WHEN I INITIALLY WROTE MOST OF THIS TEXT, I forgot—or repressed—a major event in my own life. This may be because I did not initially stand up to an anti-Semitic slur, and felt myself to be like Jacob Freud, and could not stand the memory. More likely, though, it is because in my own way I finally resolved the matter and put it to rest.
If the incapacity to confront anti-Semitism is, for me, as it was for Freud, a sort of character flaw—although in his case it was troubling because it signified his father’s cowardice, while in mine the pain came from feeling like a wuss compared to my braver, more comfortable father—I had, at last, dealt with it in a way that enabled me to check it off of a sort of ridiculous mental list I carry in my head of problems to resolve, a form of personal housecleaning.
The incident occurred at Yale Graduate School in 1971. I was in the final term of a two-year program to get my master’s in art history. It was, at best, a confusing moment in life. Having been at Columbia College when the university was shut down by my classmates in 1968, I, at the end of my first year in New Haven, again witnessed a battle between academia and what seemed to most of us to be issues that mattered more than our studies. This time the occasion was the trial of Bobby Seale and other Black Panthers, all accused of murder. I was, I am now sorry to say, like Freud with regard to Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna: an observer rather than a participant in the fight against bigotry. More enlightened members of the Yale community demonstrated in front of the New Haven courthouse on May Day 1970 to assure that Seale and others, accused of murder, get a fair trial. Ricky, with whom I had remained a close friend for all those years and who had become a specialist in French communism and the student uprisings of 1968 in Paris, and was en route to a Ph.D. in political science at Yale, and I were, however, mainly focused on how funny it was when the architecture historian Vincent Scully could be seen running around with a gas mask on—we nicknamed him “Vincent of Arabia”—in case the police attacked the demonstrators. The face covering was theatrical and unnecessary. Nonetheless, in spite of my usual finding of something to mock, and my passivity, which embarrasses me in retrospect, I was torn apart inside by the clash of life-and-death issues with the minutiae of studies, which included a course entitled “Seurat and the Iconography of Entertainment.”
That seminar required my researching, for six weeks in the depths of Sterling Library, an enormous neo-Gothic edifice, the use of gas lighting in public spaces in nineteenth-century France in order, supposedly, to understand the art of a great master who died at age thirty-one. That traditional art historical emphasis on information of dubious relevance struck me as ridiculous and wasteful. But at the same time I was overwhelmed by my love of Seurat’s achievement, and the extraordinary form of beauty he had contributed to civilization in the course of his short lifetime. At age twenty-two, I imagined that, were I to die nine years later, I would leave behind a legacy of no value. I was creating nothing of meaning; nor was I fighting any battles or contributing to humankind as a whole.
The Vietnam War and the presidency of Richard Nixon only made matters worse. It was nearly impossible to focus on the art and architecture that usually filled me with joy, whether Seurat’s drawings with their sublime range of grays achieved by his using the side of his pencil on laid paper, Greek white-ground vase painting—another of my passions, the lightest and most elegant form of ancient art, with a Picasso-like aliveness—or German Rococo architecture, which still amazes me for its Mozartian lightness and the ways the plaster appears to sculpt light. I would have liked to learn more about these subjects, but I was essentially out of kilter throughout the two years at Yale. The same professor I had derided, Vincent Scully, did, however, improve life immeasurably for many of us when he provided a spectacular vision of clarity at the end of the semester. Vince—we have since become friends, and he put us on a first-name basis thirty-five years after the time period in question when he phoned me with great warmth and enthusiasm for my biography of Le Corbusier—began a lecture in those troubled times by discussing the current political climate. With the Seale trial then taking place within walking distance of where he was giving his class, he juxtaposed the salient issues with our study of architecture. We were at that moment in 1970 focusing on Mies van der Rohe’s exquisite designs for brick and concrete country houses, which still strike me, simply in their floor plans—neither project was ever realized—as being poetic in the same way as Mondrian’s splendid “pier” paintings, the rhythm of right angles and perfectly calibrated horizontal and vertical lines infused by air. Vince told the hundreds of students packed into the auditorium of the Yale Law School, the only lecture hall big enough to accommodate his very popular course, that the previous evening he had been listening to an early Beethoven string quartet while wondering if that was not an indulgence while the world seemed to be burning. Then, he explained, he realized that one thing did not rule out the other, that human beings always need art and beauty. He added that this was true in fraught moments even more than in peaceful ones. In his charismatic way, this professor who Jackie Onassis once told me was “one of the most attractive men” she had ever seen, concluding his gripping commentary with an ecstatic look on his face and calling out, in a voice like King Lear’s at the end of Shakespeare’s play, “Everyone needs everything!”
I have never forgotten the glow with which he stated that magnificent utterance, which remains a guidepost to me. It was what enabled me to continue at Yale for a second year, even while I was at odds with a mentality whereby people became excited over the footnotes to knowledge and appeared to be blind to what I considered the vital issues of life.
So in the final stages of my pursuit of my M.A., I participated in a seminar devoted to connoisseurship with regard to American decorative art of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. There were only three of us, all graduate students, in this class that met once a week for a two-hour session with one of Yale’s most esteemed professors, Charles Montgomery. Mr. Montgomery (it is a Yale thing not to address faculty as “Professor,” which we did at Columbia, or “Dr.,” even if they have their Ph.D.s.) had been for many years the private curator, and then the director, at Winterthur, a spectacular and enormous home, now a museum, in Wilmington, Delaware. Winterthur houses the collection of Henry du Pont, who had the means as well as the eye to amass an unparalleled holding of fine American furniture created by some of its greatest makers. To have the opportunity to study in such intimate conditions with the distinguished authority who had worked for Henry du Pont and who was now head of the Garvan Collection at the Yale Art Gallery—another exceptional repository of American antiques—was a sort of Rolls-Royce of educational experiences. Once I gained admission to the tiny seminar, I believed it would be the crowning glory in the program, for which I was supported by a full fellowship awarded by Yale.
For some two months, I enjoyed learning about veneers and the proportions of finials. I took great pleasure in writing a paper about Queen Anne tea tables—real ones, hand-carved in Massachusetts in the eighteenth century, not the overpolished knockoffs I associated with Jews of recent wealth trying to give the look of “old money.” At their best, these tables are sublimely graceful and confer a dignity and warm elegance to everyday living. Their legs, which resemble the necks of swans, have the quality of social encounters where the acts of pouring and receiving cups of tea harmonize with patient conversational giving and taking.
There was something slightly ridiculous to me about Charles Montgomery, though. A tall and unctuous man, he seemed to live for waxed finishes on mahogany and the joy of holding ornate silver soup ladles, with no apparent interest in anything else in life. I did not like him. Yet I respected his expertise in determining authenticity and recognizing the nuances of quality, and I was determined to get along with him, in part for my own future success.
Then, at about the tenth meeting of the seminar, Charles Montgomery started to talk about Chinese Export porcelain of the type that became very popular in the United States during the nineteenth century. He may well specified Rose Medallion ware, but I was so startled by what he then said that the precise details of the china escaped me. He explained, with his slight southern drawl, in slow cadences, his voice full of pleasure, “One day, when I was working for Mr. du Pont, he had some people coming from New York for lunch. They were Jewish collectors”—the renowned professor emphasized the word in a way I would have expected from white-haired ladies in Birmingham, Alabama—“so they loved matched sets.”
I broke out into a sweat. We were seated at a table, with our professor at the head and the two other students across from me on his left. I looked first at Andy Cabitman. I think that is how he spelled his last name, although Charles Montgomery always addressed him so that it sounded like “Mr. Cabot-Mann.” Andy was a tall, powerful-looking guy with a jagged nose that looked as if it had been broken by a lacrosse stick; he could have been in Hannibal’s army. I knew only that he was very pleasant, had attended Groton (the exclusive boys school, which I now realize, although I did not know it then, was where Henry du Pont had gone two generations previously), and was a nice guy to chat with going to or from class. It had never occurred to me to wonder whether or not he was Jewish, even though, the moment Charles Montgomery made his remark, I asked myself the question. The third person was a meek, pale, anemic-looking woman of the type one sees in library corners, completely unprepossessing and probably very successful in academic circles, who I instantly determined could not possibly be Jewish, given her total lack of a certain life force essential to the people I now think of as my “coreligionists.” (I learned this term from Katharine, who read it in a letter her grandfather, Paul Warburg, wrote his daughter, Katharine’s great-aunt Bettina, when she was at the Madeira School, in about 1912. He said that he and “Mother”—his wife, Nina Loeb Warburg, a name and personality to reckon with—had been disturbed at the opera by “some of your co-religionists who were in the next box.” They were, Paul Warburg continued, unacceptably noisy, as well as gaudily dressed.)
Charles Montgomery was not the sort of person to feel my panic, although I now think I probably emitted the strong skunklike odor that escapes me when I am suddenly, unexpectedly upset. He continued, “So at lunch, knowing that these Jewish”—he emphasized the word the same way each time he said it—“collectors would be impressed, he began by serving them soup in perfectly matched Chinese Export bowls. These people from New York could hardly believe that he had eight identical ones, for they were of a rare and highly prized design. Mr. du Pont had given instructions in the kitchen that the soup bowls were to be washed and dried immediately and used again as side dishes for the salad served with the main course. Of course, the Jewish collectors were stupefied, now thinking he had sixteen of them.”
Charles Montgomery then leaned his enormous body back in his wooden desk chair and smiled with delight, making it clear that there was more to come. My stomach, meanwhile, had turned into a steel knot.
Next the professor, who held a distinguished university chair, thrust himself forward with the look of a preacher about to declare the Truth. He continued the anecdote, to which he clearly attributed great importance. “Then, as instructed, as soon as they cleared the table, the staff again washed the bowls, and only moments later served them with ice cream in them. The Jewish collectors could hardly believe it! A full set of twenty-four bowls.”
That was the end of the story. My professor went on to discuss something else. I have no memory, however, of what it was—or whatever else was said—because I sat there burning: at him, and at myself for letting this all pass.
I DISCUSSED THE INCIDENT WITH NO ONE. I had no idea how Cabitman reacted. Nor did I know what the pale woman made of our teacher’s remarks, although she seemed like such an unimaginative grind that I pictured her diligently taking notes about “Jewish collecting priorities.” For a week, the anecdote and Charles Montgomery’s telling of it must have been present in my unconscious mind, but, if so, I did not realize it.
When the seminar next convened for its usual meeting, I arrived a few minutes early. So did Andy Cabitman. Mr. Montgomery was already there, but we needed to wait for the ectoplasm to arrive before beginning the actual class.
“I trust you had a good weekend, Mr. Weber,” Charles Montogomery said with unexpected courtesy.
“Oh, very good, sir,” I replied. “I visited Mr. Cabot-Mann’s family north of Boston.” I left nearly five seconds between the Cabot and the Mann to emphasize the pronunciation of the name, which was the way Charles Montgomery said it. Cabitman, meanwhile, looked at me in complete puzzlement; we had not laid eyes on each other since the previous meeting of the seminar, a week earlier.
“And do you know, sir, it was amazing,” I continued. “Mr. Cabot–Mann’s grandmother—on the Cabot side, that is—had such wonderful furniture that had been in the family for generations. You would have loved it.”
The professor focused on my words with fascination. I did not dare look at Cabitman, since I imagined he was thinking I should be hospitalized instantly.
I went on. I had in no way considered in advance what I would say; this was not part of a plan. It just came out, although by then I knew where it was going. “AND, sir, she showed me the most amazing pair of pieces she wanted to give to a museum, and asked my advice. They were a highboy and lowboy, perfectly matched. Both Queen Anne, they had the same cabriolet legs, identical aprons, exquisite fluted trim, and perfectly coordinated tiger’s eye–maple veneer, which made me think they might be from southern New Hampshire.” (New Hampshire eighteenth-century furniture, always a bit freer and more natural-looking than pieces from New York or Philadelphia, seemingly made by autodidacts, was, as it still is, by far my favorite: to Colonial style overall as Bode Miller is to other skiers.)
“They sound remarkable,” Charles Montgomery affirmed.
“And, sir, as I said, Mrs. Cabot said she was just in the process of determining what museum to give them to. She said she was deciding among three: the Met, the Boston MFA, or here, to the Yale Art Gallery.”
“Well, well, well, Mr. Weber,” the professor continued with a broad smile. “We certainly know what you must have said to that.”
“Well, sir, I suggested that she should, in fact, give them to Brandeis.”
Charles Montgomery looked at me as if I had taken out a machine gun.
“I explained to her, sir, that you, the great authority on American decorative arts, had emphasized that Jewish collectors prize matched sets. So why not honor that taste by giving her perfectly matched pieces to a Jewish institution?”
This time, I allowed myself to look at Cabitman. I was now positive he was Jewish; his face bore a look of tragic understanding. Charles Montgomery appeared as if he were ready to murder me.
“In fact, Mr. Montgomery, of course I have made up this entire story. I have not glimpsed Mr. Cabitman since our seminar met last week; I have no idea who his grandparents are. But you should know, sir, that I am Jewish, and I was deeply offended by your tale last week about Henry du Pont and the visitors from New York.”
There was a heavy moment of silence. I was trembling, and I imagine my face was flushed. Then Charles Montgomery began the seminar discussion as if nothing had happened. For the rest of the semester, he was, at best, curt to me. I passed the course with the lowest-possible grade, so that, while I still was entitled to receive my master’s from Yale, I did so with no distinction whatsoever.
IN 1978, SEVEN YEARS AFTER THE INCIDENT with Charles Montgomery, Anni Albers and the Josef Albers Foundation, for which I had begun working two years earlier, when Josef died, gave seventy-seven major paintings and a complete collection of graphic art by Josef to the Yale University Art Gallery. I worked closely with Alan Shestack, the very sympathetic gallery director, on the selection of the gift and then on the exhibition where it would be publicly presented for the first time. In the course of our months of collaboration, I told him the story. By then, I had met and married Katharine, who also knew about Charles Montgomery and me.
There was a gala dinner to celebrate the opening of the show. It was a marvelous occasion for me personally, with Anni Albers, her wonderful lawyer, Lee Eastman, his exquisite and kind wife, Monique, and my brilliant and beautiful wife all present and all in top form. Alan Shestack ended his speech and toasts with a public acknowledgment of me that brought me, at age thirty, unequivocal pride.
Shortly after Alan sat down, someone rushed up to him and delivered an urgent message in a way that made it clear some sort of major event had occurred. He then rose again, visibly shaken. He said he was sorry to announce it on such a celebrative occasion, but he had just been informed that Charles Montgomery had died at his desk a couple of hours earlier, completely unexpectedly, of a massive stroke.
A hush fell over the room. Slowly, people resumed conversation. Then, one of the old Yale Blues, a retired professor named Sumner Crosby, clanked on his water glass with his knife and stood up—partially. He was completely in his cups. Leaning on the table with his left hand, Mr. Crosby raised his wineglass, and bellowed out, with completely slurred diction, “I don’t know about Josef Albers, and I don’t know about Charles Montgomery, but let’s hear it for glorious Yale. To Yale!”
Lots of people in the room cheered, and the evening resumed its course.
IN THE EARLY 1990S, I WAS PROPOSED AND ELECTED as an associate fellow of Saybrook College at Yale. Josef Albers had also been a fellow of Saybrook, and I was delighted to be so honored.
At my first fellows’ meeting, however, my rebellious streak unexpectedly reared its head. There was a cocktail hour before dinner and the after-dinner presentation of the evening’s speaker, and I found myself, out of the blue, telling the story of what had happened in Charles Montgomery’s seminar. The person to whom I was speaking was a dean of Yale College, Prish Pierce, who had been married to a man named Cheever Tyler and was now married to a very nice fellow with whom I played squash, a psychiatrist named Marc Rubenstein. The names are telling, and I thought Prish would be fascinated by my account. She had introduced me a few minutes earlier to a woman named Ruth Lord, an elegant and willowy lady who spoke like Katharine Hepburn and who worked at the Yale Child Study Center, of which Dr. Solnit was director, and whom I instantly found immensely appealing and sympathetic, and it was to the two of them that I began to recount the story of “the Jewish collectors” and Henry du Pont.
I was not far into the telling when I realized that Prish looked panic-stricken, while Ruth appeared to be hanging on to every word with daunting attentiveness. I knew from Prish’s face that something was very wrong, but there was no stopping now that I had started, although I kept the tale brief.
By the time I was done, Prish was pale and silent. Ruth, standing tall, then said, quite simply but very slowly and deliberately, with a lovely smile, “I have to tell you—that—Henry du Pont—was—my—dad.”
I started to say I had not meant to upset her, but she immediately put me at my ease, and more than. Ruth, grinning, simply said, “My father was many things, and snobby in a lot of ways, but he was not anti-Semitic. But don’t think for a minute that that in any way contradicts your story. I had to put up with that social-climbing Charles Montgomery for years, and while my sister and other people always acted as if he was divine, I could not stand the man. And until now I have stayed silent about him. My deah, that is exactly the sort of thing Charlie Montgomery would tell people—because it is how his mind worked. May I hug you?”
I cannot say that I have reconstituted Ruth’s words perfectly, but she became, starting that evening, a wonderful friend, as she remained for the rest of her life. She asked me if I would mind if she told the story to her daughter Pauline. Since then, on numerous occasions, when we were at dinner parties together, and even at the odd event at Saybrook, she asked me to retell the story of how she instantly considered me a close friend. She always laughed with utter delight at the odd confluence of events and at my having given the one-two punch to a man who was the bane of her existence.