AUGUST 13, 2016
AFTER RETURNING THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS TEXT to the copy editor, I became plagued by my use of the term “throbbing cock.” It would not be too late to delete it, I realized, and my doing so might spare some people their possible discomfort.
Yet, while I greatly value decorum in life, and cherish what Edmund Burke called “the decent drapery” of existence, something made me want to retain these more-than-direct words. My motive was neither shock value nor braggadocio. It is because I want to get past the euphemisms, masking, veiling, and the retreat from reality to the escape mechanism of convoluted language that is a lot of what this book is about. (My apologies to whoever actually said “Prepositions at the end of sentences are something up with which I will not put.” I still remember the fellow student at Loomis from whom I first heard this and who attributed it to Winston Churchill, an error I accepted as fact for over fifty years until it was corrected in an earlier version of this afterword.)
Why the unflinching, even coarse, language? Why the memory from the all-boys school I attended as an adolescent? And why the need to tell you that what I assumed, for over half a century, to have been a certainty—the attribution of that witticism to Churchill—was false information? Because I long for truthfulness, for simplicity, for authentic responses, for accepting the way things are, for calling a spade a spade, not just for accuracy but for a correction of myths.
You could fill a large library with the literature on Freud and homosexuality. You could find scholars to say he considered it an illness to be treated, a mark of arrested development in the so-called “normal” progress of healthy human beings. Not exactly to the contrary, but with different emphasis, other knowledgeable people will focus on the innate human bisexuality Freud discussed with Fliess. Regardless, in adolescence, sexuality, whatever its form, becomes a preoccupation for most of us, and the thinking and imagining and desiring and wondering tend to outdo the action. Moreover, little is certain; there are few cut-and-dried facts. Feelings and wishes elude easy identification.
All the theories! All the verbiage! All those elaborate analyses, devoid of clear vision, about why Freud forgot a name! Little boys—at least most of them—admire bold men. We want to be one of them. Our dads are rarely the he-men the hero Hamilcar was to Hannibal. Narcissism, pansexuality, the Oedipus complex: all these, and many more, psychological conditions and processes occur as we grow up and, even before puberty, life stops being based purely on instinct—that absolute marvel of babyhood—and becomes inextricably complicated. None of the lingo and terminology and theorizing is adequate to pinpoint the feelings, because intuition and emotion elude language and explanation.
My grandson at twenty-one months likes holding his penis and smiling and calling it his “bee bee.” Wilder Fox Smith is as great an enjoyer of life as I know, and he is proud to stand with his nappy off and hold the goods. Maleness is terrific for most men, but the whole thing becomes so much trickier after Wilder’s age and the questions begin. Whose maleness is it that appeals to us? Our own, someone else’s, our father’s, that of the alternatives with whom we have replaced our fathers, of the older brothers we have or the ideal ones we wish we had, the mixture of any of these people? Why did Freud, so perceptive about paintings, so on to the earthiness of Raphael’s Virgin, simply not realize that those frescoes in Orvieto are testosterone itself? Not just the male hormone, but also its realization in visible beauty.
Why could he not see—or, if he did see it, then acknowledge—that this display of forceful, naked manhood was understandably overwhelming for him with all the ramifications of his father’s death and his reflection on the Turkish idea that once you become unable to have an erection, then life is not worth living. All the issues of what it means to be a man and the feelings he did or did not have for other men, linked with the surprising but real relationship that being male and being Jewish has for many of us, were cloudy and unfathomable in this period when his father had recently died. The issue of the little “signor,” “Signorelli,” and “Sigmund” was just too much for him to cope with. (Sorry again, person-who-is-not Sir Winston, even if I suspect that I will never succeed in disassociating this stipulation about prepositions from the man who led Britain so nobly in wartime. How do we ever train ourselves to unlearn something, especially as delightful an idea as the notion that the courageous spokesman who invoked “blood, sweat, and tears” prized the rules of grammar and was as playful as he was powerful?) Those bare buttocks at Orvieto give you no choice but to see what naked maleness, in fine and muscular form, is. It also unequivocally depicts physical battle and sheer brute force, and makes raw strength, at least in these illustrations of it, a vital element of masculinity. Freud could not accept, or face—or, in any event, discuss—his own reactions and issues.
Another brilliant authority on human development, Charles Darwin, for all his exceptional intellectual awareness of the natural world, was even more uptight about innate instincts, or at least their expression. He was horrified by his grandfather’s championing of group sex in his poetry—the wonderfully named Erasmus Darwin also flaunted the existence of his illegitimate children, much to his grandson’s embarrassment—and was so traumatized by the death of his mother when he was eight that, while suffering from extreme anxiety and depression in assorted manifestations for his entire life, in adulthood he wrote a condolence letter to a cousin in which he said he had never had a close relative die. When playing a game similar to Scrabble, in which another player put an “m” in front of “other,” Darwin immediately said that the new creation was not a real word.
It took a while before Charles Darwin could be convinced that “mother” is an actual word. Sometimes what is represented by language is too painful, because it touches us so profoundly, that we cannot let verbal language penetrate our consciousness. The inability to see or remember a word or name becomes a protective barricade to the truth.
My own use of words and images that may be too colloquial or frank for some people’s taste is simply because I think that there is no reason for the guises, any more than I think there is anything wrong when Wilder holds his penis and smiles. What’s the big deal? Why not celebrate visceral feelings, the way kids do? Why the anguish? Why the need to create an elaborate explanation that obfuscates what is intuitive? Why was Freud, the great master of the human mind, so uptight about the pleasure of it all?
Ever since I was a university student and began to read texts by Freud that at times were tough sledding for me, I have been fascinated that, lifelong, Freud retained his sweet tooth, manifest in his weakness for Viennese pastries. Sheer physical enjoyment! Sensuous satisfaction! Aren’t they better than death, whatever form earthly delights take, as long as they do no one else any harm? What counted for the Turks was potency: the source that inspires it was a secondary matter. I want to say to all of you: enjoy it! Forget the guilt and repression. Let the power of those frescoes, the memories of other time periods in your life, delight you, and fire you up.
The marvel is that Signorelli’s paintings had such an effect on Freud. Why could the warrior worshipper not just enjoy the colors and the forms and the painting and the naked maleness and give himself a break from the subsequent convolutions of his mind?
MUCH OF MY WORK THESE DAYS IS DEVOTED TO WRITING the biography of Piet Mondrian. And one of the most striking aspects of Mondrian’s approach to art was his constant repainting and refining.
Toward the end of his life, just after he moved to New York at age sixty-eight, one of Mondrian’s recent compositions was exhibited in a major show of abstract art. His inclusion in this important event was a nice welcome to America. But the moment the painting was returned to his studio in a brownstone walkup at the corner of First Avenue and Fifty-Sixth Street, he changed it, adding colors and recalibrating lines. This is how some of us always feel about our books. Why had we not added or taken out some element? Could we not shine more light on our subject? Have we done the best possible service to you, the reader?
I realized only this morning that I had never considered Berenson’s judgment of Signorelli’s aesthetic qualities. What Freud is to psychiatry, Berenson is to art history. I won’t even attempt to analyze what prevented my previously delving further into the views of the famous B.B. (please don’t tell me it has something to do with Wilder’s calling his penis his bee bee), but I decided to reconsider what Berenson really thought. I, too, am sixty-eight years old, and more determined to go the extra step to get something right than I used to be. And, like Mondrian, I relish the process.
Berenson was iffy about Signorelli, and begins his discussion of him by amplifying the painter’s weaknesses. The ultimate authority on Italian Renaissance painting, Berenson allows that “the painting of the Nude is the supreme endeavor of the very greatest artists; and, when successfully treated, the most life communicating and life-enhancing theme in existence,” and that the master bar none was Signorelli’s follower, Michelangelo, but that the student was markedly superior to the mentor. Signorelli’s “entire treatment is drier, his feeling for texture and tissue of surface much weaker, and the female form revealed itself to him but reluctantly. Signorelli’s Nude, therefore, does not attain to [sic] the soaring beauty of Michelangelo’s.”
Then, however, Berenson gives Signorelli a break. What he says is so insightful that I am requiting some of his statements in the main text of the book, now with the gaps filled in. “But a truce to his faults! What though his nudes are not perfect; what though as in candour must be said his colour is not always as it should be, a glamour upon things, and his composition is at times crowded and confused? Luca Signorelli nevertheless remains one of the grandest—mark you, I do not say pleasantest—Illustrators of modern times. It is as a great Illustrator first, and then as a great artist that we must appreciate Signorelli.”
Berenson allows that Signorelli’s work has “virtues of its own a certain gigantic robustness and suggestions of primeval energy. . . . It would not have been possible to communicate such feelings but for the Nude, which possesses to the highest degree the power to make us feel, all over our own bodies, its own state.”
I have come back to the great authority on Italian Renaissance art because I now see that here he homed in on what I believe was pivotal to Freud: the way that Signorelli, more successful showing naked men than naked women, makes men feel about our own bodies.
Berenson was another Jew who was uncomfortable about being Jewish—although his case was more extreme in both directions than Freud’s, since he was brought up Orthodox, and when he made anti-Semitic statements did not prevaricate. The comment that is most striking in relationship to Freud and the Orvieto frescoes, meanwhile, is one Iris Origo quotes in her introduction to the art historian’s late-life diaries. Berenson was in his eighties when he had switched from being vehemently anti-Zionist to supporting the idea of a Jewish homeland. Relatedly, he said of “his people”: “The fact that contempt is felt for them by the majority of non-Jews makes them not only resentfully unhappy or cringingly eager to be good bourgeois, toeing the mediocre line in every land, but also to feel this contempt for themselves. . . . The remedy may be found in statehood plus . . . military glory.”
“Military glory”: isn’t that exactly the remedy onto which Freud latched so enthusiastically, the antidote to his father’s cowardice in the face of anti-Semitism?
And why some of us are drawn to any thought associated with Winston Churchill, his unabashed self-confidence as well as his will to better the lives of others?
BERENSON LED ME TO WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS via Iris Origo. In her introduction to those late diaries—another timely gift from Charlotte, the day after she called my attention to Darwin’s inability to recognize “mother” as a word—Origo credits what Berenson wrote at the end of his life as opening the way to “the rediscovery, always lucid and sometimes merciless, of the true figure, as a tree sheds its leaves, leaving the tracery of its branches bare against the winter sky.” In that vein, she quotes Yeats on what I consider to be the nuts and bolts issue of this book. My attempt has been, quite simply, to demonstrate that a forgotten name, and an elaborate series of conjectures and linguistic complexity, may have, at their core, nothing more, or less, than raw feeling and the forces of human attraction. Origo on Berenson’s late-life comfort with his real self quotes Yeat’s exquisite:
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
I think that Freud, and the people I would call the genuine Freudians—the Karpes, my own Dr. Solnit, the remarkable Stefan Stein, and, oddly, regardless of his dispute with certain Freudian ideas, Sartre—as well as artists like Cézanne and Mondrian and Anni Albers and Josef Albers exemplify the pursuit that Yeats describes in a letter he wrote Ezra Pound on July 15, 1918: “After all one’s art is not the chief end of life but an accident in one’s search for reality or rather perhaps one’s method of search.”
Yeats’s perpetual quest, which he put into some of the most exquisite poetry ever written in the English language, was for the truth within:
But I, whose virtues are the definitions
Of the analytic mind, can neither close
The eye of the mind nor keep my tongue from speech.
This poet who wrote as beautifully of heterosexual love as anyone ever has, who could capture women’s pleasure as unabashedly as men’s, who was a connoisseur of female beauty and a wonderful proponent of lust between men and women, was as relaxed, and brave, about homosexuality as one would hope. This was a vital issue because of the trial and execution of Roger Casement, the extraordinary humanitarian who had battled for the rights of victims of oppression in the Congo and in South America, and who had an unequaled impact in fighting colonialism when Ireland was still part of the Empire. The key evidence that sent Casement to the gallows was the publication of his Black Diaries, a frank account of one after another homosexual encounter, thought by some to be real and by others to be falsified, in the middle of his trial. Yeats wrote, quite simply, “If Casement were homo-sexual, what matter!”
Yeats was always battling for the same sort of blatant power evident in Signorelli’s frescoes. His candor and artistic boldness, his unabashedness, give his words a quality akin to the Orvieto paintings with their unparalleled presentation of male nudity and strength, of the attraction of violence, and of muscular force. Yeats knew the temptation of anecdote and sideways thinking, but prized, beyond them, reality in all its harshness, and recognized the “beauty”—there is no other word for it—of that reality:
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking take or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
In 1937, Yeats said his thesis for an upcoming radio debate was “[t]hat the exclusion of sex appeal from painting, poetry, and sculpture is nonsense (are the films alone to impose their ideal upon the sexual instinct?). That, on the contrary, all arts are the expression of desire—exciting desirable life, exulting desirable death.” Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgment is a case in point.