East Goes West
Page 27
Mr. Brown said, “Wonderful, aren’t they? No race has perfected the effect of color and composition along decorative lines as these Chinese artists and their Korean brothers.” (And he pointed out one there as a prized Korean painting.) Then just as Kim had warned, Brown gave us to understand that he was not interested in Western art of any kind. It had gone off down false trails. As for Christian art . . .
“I can’t stand contorted human emotions . . . the strained anthropomorphic viewpoint. Crucifixions, mater dolorosas . . . Botticelli for instance . . . or the passionate Primitives. . . . As a young man, I used to collect such things. When I became interested in the art of the Orient, I got rid of them all.”
Now Brown got out his books of study in Chinese calligraphy. Already he could write the 600 fundamental characters which form the foundation of the written language; and the 214 radicals he had written down separately in a beautifully bound blank book. His calligraphy was painstaking and neat, but rather lifeless, and in the strokes, as was natural, he had small sense of the sweeping demonic style which is the soul of the art. What Brown lacked in feeling, however, he made up in intellectual grasp. Always he tried to rationalize the word pictures through the evolutional process, and I saw he was learning more logically than we who were brought up in it. A fine mind he had.
Kim said of me to Brown, “Here is a young Korean, one of those few last men with the classical background. He comes from a remote Northern province not much touched by the West. He improvises in the old style, and is better than I am in the handwriting.”
Of course it was untrue. . . . Kim was so much better than I that it was foolish to say it—for he had already levelled to a definite style, which reflected his own personality no matter what he wrote, whether fast or wildly; mine somewhat changed with the mood and the occasion and was always better when I took time and thought. The personal rhythm is important in calligraphy as in verse, and it was always striking in Kim’s work.
Brown went out of the room to bring in something else to show. Kim said: “Such private collections no longer exist in the Orient. Do you realize that to study Oriental art, man is now obliged to come to the West? But with Arthur Brown this is genuinely his passion. He has read most of the books and articles written on the subject in the Western languages, including related topics by such authorities as Laufer, Pelliot, Maspero, etc. Every important collection in Europe and America he knows. He has a good library of his own, and his comments are original, suggestive and interesting.”
“You must feel very congenial here.”
Kim smiled: “Mr. Brown and I are alike but different. He is accepting the East in the spirit of blind optimism while I am accepting the West in the spirit of sane pessimism. But this makes him the happier man. I have given up one world and cannot accept another. But Arthur has no such conflict. He seems well satisfied with Oriental art as a substitute.”
Brown came back with illuminated manuscripts from a Buddhist Korean monastery. We examined these, and also the gravely chaste Korean chest—Greek in simplicity—in one corner of the room. Mr. Brown had assembled his Chinese and Korean pieces together (even in museum cataloguing I have found, this is often done). Last of all, we went into the Japanese room, where Brown said the “tea ceremony” was to be held. In here were sliding windows, and walls papered with Japanese paper of the best quality and design. There were stools, no chairs, and a Japanese table, but slightly too long-legged, and behind the table, a long seat with Japanese covering against the wall. This room was quite dark, being lighted only with Japanese lanterns. There were Japanese games, including Japanese chess (which Brown played sometimes with a Japanese). Now we had the tea ceremony. But it was not tea, but the American cocktail that was served.
5
Would not a man with such excellent taste in art hunger for the same kind of thing in food? Eight-jewelled cakes, tiger boned wine, 300-year-aged eggs? . . . Shark’s Fin soup in one of those Koryu bowls he had, or at least Chinese lobster making necessary the use of those carved ivory chopsticks from the emperor Kang-hsi? I followed him into the dining room with a lively spirit of anticipation, thinking on various passages about food in the Chinese classics. “Nine times must the soup be boiled and exposed to the scorching heat; a hundred times it must rise and fall in bubbling effervescence. Taste a slice of meat from the nape of the neck; take a bite of the claws of a crab before the coming of the hoarfrost; break open the fruit of crystallized pearl-cherry, a delicious morsel. Allow the almond gruel with its steamed lamb to boil up into clouds of vapor. The clams must be half-cooked, and steeped in wine; the crabs slightly underdone and soaked in grain . . . all tender and savory foods must be gathered in to feed my old Gourmand!” And although I had not drunk, I felt I could gobble up the spirits and demons of fish and dragon.
It was a prim room of early colonial furniture with tall white candles in pewter candlesticks on a glistening white tablecloth. Two American ladies were there. One was young, being introduced to me as Miss Hancock. She was of that type of person who looks as if she has been immaculate from the cradle up and constantly scrubbed with soap. Her light-brown hair seemed never to have been bobbed. It waved, showing now and then sparks of old gold, but it was very soberly put back, keeping its place without the spirit of mischief. She was dressed in a russet velvet dress with lace at the throat and an old-fashioned amethyst brooch. In her taut rather boyish figure was a hint of the North, although there was nothing boyish—at least tom-boyish—in Mr. Brown’s young cousin, Helen Hancock; she was all old-fashioned mannered, dignified, serious, modest. Her face in repose held a sensitive and wistful shadow almost of Hawthornesque melancholy. No mystery, no sophistication was visible in her. She showed the direct honest primness of New England architecture, a white house with apple trees in blossom before it. I don’t suppose she would have been considered beautiful by Hollywood standards. That is, I believe she was not much pursued by American men as a star, possessing the “it” of those times. But I got the impression that Kim considered her very beautiful, that to his eyes, her young slender figure was in a springtime of bloom, favored with sunshine and rain without knowing storm or violent wind, scorched desert or burning heat-tide. Mrs. Brown had seated them side by side at the table, and Brown seemed to look with genial eye upon their obvious friendship.
Mrs. Brown, I thought, appeared somewhat older than her husband. She had iron-gray hair, gray eyes, a pale face not at all beautiful, and a stout full figure. She showed, however, a quiet feminine charm of poise and repose and one fancied that Brown, in his choice of a wife, had Chinese taste. (But not in dinner, I regret to say. One had to be contented with the wife.) Later I learned that she had been a trained nurse, married unexpectedly to Brown in middle life after attending him in an illness. Very practical she seemed, well satisfied to rest on earth. She made no attempt to keep up the tradition of American ladies to whom conversation is an art, and where ladies’ charm is understood to be the product of that plus gesture. Mrs. Brown had neither talk nor gesture. I doubt even if she had much appreciation of her husband’s Oriental collection. It must be told, however, that when dinner was over, I felt I knew Mrs. Brown better than Mr. Brown, who talked most of the time.
Mr. Brown had a loud, vibrating, metallic voice, aggressive in his quest for knowledge, yet whenever he spoke it had always dogmatic tones. He never made any questioning remark in the mood of wonder or doubt, but everything he said was meant for 100 per cent sure. I noticed Mr. Brown seemed to have some hidden fault to find with his young cousin, Helen. I suppose it was that obviously she could never be Chinized! No more than a white meetinghouse. She was quiet, but lacked the feminine stodginess of Mrs. Brown. Helen Hancock did not seem a young woman of intellect, exactly, but she moved from the higher centers and she had the temperament if not the talent for the realm of high ideas. She had recently graduated from one of the Eastern women’s colleges and was very fond of European travel, I gathered.
“May I, To Wan?”
Kim nodded. “And any more you like. But what was it?”
“Your pen-and-ink drawing of the Clem below Karmesh . . . I adore it, so wild, so German, so mystic.”
“It is very Oriental. Certain places in Diamond Mountains are like that, on a still grander scale.” (And Helen murmured, “How magnificent!”) “I did it on the spot, something I don’t often do, without composing my mind. I did not do it well, and I meant to destroy it. It got mixed up with some other things I brought over to show. . . .”
“No, it wasn’t so good,” agreed Brown, his great voice booming out across the table. “Too romantic . . . much too tragic, too Western for Kim. . . . What got into you, Kim?”
“I don’t know. I think all mixtures are horrible. There is a Japanese artist living not far from me in the Village. He is always engaged in trying to make an acceptable bust of Lincoln—or something like that.”
Brown had rich, hearty laughter; it vibrated the whole air.
“Oh, but he is making big money with that kind of stuff,” returned Kim.
“So do bootleggers. Nothing is easier . . . one can in New York.” (I wondered how, but did not interrupt.) And it was easy to see that such remarks endeared Brown to Kim.
“Susan, he has taken all my rucksack trips. Isn’t it exciting?” Helen was saying, a nostalgic light in her blue eyes.
“Like Kim, Helen is something of a globe-trotter,” Brown remarked slyly. “But she remains a Bostonian all the same. Aunt Helen, you know, was a globe-trotter, too, at your age.”
“How horrid of you, Arthur!” said Helen and looked vexed.
“Are you homesick for Europe again?” asked Kim. “That is why you wanted the Clem?”
“Aren’t you? What can you see in this noisy country of ours?”
Kim looked as if he might have answered, “You.” But he replied instead, “I never travel any more. I am losing the desire. I never find peace, so the travel itself seems futile. And I remember, too late, the story of a Chinese emperor who employed 10,000 magicians to set out for him in search of the heavenly flower, but he found it at last growing in his own yard. No. I have no homesickness for Europe . . . nor for my own country. The world seems my country, such as it is. . . . Perhaps it would have been better for me to dream away life to the sweet music of Rossini, drinking the mild capri bianco or verona suave. But really I somewhat prefer now American cocktails.”
“And I don’t like cocktails!” Helen confessed, shuddering.
“Nor New York,” murmured Kim with a teasing smile.
“I like Brookline better than New York, and Germany better than Brookline.”
“I can see why a man of my race might not like New York. But why a woman of yours?”
“And why don’t you like New York?”
“The only goal for a man here is money and power. But money and power in New York are not for men of my race. Even if we succeeded, we would not be admired for that, but only hated and feared.”
“Why hated and feared?”
“Pagans, coming over to spoil good manners and respectable morals. When powerless, pagans are more tolerable, isn’t that so? Pagans are not so much to be feared.”
“Our neighbor, Miss Lowell, in Brookline, spends all her time in translating Chinese poetry. I only know what I have read of hers. I don’t feel such poets are pagans. Nobody does.”
“Oh, come, Kim,” Brown interrupted, “We are all pagans here—except Helen. Susan, aren’t you a pagan? You know you’re a pagan.” Mrs. Brown merely smiled indulgently without committing herself.
And now Brown took my arm and drew me toward the Chinese room, where he said cigarettes and more drinks were waiting. Mrs. Brown prepared to withdraw through another door, and Helen with her, but Kim interposed. “Aren’t you coming?” he said to Helen.
She hesitated. “Then there is to be no Chinese lesson tonight?”
“No, none.”
And Helen came with us.
As we strolled about the Chinese room once more, to let me look at the paintings, Brown was singing to me the praises of Kim: “A most unusual person. And a great artist. Some day, like Wu Taotze, he will disappear within one of his own paintings. I wish I could do something for To Wan. But he won’t let me. He gives me pieces for which I ought to be paying a handsome sum. He won’t hear of money. It was he who made a catalogue of all these things for me, with English captions and verse translations. . . .”
Behind us, Kim was talking to Helen. “A famous Chinese philosopher was asked what he would do with a useless tree. He said, ‘Why not plant it in the land of non-existence and yourself lie in a state of bliss beneath it, inactive by its side? No ax nor other harm could touch it, and being useless, it would be safe from danger.’ This has been my philosophy, in utilitarian civilizations where I and my muse are not wanted. My life is the useless tree. I try to plant my tree in the land of non-existence. It is the same land we see in Arthur’s collections over these walls here.”
“Tell me more about Oriental art,” said Helen. “I am so ignorant about it.”
“Its simplicity sometimes escapes the Western eye. The inspiration is usually nature. That the artist admires with primitive simplicity. It was said of Yu-K’o that when he painted bamboos, he forgot his own body and became transformed into bamboo, he saw bamboos, not mankind. So when you paint a horse, a cat, a butterfly, a stream, you must become all these, not see them in terms of utility to man, nor as part of some mystical scheme to human advantage (not like the praying cows of Italian primitives, that is). He who succeeds in setting down the soul of bamboo, of stone, of old trees, that man must feel serene and divine (he is in union with nature, as they say). Some things in Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, and other poets you know will suggest what I mean. Keats has said, ‘A poet has no identity; he is continually in, for, and filling some other body.’ This is the spirit of the Orient, at the same time mystic and sensuous. Like the German word, Seele . . . so simple. . . . As when you are happy, and can’t say anything, you talk on flowers, trees, birds, clouds and streams.” And Kim’s face looked happy for the moment. “And then you meet your friend through the medium of nature more universal than the human face or individuality.”
Helen met his eyes, then turned hers away. “What an amazing dragon,” she quickly commented. “Where did they ever get the models for such things?”
“You must say good-bye to the Oriental muse, if you paint as Western artists do from models.”
“Do you never paint from models?”
“Well, a Chinese poet-artist says, ‘Art produces something beyond the form of things, though its importance lies in preserving the form of things.’ A craftsman may be able to represent form, but genius is something else. So always the Oriental artists aim to interpret the inner spirit rather than the outer look. If an artist draws a rose, it is not the color or the form he is trying to get, but its blooming fragrant grace. To him the mystery and beauty of the rose are more significant than shape. Always it is suggestiveness he is creating; not show.” He interpreted a poem for Helen from the great T’ang poet, Li Po, one of Kim’s heroes:
Ch’uang ch’ien ming yüeh kuang
I shih ti shang shuang
Chü tou wang ming yüeh
Ti tou ssū ku hsiang
Moonlight before my bed—
Or is it hoar-frost spread?
To the moon, I raise my eyes.
With thoughts of home, I bow my head.4
Afterwards we sat down in the symposium circle, and Brown and Kim had glasses filled with drink and cigarettes to smoke. Helen and I had neither the smoke nor t
he drink, and so we had few words for which drink always seems the medicine. It was mostly Kim who talked; not, as before dinner, Brown. I had never seen Kim so stimulated. A question from Helen, a hint from Brown was enough to set him off. What tales he had to tell, and what a variety of people and scenes he remembered! In the Far East, he had wandered through the heart of storms, amidst guns and fires, battles and revolutions. He had lived long in Europe, he had visited in the Near East, even in Africa . . . one moment drinking the famous beer of Heidelberg, the next eating fettucini at Alfredo’s in Rome, sauntering by the bookstalls in Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo, and now recalling everything over a glass of American gin in New York City. His suave irony came out as never before in delicate humor, and he kept Helen and Brown in gales of laughter softened immediately afterwards to a touched gravity. The Oriental exile of Kim’s generation is really a new character in history. His break with his kind is so profound, by reason of the abnormal expansion of his knowledge and experience; he is at the same time so outside the alien worlds he travels in, so isolated and apart, he gives a new interpretation of the solitariness of the human soul, its essential curiosity and dauntlessness.
It grew later and later. Time to go. I said good night to Brown. Kim was talking to Helen about an exhibition in New York of some modern French art he was going to see, and I heard him ask, “Would you like to see it?”
“I’d love to.”
“May I come for you here?”
Helen’s face clouded in perplexity. She hesitated. “I’m not staying here. Tomorrow I will be with my aunt, and from then on, until I return to Boston.”