, to whistle and hum and all the preoccupied instrumentals of the head and heart, the aye-lu-loo-lus and sweet-dream lullabies of softest yore. And to all those makers of those less-than-masterpieces who lend point to the sermon, and to dilettantes, oh, especially, Lord, to dilettantes, window shoppers on the artier avenues, friends of the museum, patrons of the symphony, pals of the zoo, to everyone everywhere who’s ever tossed a pledge to PBS, NPR, ladies and gentlemen of good will who keep the Sunday. So, waiting for the worst, hoping for the best, it’s back I go to my own harmless knitting, an expert self-proclamated but innocent as any.

  Now what I don’t much care for is all the boring, adulatory religious art of dark old early times, the triptychs in their layered gilded frames like great wooden fanfares, I mean; the altarpieces; the madonnas with their malnourished, wizened bundles of infant Jesuses in fishbowl, space-helmet halos or under a rakish nimbus of beanies (not like Michelangelo’s pink, meaty, muscular biblicals so oddly like Picasso’s great fleshy giants and giantesses); all the annunciations running together in our heads like a pony express of the holy; all the lugubrious figures making their there-there’s of comfort over the spilled milk and blood of the major players on all that stained glass and shining wood; all that adoration in kings’ caucus in the stable like so much political buzz, their baksheesh of gold, frankincense, and myrrh; angels in improbable, heavier-than-air wings; lashed, trussed, hangdog Jesus, pathetic, almost sheepish, shouldering a cross like a T-square, neither a Son of Man to inspire confidence nor a God to reckon with, looking nothing near what he’s cracked up to be, looking confused in fact, lost, as if he’d rather be in Philadelphia—all the stupefying junk I mean, in Europe raised to the level of an industry, complete with guides, nuch, scholars of the local (and here’s to guides in billed caps, creased gray suits, and stuffed pockets), all those panels of unskilled, uninspired piety cartoons that looked at long enough bring on the headache and fog up the mind, and cause, as stated, to run together in the memory this blur of art, this crisis of criticism, this deferential politeness on all sides—“Bella, bello,” I assure the guide, “molto, molti, tres molti bella”—in my broken European, not only as if no one had ever been afraid of being caught short in church but as if tourists were as anatomically incorrect as all those God doll altarpieces.

  And, God forgive me, Hamlet is an overrated play. Well, it’s too long, but that ain’t it, and too melodramatic, of course, and familiar, but that ain’t it either. For one thing, the premise has always bothered me, or if not the premise then what triggers the play, bothered me, I mean, even back in those old new-critical days of my undergraduate youth when we fastened on the incest thing, or the question of the Prince’s madness, ruse or consequence, or just plain dug H’s brilliant, witty manic depression. He was, for most of us, our first psychological hero, more pyschological even than Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, which we hadn’t read yet anyway. Absolutely, Hamlet was our first interesting guy, a role model even, with his get-thees-to-a-nunnery and all the tortured Ophelia bashing and secret titillation of the dirty private jokes, his breezy killer instincts, all the full-throated cynicism of his bullying intellect—role model, male bonder, man’s man, prince’s prince.

  What puts me off, what I can’t get past though, is, quite simply, Hamlet’s father’s ghost, to me as silly as that cadre of icons in all those triptychs on all those altarpieces, the angels and allegoricals, themselves a band of ghosts, sentimental and sweet-cheeked as zephyrs on maps. I am what I am and cut no slack for the times, the other fellow’s world view. Besides, at its core Hamlet is a realistic play, and having truck with ghosts goes against its grain, botches the unity of its tone, and anyway the ghost’s only a device to put the ball in play in the play. In a drama so dependent upon personality, this ghost is a stick figure. It has no character. Nor will it do to write the ghost off as a psychological projection. It comes with too much information for that. A forensic pathologist of a ghost, it fingers Claudius, fine-tunes the terms of its dispatch during its afternoon nap (“Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,/Unhous’led disappointed, unanel’d,/No reck’ning made, but sent to my account/With all my imperfections on my head”), charges Hamlet to avenge it, and even dictates how Hamlet is to treat his mother.

  (And like where do I get off?)

  Some soliloquies bother me—all its vaunted To-be-or-not-to-bes, a speech that I’ve never heard delivered by any actor, any actor, who’s not managed to make it sound silly. To be or not to be? That’s the question? Some question. Some answer: “To die—to sleep./To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub!/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give us pause.” This is an argument? Hamlet buys this? And what flat-footed locutions: “Perchance to dream.” “Shuffled off this mortal coil.” This isn’t English, it’s W. C. Fields impressions, stretch rhetoric, but nothing compared to the barbarous poetry a few lines down: “When he himself might his quietus make/With a bare bodkin . . .” Hamlet is top-heavy with phrases like these, but finally, it isn’t the ghost and it isn’t the overblown language that grate so much as the flip side of this “interesting” man, for Hamlet’s procrastinations lie as heavily on the belly as bad food. One has the sense that Shakespeare, not Hamlet, is vamping till ready, that Hamlet’s frozen will is finally as much a device to stall the play as the ghost is to get it going, because for all the brilliant facets of Hamlet’s reckless character, his too-fastidious duty pulls him down and locks up the play like so much left luggage until, well, until we begin to suspect that will paralysis is itself a device, that Hamlet, for all his thoroughbred, live-wire wit, for all his charm and playfulness, is not so much the Dane as one of those paid professionals at an Irish funeral, a bespoke whiner and keener, the ultimate wailer and scold of fate. Brilliant along the brightest edges of its day, the play naps like the old king during the dead, leaden center of its long, endless afternoon.

  And get these to a nunnery:

  Birth of a Nation, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (well almost every silent movie ever made, including Buster Keaton’s, including Charlie Chaplin’s). Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, that documentary about the ’36 Olympics, most “screwball” comedies of the thirties (well, most black-and-white films generally). All the Marx Brothers, all the Ritz Brothers, Judy Garland, Fred Astaire. No more “face” to them than the dry, blanched bones of a Georgia O’Keeffe, mask all they ever had for face, as customized as a clown’s patented, painted puss, Garland all pixie/gamine/urchin pout and phony hope, that mask out on a ledge somewhere between outrage and melted love and on a kind of red-alert verge of perpetual tears from the tip of her pigtail in The Wizard of Oz to the top of her pompadour in Meet Me in St. Louis, a face, like the clown’s, made for black velvet, crying out for it like a fix, and not much more face to her voice either if you want to know, decibel for decibel its direct weights
-and-measure vocal equivalency, all vibrato and belt but slightly off-true, and Fred Astaire’s fixed puzzled-bumpkin expression more pleasant, perhaps, but as locked-in as Garland’s. Though maybe even more mpg for Astaire, bang-for-the-buckwise, than J. Garland’s overdrawn checks. (Am I cranky, crotchety, under the weather? Are my shoes too tight, is curmudgeon written all over me? Am I this old fogey, is my bite worse than my bark? Or is this still the war news, something fed-up in my bones with hyperbolicized attachment, the red rant of unearned, misunderstood praise?) So take that, Fred Astaire, with your vaunted grace in your top hat, your white tie, and your tails, in your nightclubs, on your patent leather, art deco floors, your decks like the seamless, level tiles of toney beauty parlors, barbershops, and mens’ rooms in the basements of world-class hotels. Take that and that on your fey, heel-toe, heel-toe bearings in your smug, noli-me-tangere aloofness and look-ma-no-hands gravity denials, your tango indifference and vain, vaguely threatening, predatory swoops and leaned inclinations as if, Ginger Rogers or no Ginger Rogers, elegance were only a narcissistic one-man show, ur-performance art, removed as the elsewhere-engaged attentions of a juggler.

  Though maybe all movies fall short of art with their soft blandishments and easy endowments—sound, close-ups, an arch, arranged lushness, perfect and unblemished as a gorgeous bay posed on a postcard. (Are my pants too small, is my hat off-plumb? Nah, nah, this from a lover of movies, one of their easiest marks, privileged to get out of an evening, watch the coming attractions, the trailers, who, settled in his seat in the auditorium, sighs, remarks to the wife, “What could be better?”) Because the truth about art is the company it keeps with the slightly askew, and the real stunt of the beautiful is not to be too beautiful.