The pandemic has effected many dramatic delays, postponements, and reversals, most of them unfortunate and some disastrous; but at the domestic level it has afforded me one or two useful permission slips. In recent years I had been making some effort to downsize my library, a very painful task. That has come to a screeching halt and indeed something of a reversal. If you can’t get to a big research library, indeed rarely leave your own precincts except for walks in open places, you need to import reading material. I am allowing myself to buy at least such volumes of the magnificent Library of America as I lack and want. That is how a beautiful, two-volume boxed collection of the short stories of Peter Taylor arrived at my house recently—1,397 pages of them to be exact.
There are at least two great Tennessee writers of the twentieth century, James Agee and Peter Taylor. If names count for something we would have to add a third, Tennessee Williams, though he was not really a Tennessean. It is only because a medievalist feels safer in judging defunct writers that he says nothing of the very powerful and happily extant Madison Smartt Bell. All three of the older guys have connections with my alma mater, Sewanee, the University of the South, though none of them attended it. Taylor and especially Agee were significantly influenced by Fr. James Fly, a priest who long taught at the St. Andrew’s School just beyond the Sewanee domain. Taylor lies buried along with Flye and many of my own revered teachers in the extraordinary Sewanee cemetery. Agee and Taylor were both serious, unsettled Christians. Tennessee Williams much admired his grandfather, a Mississippi priest who was a Sewanee graduate, and in his honor left the college a sizeable legacy in his will. Late in his life Williams, never particularly religious, joined the Roman Catholic Church, though I think rather in the manner of an American Oscar Wilde, and for much the same reasons. The greatest of them in my view was Agee, who died far too young. Nobody has written better film criticism. And his unfinished novel, A Death in the Family, is a great work of art.
The current topic, however is Taylor’s art. I began with one of his substantial older and more famous stories—“Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time” (1958, the year I graduated from Sewanee). It was, I think, the first thing I ever read in the Kenyon Review, twin, as we thought of it, to our Sewanee Review. The plot is rather fantastic, but you don’t mind. A really great fiction writer can always get a reader not merely to tolerate but positively to collude in the famously “willing suspension of disbelief.” The Dorsets, an aging, unmarried brother and sister, living in isolation and genteel poverty in a decaying mansion in what I think must be one of the more sizeable old towns in an imagined geography somewhere beneath the western extension of the Mason-Dixon line, are largely disapproved of by the town’s “society”, who disdain their standoffish eccentricities and geriatric slovenliness. Yet they have long hosted a single elegant annual social event—a house tour and dinner party for a select group of the town’s graduating high-school seniors, strangely endorsed by the young people’s parents. So we have mysterious people, a mysterious party, and a mysterious house in which, very mysteriously indeed, the sole piece of art on display is a magazine reproduction of a mid-sixteenth-century work of the Florentine Mannerist Agnolo Bronzino.: his so-called called “Allegory of Love” or “Allegory of Cupid and Venus” in the National Gallery of Britain. We get the story of what happened the year of the last dinner party, the year that Bronzino met the Junior Varsity of the First Families of Virginia, so to speak.
As you can see if you didn’t already know, it is one hell of a painting. Does Bronzino’s incestuous theme extend to the aging Dorset siblings? Who are the strange onlookers? Taylor’s short story is, among other things, a subtle and softcore example of Southern Gothic, perhaps most famously exemplified by Faulkner’s necrophiliac short story “A Rose for Emily”—echoed by Taylor—and the recent spectacular novel by Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time, which enthusiastic critics have praised as “Hillbilly Gothic”—a possible upgrade? What is Taylor’s story really about? Since I’ve got 1,368 pages of other stories still to go, I can keep thinking about it as I move along. What I am thinking about just now are the commodious convergences of life, a pattern of personal and mental implosions that transform seemingly random and disparate personal experiences into a plausible if fragile coherence: Taylor, Tennessee, Sewanee, then in widening, fainter rings so much of Southern literature, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, Andrew Lytle, lesser lights yet, with all of whom I had some fleeting, obscure, spear-bearer’s association.
The Bronzino was a different matter. I doubt, at the time I first read Taylor’s story, that I had the slightest clue of who he was or the good sense to think that he and his painting might have some specific role in the strange narrative. That all changed when I got to graduate school and read Erwin Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology, first published in 1939, one of a small shelf of books that directed me to a major theme of my life’s work. Iconology, more precisely than the broader term iconography, is the study of the figurative or allegorical meaning of the images (in Greek, icons) in the visual and plastic arts. Very often such images have their origins and/or parallels in literary texts, especially in the classical poets or the Bible and its early exegesis. Panofsky was one of the great German art historians scattered through the Anglophone world by Hitler’s madness, and one who became a colleague of Einstein’s at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His book on iconology was already twenty-five years old when I met him. His principal iconological interests were secular and often arcane—the commerce between the profound revival of classical learning in Renaissance Europe and the visual art of that period. I now believe that some of his interpretations are too ingenious by half, but his deep discussion of the Bronzino was for a time the last word on the subject. It had to have been directly or indirectly from Panofsky, I now see, that Taylor had taken the painting’s very title: Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time. Well, there are few permanent “last words” in humanistic study, but three out of four ain’t bad.
I tried to do a quickie catchup on Bronzino studies of the last few decades, as best one can do such things at a home computer screen. The most interesting thing I turned up along these lines was an essay in which a young scholar identifies the subject of the painting as “bisexual eroticism” deriving from an ancient debate renewed in the Renaissance, largely but not entirely whimsical, concerning the comparative pleasures on offer from the lower orifices of schoolboys and nubile maidens.* That day I read no further—in Bronzino studies that is. Hillbilly Gothic seemed the safer and chaster choice for the moment,
Naturally I claim to know what the Bronzino painting really “means”, and I could tell you, but then of course I would have to kill you--a violation of Google's rules for its bloggers' platform. So I shall end by returning to my beginning. The point I wanted to make was that even among the constraints, constrictions, and limitations of a pandemic lockdown of unpredictable duration we are not without resources. As Milton’s Satan said when faced with a drastic downgrading of his real estate options, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”
*Will Fisher, “Peaches and figs: bisexual eroticism in the paintings and burlesque poetry of Bronzino,” in Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy: Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment, ed. Allison Levy (Ashgate, ca. 2010), pp. 151-164. [This time, three out of four are bad]. I should not gratuitously choose to impose possible indelicacy upon my genteel readership, but I think it important to remind ourselves from time to time of just how cool and edgy the study of dead white males can sometimes be.
