IN 1923 WORTHINGTON WHITSON had been living in Florence for almost a quarter of a century, and his tall trim figure, fine white hair, wrinkled brown face and cold blue eyes made up an image almost as familiar to street vendors as the statues in the Loggia dei Lanzi. His daily walk from his small bachelor’s apartment in a fourteenth-century palazzo on the Via Tornabuoni, across the Arno and as far as the Pitti, was something that could be counted on like the mail or newspaper. His visits to galleries and antiquaries, like his lunches, were apt to be solitary, but in the evenings he was a great diner-out and a favorite extra man among the widowed ladies, titled and untitled, of the expatriate community.
Whitson was considered all things that an elegant New York gentleman of the Mauve Decade should have been: poised, articulate, grave, gentle, with exquisite manners and a positive erudition on all questions of social precedence. And he had been, too, in his day, something more than what his younger critics sneeringly called a walking book of etiquette; he had been, for a decade at least, the “gray eminence” behind Mrs. Darius Slocum and the acknowledged arbiter elegantiarum of Fifth Avenue and Newport. A world war and new ways might have caused a new generation to sneer at such things, but in Florence there were still enough who remembered that vanished world to compose a society in which such an anachronism as Whitson could comfortably flourish.
If Whitson had a fault, it was a venial one. He tended to wax a touch boring on the subject of the degeneration of American manners, even in a community not famous for its enthusiasm for Yankee ways.
“Don’t let old Worthington get going on the subject of New York society,” a hostess would murmur to a newcomer. “He gets too angry to be funny. Of course, it’s all sour grapes. A young writer called Alistair Temple persuaded Euphemia Slocum to give him the sack. But he fancies himself Napoleon on St. Helena!”
It was true that Whitson regarded his Florentine residence in the light of a political exile. He liked to consider himself as the Tory minister to a brownstone queen who had been hounded from office by a cabal of radicals, impatient of law and order. For the noble program that he had tried to institute had been nothing less than to establish the ground rules for New York society: what families were to form its base; how new ones were to be admitted; what events should be considered primary; what clubs should be favored; even what clothes and decorations should be worn and on what occasions. He had organized a group of ladies, under the leadership of Euphemia Slocum, to give his doctrine the force of law. And for a few years it had looked as if he might actually succeed.
It still, as late as 1923, seemed to him a lofty ideal. Why should the biggest city of the New World, the leading commercial metropolis of the globe, not have an ordered and dignified oligarchy to set the pace in manners and morals, in the beautification of life, in the encouragement of the arts and in the establishment of a style of living that would offer a fitting reward for the successful? Was this not preferable to the alternative of a vulgar mob of crude speculators with fat, bejeweled spouses, pushing their way in everywhere, building crazy gingerbread castles and making themselves contemptible to European eyes? Well, that was what New York society had become. And yet there were people who seemed content with this, people who regarded Whitson as a dreamer, a fusspot, an old maid, an ass. Such was the fate of any American male who dared concern himself with aught but the making of money.
It was only after the war that Whitson had become a friend of Bernard Berenson. Of course, they had often met, and the diminutive but dapper art connoisseur with the grave, beautiful eyes had treated the older man with his invariable quiet courtesy and charm, but there had been little in Whitson’s story to arouse more than Berenson’s mild amusement. “B.B.” enjoyed gossip about the expatriate community, and Whitson always had a succulent anecdote for him. But it was not until the hierophant of the Italian Renaissance had read the novels of Alistair Temple, at the urging of his friend Edith Wharton, and discovered the intimate connection between Whitson and Temple, that his real curiosity was aroused.
“I had not known, my friend,” Berenson told Whitson at a tea party in Fiesole, “that you were acquainted with that great genius of American letters. I have recently been reading his exquisite Paradise to Come. To have written that at forty-five, and then have simply died! Think of it. But perhaps he had done his thing, had told his tale. Perhaps three novels were all we were to have had, like the seven masterpieces of Pisanello.”
“You really rank Temple that high?” Whitson asked in surprise. “His books were not so well esteemed when they were published. I thought people generally found him prolix and obscure.”
“He was, perhaps, ahead of his time. What was he like?”
Whitson gazed thoughtfully from the terrace where they were standing down over the cascading vineyards of the hillside. Then he glanced across to the brown panorama of Florence.
“He was damp,” he said at last.
“Damp?”
“Moist. He had thick, black, glossy hair that seemed wet and big, brown, watery eyes. He had a way of standing too close to you and looking at you gravely as he uttered some absurdly flattering remark. And I’m afraid he had bad breath.”
“Dear me! I thought they hated that in America. You mean he wasn’t a social success?”
“He was a good deal taken up by certain families on the fringe of society. But no doubt I am prejudiced. He treated me badly. In fact, he was a kind of Benedict Arnold. I refer to a traitor in our revolutionary war.”
“You forget, my friend, that I, too, am American.”
“I’m sorry, B.B.! You always strike me as belonging to all nations.”
The mild motion of Berenson’s hand waived the apology. But his curiosity about Temple was evidently strong enough to make him persistent. He now actually offered himself as a guide for a morning’s tour of the Uffizi and as a host for luncheon afterwards if Whitson would agree to discuss his former friend. Whitson hesitated. He well knew the value of such a bid.
“Could we make it the Pitti?”
Berenson seemed amused. “You regard that as the superior collection?”
“It has more portraits.”
“Ah, it is the art of representing the physiognomy that you prefer?”
Whitson decided to be bold. He knew that the great man was laughing at him, but he didn’t care. Information was what he was after, and this was his chance. Berenson would never make such an offer twice.
“I like portraits of princes. Of peers. Of great people.”
“You are concerned with the mystery of power! Good, my friend. I like a man to know what he is after in art. The Pitti is just the place for us.”
They spent two hours there the very next morning. Berenson descanted fascinatingly on the intrigues and ambitions of the Medici, the Strozzi, the Orsini, before their bejeweled and bedizened likenesses. Whitson knew enough to keep quiet. But when they had paused for several minutes before a portrait of a woman by Pontormo about which the great critic seemed to have no comment, he ventured at last to ask who the subject was.
“We do not know, other than that she was a lady of the highest rank.”
“How can you tell that?”
Berenson gave him an inscrutable look. “Because, for perhaps the first time in Florentine painting, the artist seems more concerned with rendering his sitter’s social position than her personality.”
“Perhaps her personality was her social position.”
“My friend, you are profound. But it still marks the beginning of modern vulgarity.”
At luncheon, at a carefully chosen restaurant, on a terrace with a view of the Palazzo Vecchio, Berenson was silent as he ate his spaghetti. He chewed each mouthful for a good two minutes, took a long sip of Chianti, and then wiped his lips carefully with the napkin secured under his collar. When he spoke at last, it was to ask his guest gravely what he expected to glean from the Florentine portraitists. Whitson leaned forward eagerly in his chair.
“I want to find out why painters and sculptors who made their reputations by illustrating the lives of the rich and powerful are adored in Florence and despised in New York!” As B.B. simply stared at him, perhaps even wonderingly, Whitson continued emphatically: “Michelangelo could turn an idiotic syphilitic duke of Urbino into a glorious brooding warrior, and everyone shrieked in acclaim. But if Sargent transformed some bosomy Mrs. Stuyvesant into a splendid Clytemnestra, people called him a society sycophant. Why are the feasts of the Medici great pageants and the balls of the Vanderbilts only ostentation?”
“May we not simply suppose that the earlier era produced the greater geniuses?”
“But why is the artist whose subject is society any better than that society?”
“Better?”
“Profounder. Deeper. More estimable.”
“Because he must see it in a different light. He illuminates it.”
“Ah, but does he? Because he pretends to spoof it or satirize it or condemn it? Could he do any of those things if he weren’t basically fascinated by it? As much so as the crudest social climber? Didn’t Rigaud and Nattier adore their princes and princesses? Didn’t Thackeray and Proust—and doesn’t even your friend Mrs. Wharton—fundamentally make love to the society they pretended to criticize?”
Berenson now abruptly united their interests. “Is Alistair Temple the artist you are thinking about? Did he care about society?”
“To his dying gasp! There never was such an ardent climber!”
“And that is why you resent his great reputation?”
“Yes! Alistair Temple has passed into legend as a genius, while I remain a silly ass. Why? Because he amused himself by pushing his way into society and then making fun of it, while I was breaking my foolish heart to give it some kind of dignity? Because he was sneering while I was building? Yet he is called the creator!”
It was May, and the air on the restaurant terrace was velvety. Berenson raised his eyes to the dome of the cathedral appearing over the block across the way and seemed to reflect.
“I think this may be the moment for you to tell me about Temple,” he suggested. “You have finished your meal. I am sorry to be so slow at eating, but it will give you the chance to talk without interruption.”
Whitson’s agitation began to settle as he looked back in memory on his old betrayal, and after a few moments he was calm enough. Berenson’s detachment was soothing. Whitson began.
“Alistair Temple came of a respectable but undistinguished Brooklyn family. He had inherited a small sum of money whose income might have just sustained a bachelor of modest needs in a boarding house. But he chose instead to blow it. He figured it would last him three years. He called on me at the Patroons Club, where I then lived, on the strength of a letter from an uncle of his who had been my Columbia classmate, and, in perfect seriousness, expounded his plan. He wanted to ‘be in society’ for the period that his money would afford him the proper clothes and lodging and the means of traveling to the grandest country houses.
“‘And what do you propose to do when your money is gone, young man?’ I asked him in astonishment, for his disregard in this respect shocked me even more than his assumption that he could get into society.
“‘Oh, I shall let fate take care of that. How many people know what they want today, let alone tomorrow? I at least am very firm about what I want today.’”
“I like that,” Berenson intervened, nodding. “I like a young man to have a plan. And he attached himself to you, did he? He became your disciple in the task of reforming society?”
“Precisely. I even found myself becoming very fond of him. He was a kind of adopted nephew. He glided swiftly enough through every door that I opened for him, but he always looked back respectfully to show me that he knew to whom he owed it. And his manners were good, if a bit unctuous. There was sympathy in his dark brown eyes that made him attractive to older women. He had a proper respect for detail. He would call on me every morning at my club to help me with my plans, like a good secretary. He was patient, industrious, accurate. There were moments, I admit, when I suspected that he might be smiling at me, smiling perhaps at my whole world, but I thought at least it was a kindly smile.”
“And it wasn’t?”
Whitson became very grave at this. “B.B., the man was simply planning treason!”
“You mean he was going to ‘write you up’?”
“No. I will not say that I ever found myself pilloried in his novels, though, mind you, I had a hard time getting through them. He might have assassinated my character, I suppose, in one of those interminable paragraphs that put me to sleep. But no, I do not accuse him of using people as models. Unless, of course, they’re not recognizable!”
“He was too good a writer for that.”
“You think him a great novelist.” Whitson shrugged. “Very well. Let us concede it. Personally, I don’t think there’s a live man or woman in any of his books. Dressmaker’s models, that’s all. But pass that. What Temple did was something much worse than making sport of me. He destroyed my work! He aborted my great scheme for society. And he did so deliberately, fiendishly, for no purpose other than his own amusement!”
Berenson’s gaze was serene. “You mean he constructed a scenario for his own inspiration? He modeled a plot out of real life? And then never used it? How interesting. Perhaps you provided the scaffolding, my friend, which he had later to remove.”
“Or the poor old tarpaulin that he yanked off his completed statue,” Whitson retorted with a snort. “That would be more like it.”
“Tell me what he did.”
“It was at the time of the great Smedley ball. Mrs. Ezra Smedley was a very determined woman. She had commissioned a great palace by Hunt on Fifth Avenue—you remember it, B.B., it was a copy of Azay-le-Rideau . . . ?”
“Ah, yes. And she’s since become a collector. She bought that false Mantegna from Prince Loredan.”
“And sued him about it. She’s not even a good sport. But anyway. She was determined to take New York society by storm. With her great housewarming, a costume ball. I knew Mrs. Smedley and even rather liked her. She had spirit and wit. But it wasn’t her time yet. She needed a couple more years of polishing. A few more snubs. There could be no idea of Mrs. Smedley inviting Mrs. Slocum to her ball, as the latter had never called on her, and I advised Mrs. Slocum not to do so until the ball was over and we had had a chance to assess its success. My illustrious patroness seemed to be entirely of my persuasion. Until events took an unfortunate turn. It appeared that her daughter, Miss Abigail Slocum, without my approval had been secretly rehearsing a quadrille for the Smedley ball and had set her heart on performing it. Mrs. Smedley discovered this and saw her chance. She let it be known, by sundry remarks dropped in sundry places, that she regretted that Miss Slocum’s artistic efforts were being thrown away. For how could she possibly send a card for her ball to a young lady whose mother had never called on her?”
“Blackmail.” Berenson touched his fingertips together. “Surely the great Mrs. Slocum did not stoop to pay the ransom.”
“B.B., you don’t know what such women are! Under the stiff stance, the whalebone, the eagle eye, the glittering parure, there often beats the heart of a craven. Mrs. Slocum was afraid of the world, afraid of criticism, afraid of her own daughter. Afraid of everyone, I suppose, but my own poor self. She agreed with all my arguments about standing fast and promised to be guided by them. But she nevertheless slipped off in her carriage to leave her card at Azay-le-Rideau. How Eliza Smedley’s heart must have quickened as she watched from behind the curtains of her parlor the maroon-coated equerry delivering that fatal bit of pasteboard to her impassive butler on the stoop below! New York society—or should I say the hope for a New York society—simply fell to pieces at that moment!”
“I see.” Berenson shook his head. “Had Marc Antony not been drunk the night before Philippi, had Cleopatra’s nose been a half-inch longer—our fate, dear Worthington, depends on such trivia. But how did Temple come into it?”
“He was the engineer. It was he who organized that wretched quadrille. It was he who induced the uninvited Miss Slocum to take part in it. And it was he who put the idea in Mrs. Smedley’s head of what use she might make of it!”
“Because she bribed him?”
“No! Maybe. It doesn’t matter. He did it because he wanted to divert himself by creating a drama in New York society. A great drama!”
“How do you know that?”
“He told me so! He had the inimitable gall to throw it in my very face when I accused him of betraying me. He even went so far as to say that he had thought I might be amused by it, too.”
“And you were not.” Berenson shook his head sadly. “No, I am sure you were not. And did his little game really affect your position as arbiter of New York society?”
“It simply ruined me. It made me ridiculous. My position had always been precarious. It depended on the preservation of my favor with a single dowager. And Euphemia Slocum cast me off like an old shoe, as soon as she understood that the truth would make her look like a poltroon. I had to pay the price of her panic. It was she, she cried to the world, who had decided, against my crabby conservatism, that the time had come for the Smedleys. A great new era had started. Everyone who had been denied Mrs. Slocum’s door in the preceding decade now sharpened a knife for my throat. Like President Wilson, I was ‘too proud to fight.’ I retired to Florence!”
“And Temple? Did he not retire as well?”
“Yes, but only because his money ran out. He went to live with a blind old aunt in Trenton and wrote his three novels.”
“Wrote them and died.”
“So it seemed.”
“And you care for none of them?”
“Well, what is there to care about? What happens in Paradise to Come? Nothing at all.”
“Exactly. Nothing at all. Or perhaps everything. A young lady of fabulous fortune and ancient lineage is pursued by fortune hunters in New York in the nineties. She evades them all and finally marries a plain, dull, middle-aged gentleman of no particular means. She devotes herself utterly to his happiness.” Berenson paused to dramatize his conclusion. “Her reward is to be robbed and deserted!”
“How can you call that ‘everything’?” Whitson protested. “It’s the stupidest tale ever told. And why would she be rich? Those old families were just as apt to be poor.”
“Perhaps Temple was not concerned with social realism. We never really know where Bessie’s fortune comes from or even what her family’s house is like. We know only that it is very ugly and filled with beautiful things. I think Temple saw the old New York families and the new as basically alike. Both live in the same kind of monstrous edifices where even the finest assemblage of art objects amounts to a clutter.”
“Ugly houses and no plot. A most readable book! And what about the characters? Are there any? Bessie, the heroine—can you picture her?”
Berenson half-closed his eyes as he again touched his fingertips together. “Not in facial detail, like a lady in a Ghirlandaio portrait. But in the mass, yes, splendid, like a great, pale figure in a Piero della Francesca. Or perhaps even like one of those large female figures in a white tunic, against a plain red beach or a flat blue sky—a sort of classic background—that Picasso has been doing recently. Grave, unfathomable, awesome, yet strangely moving. We see Bessie only in her effect on others. That is the magic of Temple’s glorious tapestry of prose. The mercenary characters, the ‘poor’ ones, glint like gold in the dark, while she encompasses them in a kind of cerulean sky. It is as if riches in New York were being equated with virtue, and poverty with vice. Why? I don’t profess to know. There may be some kind of allegory there, or myth. All I’m sure of is that I am touched to the heart with a pervading sense of Bessie’s beauty of soul.” He sighed. “I find reading Temple a unique aesthetic experience.”
“But was his soul beautiful?”
“You must distinguish, my friend, between an artist’s individual personality and his artistic one. The former has little to do with his art. Shakespeare is supposed to have been a lovable man; Wagner is known to have been often hateful. The matter is irrelevant to Hamlet and Tristan. The artistic personality is the creator. And that is something totally detached from the vulgar appetites, from greed, from Mammon, from snobbishness and social ambition. Alistair Temple the man may have been everything you think. But Alistair Temple the artist had not the smallest ounce of worldliness. Of that I am convinced.”
They had finished their meal now, and together they commenced a slow stroll across the Piazza della República. Berenson had taken a crust of bread with him, and he proceeded to scatter crumbs for the pigeons. Whitson watched him uneasily.
“So you really think, B.B., that I have known one great artist?”
“I do.”
“And can I claim, do you think, that I helped him? That I provided him with raw material? I should like to think that my existence has not been totally useless.”
“Who knows?” Berenson stood still for a moment and let his eyelids droop. “Perhaps your brave vision of yourself as the architect of a reconstituted society was the seed of his portrait of Bessie!”
“Are you laughing at me?”
Berenson’s eyes opened with a snap. “Yes!” he exclaimed, with something like impatience, and headed to where his limousine was waiting.