The Naked Truth

 

There was in last week’s paper an interesting piece about Henry Tudor and Catalina Aragona, alias Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, the sixteenth-century royals.  These two formed a typical New York Times power couple, except for the fact that they both have been dead for nearly five hundred years.  Catherine was Wife Number One, who got cancelled when Harry’s wandering eye landed on Anne Boleyn.  An enterprising Harvard graduate student, Vanessa Braganza, thinks she has found a previously unremarked message from Catherine concerning this matter hidden in clear sight in a cypher, or allegorical emblem, in some seldom consulted old archival papers.  According to the researcher’s interpretation, Catherine wanted to make a coded statement of her enduring claim to be Henry’s unique wife, or at least his unique queen.  This was not at all his plan.  And as Henry VIII did not like to be crossed, if you were going to cross him, it probably would be best to do so in a fashion he could not easily grasp.   So the cypher and its possible interpretation are themselves very interesting topics, but not the ones I shall pursue in this essay.

 

What claims my attention is the more general proclivity of the old artists—whether in visual media, literature, or even musical composition—to embed cryptic meaning in their artistic creations.  One of our great Renaissance poets, Edmund Spenser, wrote an epic allegorical poem for, and about, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I.  It is called in its ye-olde printed form The Faerie Queene, and it is a very long narrative dealing with ethical, political, and theological issues beneath the veil of what Spenser calls a “dark conceit”—meaning a complex and obscure metaphorical covering that the reader must strive to  penetrate and illuminate.  We rightly worry about the bad effects that divorce might have on the children.  Is it a stretch to suppose that growing up knowing your daddy had your mommy’s head chopped off might cast some shadow across the emotional life of a daughter?  One does notice that Elizabeth I chose not to marry.  Might studying the Fairy Queen, which has proved to be a full life’s work for several prominent scholars and a life sentence for some of their students, have been suggested in part to occupy its dedicatee’s mind and perhaps help purge it of unpleasant family memories?

 

The allegorical dimensions of our earlier art present vast fields of interest and of study, to which I applied myself for many years.  The allegorical mentality long antedated the Christian era, but it was greatly enriched by the traditions of Jewish and Christian biblical exegesis in Late Antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages.  The justification for scriptural obscurity offered by Augustine and many others was a familiar one to all teachers.  You get out of a learning experience what you put into a learning experience.  Truths learned through assiduous application are more secure than those with which you are spoon fed. 

 

But what about the naked truth?  Common expressions like “the simple truth…”, “the truth is…” or “the fact of the matter…” seem to suggest that truth is eventually a rather simple business, and that we too often distort, dilute, or complicate it in our daily life.  In an earlier essay I mentioned my pleasure at discovering a novel called The Relic (1887) by the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós.  Eça is rightly considered an important realist writer who was much influenced by earlier and contemporary French writers like Balzac, Flaubert, and even Zola.  In politics he was a liberal, indeed a socialist, and part of a group of writers who were trying to bring new social and political ideas into their native land.  Their revolution had a literary agenda as well.  They explicitly challenged the conventionality and sentimentality of decadent Romanticism for its lack of “truth” and “sincerity”.  But The Relic is a wild and nearly indescribable combination of social realism, extravagant satire, travelog, and what amounts to theological science fiction.  In an early edition of the book the author tried to alert his readers by adding the following epigraph: “Over the stark nakedness of truth, the diaphanous cloak of fantasy.”  Eça is claiming that beneath a plot that is at times fantastic the adept reader will find a good deal of social and political truth.

 

For a very particular reason, the nakedness of truth rang a bell in my mind.  Around 1970 we launched a private printing operation from our living room.  We did publish a few small books, but our main productions at that time were elegant posters advertising public lectures on campus.  Among our friends was the historian Carl Schorske, who for years was Joan’s fellow violinist in a string quartet.  During the decade of the ‘70s he was completing his celebrated book about the rich cultural life of Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.*  Carl, who died a centenarian in 2015, presented some of the chapters of his book as they were finished as public lectures and/or discreet journal essays.  He was prevailed upon to offer a public lecture on one dealing with the visual arts (“Gustav Klimt: Painting and the Crisis of the Liberal Ego”) on the Princeton campus.  We got the commission for a poster.  I hope a copy survives somewhere.  It was one of our better efforts.

The Kiss
 

Most people know the work of the Viennese painter Gustav Klimt (1864-1918), if only for his sensational painting “The Kiss,” a hot contender (along with Che Guevara in a beret) for the artwork most likely to be hanging on an undergraduate’s dormitory wall around 1975.  But we lacked the facilities for polychrome elaboration, and the image we chose, stunning in its black and white, was Klimt’s own poster-like version of “Nuda Veritas” (the Naked Truth) in line etching.  

 

 

 It featured a German motto to the effect that “Truth is fire and to speak the truth is both a shining and a burning”—the constructive and destructive aspects of artistic revolution, perhaps.  For artistic revolutionaries, “in with the new” definitely implied “out with the old.”  Klimt’s “Nuda Veritas” is an image that particularly engaged me because it is of an iconographic type—interesting females with mirrors in hand—with a very long tradition in medieval and Renaissance art.  These ladies include the cardinal virtue of Prudence and the vice of Lust.  In Dante, biblical Rachel, a type of the contemplative life, never ceases from staring into her mirror.  In the Romance of the Rose a dubious lady porter named Idleness greets the Lover at the gate, a mirror in her hand.

 

But back to Gustav Klimt.  He was a founding member of a revolutionary group of artists called the “Vienna Secession” or simply the “Secessionists,” who like most other groups of revolutionary artists claimed to discover or to reclaim the elemental truth of art.  What I am now trying to figure out is whether it is even conceivable that hyper-cosmopolitan Vienna could reflect the influence of the benighted and parochial Lisbon of 1871, when Eça and other young Portuguese intellectuals formed a group with similar artistic and political aims.  It did not name itself, but is now known as the “Generation of ‘70”.  As Schorske pointed out, the first thing one notices about Klimt’s “Nuda Veritas” is its vera nuditas.  On this occasion he omitted any diaphanous cloak (manto diáfono) in favor of the “stark nakedness” part.  But the good Lord knows that when it comes to diaphanous women’s cloaks nobody did them much better than Klimt.

 

 

And it is quite possible to be a little too diaphanous.  You may think that the Portuguese sculptor António Teixeira Lopes (d. 1942) succumbed to this temptation in his monument to Eça’s unflinching search for the naked truth.  The author is not flinching, but he may in the circumstances be somewhat overdressed.

 

 

 

 

 

*Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (NY: Knopf, 1980).

 

Carl Emil Schorske (1915-2015)

Carl Schorske—famous historian, the Dayton-Stockton Professor emeritus, amateur musician, friend, and matchless Mensch—died over the weekend at the Meadow Lakes retirement community in Hightstown midway through his one-hundred-and-first year.  Joan was expecting this.  She had last visited him on the previous Friday, by which time he was already in “hospice” mode, only dubiously aware of her presence.  She told me he must soon slip away altogether.  But the rational acceptance of the inevitable lacks the sharpness of its final actuality, and she is left grieving.

Most of us, even when we do not think of ourselves as living in “spheres”, operate within more or less public and private arenas.  As Carl’s colleague on the Princeton faculty I was very much aware of the man’s professional fame.  It was in 1980 that he published his masterwork: Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture.  It had been long anticipated, and it became instantly famous, winning (among numerous other trophies) the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1981.  Its subject, of course, is the extraordinary richness and fecundity of the artistic and intellectual milieu of the Austrian capital in the age of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Klimt.  It is beautifully written, with a subtlety that honors complexity and a clarity that guides the general reader through it.

Many honors followed.  Carl was recognized repeatedly by the Austrian government for his outstanding contributions to the study of their national culture.  He was in the first “class” of the then-new MacArthur Fellowships, which the press had dubbed the “Genius Awards”.  These are lucrative as well as prestigious.   For a party marking the honor a witty childhood friend of Carl’s from Scarsdale wrote a poem with the refrain “’Til the fin-de-siècle he’ll be counting his dough”.

Schorske had enjoyed what I sometimes described as an ideal career for an American academic.  One of the great things about higher education in this country is its variety.  Carl experienced the best of it.  He began his teaching career at Wesleyan, one of our finest liberal arts colleges.  He then went for a decade to Berkeley, the flagship campus of one of the greatest of our great state universities.  Finally of course he came here to Princeton, among the most distinguished of our private research universities.  In a sense he had it all.

 

fêted in Vienna 

But I must leave the public side of Carl Schorske to the major obituaries that are certain to appear soon.  Our feeling of loss, especially Joan’s, is intimate and domestic.  Since about 1970 she regularly made music with Carl and other friends in a string quartet.  The photograph below will not be found on any CD covers, but it is a monument to decades of joyous companionship.  It is of uncertain date, but it must be from the mid-Seventies.  It shows from left to right Joan and Carl, the two violinists, Jerrold Seigel, an eminent historian then at Princeton and latterly at NYU, and Kathleen Amon, who worked in administrative offices at the University.  Carl was a regular well into his eighties, and the group continues to play today with two of its original members—Joan and Kathleen.

The love of music, though doubtless magnified by his talent as singer and player, was part of a broad, delightfully old-fashioned, and courteously deployed culture that included literature, the visual and plastic arts, travel, current events, the New York scene—you name it.  He was interested in everything including—maybe even especially—in whatever it was his friends were doing or had to say.  If you hang around academics you are bound to meet lots of brilliant people whose talk consists of engaging mini-lectures or mini-seminars.  Encountering them is often exhilarating, but Carl had the rarer gift of being a truly brilliant conversationalist: a man brilliant alike in his talking and in his listening.

I last saw Carl in March, at a gala party celebrating his hundred birthday.  It was held in one of the public spaces of his retirement community.  I have to confess that in general visiting nursing homes creeps me out, probably in the fashion that visiting prisons might creep out a bank robber.  Yet this was a wonderful event, meticulously organized by Carl’s dear friend the musicologist Christopher Hailey, an expert in Viennese modernism.  The place was packed with old friends, old colleagues, old students, not a few of them minor eminences themselves.  There was an excellent presentation featuring professional musicians from New York and beyond.  The Austrian Minister of Culture had come from Vienna to present Carl with yet another gaudy kreuz of Ruritanian appearance.  But the high point of the day for me came in the informal refreshment hour following the program.  I am unsure of how it happened exactly, but to the delight of the revelers Joan and Carl spontaneously joined in duet singing a song from Gilbert and Sullivan.  It was Jane’s song from “Patience”: Silvered is the raven hair.  “Silvered is the raven hair….Halting is the youthful gait….Spectacled the limpid eye….”  I was able not merely to hear but to see it all perfectly, having recently undergone successful cataract surgery.

Like many of the important cultural figures he wrote about Carl could be rightly described, I suppose, as a secular intellectual.  But he fully honored the role of the religious tradition in creating our western civilization.   What lover of classical music does not?  Liz, his wonderful wife of more than sixty years, who herself died only last year at a great age, was a life-long serious Roman Catholic.  It is condign that this great man, so rich in years and accomplishments alike, should leave us at the portal of the High Holy Days.

-o-

We are preparing to depart in a few hours for ten days in England, and while I try to keep a regular schedule with my blog posts, I do not go to fanatical ends to do so.  As Jesus reminds us the Sabbath was made for man, not the other way around.  I will travel more blithely without schlepping a computer about with me.  And even as this post is a few hours early, the next will probably be a few days late.  Deo volente, I shall be in touch soon enough.