BERNARD BERENSON

The Italian Painters of the Renaissance

1952 EDITION

AFTER THE DEATH OF POPPY in February 1953, an immediate question for Alan, my father, was what to do about me. The obvious solution was to send me for the entire school holidays to stay with Poppy’s mother, my grandmother, called Mitzi by some and Mary by others. Exploiting every form of theft from legal chicanery to strong-arm Gestapo squads carrying the loot off in armored cars, the Nazis had dispossessed her wherever she had property. Having spent the war in Canada, she was unsure where to live in Europe outside German-speaking countries. In the lobby of the Hotel Excelsior in Florence she overheard a conversation about a desirable property for sale in Arcetri, a cluster of old houses that is virtually a suburb of Florence but whose olive orchards and cultivated strips have the look of traditional countryside. San Martino was a farmhouse, a casa colonica done up as a villa between the wars. The seller, a baroness, judged it prudent to return to her native Germany. No sooner had Mitzi moved in than hopeful Communists painted a hammer and sickle on the portal. Poppy did not live long enough to visit San Martino, but she imagined the Communists dispossessing Mitzi, just as the Nazis had done, and maybe even slitting her throat. “I’d like to see them try” was Mitzi’s response to this warning.

Alan was extremely attentive to Mitzi. His letters to her were regular bulletins, and he addressed her on the first page invariably as “Darling.” In a characteristic gesture of largesse, he had bought a second-hand Bentley, and proposed that we drive it to San Martino. On the way there, we could take in the Pont du Gard or the Roman remains at Nimes and Orange, but in the years to come, he said, I would surely have plenty of opportunities for classical sightseeing. Part of his task as editor of the Times Literary Supplement was to be in touch with famous old writers, and with them it was a case of now or never. Architectural monuments would always be there, human monuments would not. He arranged that we were to call in on Somerset Maugham in the South of France, Max Beerbohm in Rapallo and Percy Lubbock near Lerici, where Shelley had drowned.

The fourth famous old person was Bernard Berenson. Some years before, my grandmother had invited me to accompany her to Bruges and I could recall museums with some of Memling’s dough-faced portraits. My housemaster at Eton had taken several of us around the National Gallery. Otherwise I knew little or nothing about art or art history and had no special feeling for either. Until I was in Florence, I had never heard of Berenson though he was then at the height of his fame. Every door was open to him. He had identified great artists, authenticated their works and been involved in the selling of masterpieces to the best collections, in the process building his own fortune. His library was one of the finest in Europe, and according to rumor he had read all the books in it. Mitzi and BB were two of a kind, both assuming that their reputation and social success put them on an equal footing with the men and women in the brilliant aristocratic and literary circles in which they moved. After her first husband’s death, Mitzi married an Englishman and through him acquired the new name and identity of Mary Wooster. BB had been born in Lithuania as Bernhard Valvrojenski, but made his way in New York and Paris and Berlin with a measure of assimilation as Bernard Berenson. Mitzi and BB both converted to Christianity. I was then seventeen, and could not have had any realistic idea of the psychological pressures or the experiences that drove people like these to be so fearful about their Jewish origins.

Even a teenager like me was invited to lunch with Berenson and expected to refer to him as BB. We drove across the Arno to Settignano. At the top of a wooded hill, I Tatti seemed an imposing country house. BB was in a wheelchair in the garden. Small, neat and very tidily dressed, he had the sharply defined features of someone accustomed to command. A trim white beard added a touch of informality. Courtiers came to pay homage, the guests, ourselves included, fussed around him. We sat down to lunch about twenty strong.

BB had put me on his left, and early in the meal he asked what I was doing at school. I had just been admitted to the Eton College Literary Society, and I explained to him that the members met once a week in one of the headmaster’s rooms and took it in turns to read something they’d mugged up and written, usually on some safely conventional subject. And what will you be writing about? BB asked. The Norman Kings of Sicily had been my first choice but they were confusing, and the Dreyfus affair was simpler. I had read one book about it, and I also was aware that Mitzi’s husband and my grandfather, Eugène Fould, had been cut out of the social life of Paris on the grounds that all Jews couldn’t help having treason in their nature and were guilty like Dreyfus. The name of the Marquis de Jaucourt had come down to me as the one and only person in high society who had crossed the Place Vendôme to shake my grandfather’s hand. BB turned red with anger. He raised his voice. Everyone else was silent. A passage in his diaries Sunset and Twilight gives an impression of the passion in his voice at that lunch. “I lived through the affaire, and was in Paris off and on through most of it. Anti-Semitism was rampant. Paris was reeking and drenched and soaked with it, and most Academicians and other writers were anti.… High society rabidly anti-Jewish. Never have I encountered such expressions of hatred, of loathing, as I used to hear against Jews from the mouths of Parisians.” From the far end of the table, someone whom I’ve always and perhaps mistakenly thought was Hugh Trevor-Roper, broke in with some distracting question.

Unintentionally, I had said something about the condition of Jews in general, and him in particular. Jews were rounded up and deported in September 1943 when Italy dropped out of the war, and German Nazism became the order of the day. Although Berenson was among the best-known Jewish personalities anywhere in the world at that time, he was at the mercy of murderous thugs. Friends spirited him away from I Tatti to safety in the house of the Marchese Filippo Serlupi, who had diplomatic immunity as Ambassador of San Marino to the Holy See. At the end of the war, BB was able to pick up life at I Tatti at the point where Italian Fascists and German Nazis had compelled him to abandon it. The air of normality was deceptive. Next to him was this schoolboy who didn’t grasp that a dining room full of guests with silver on the table and old masters on the walls was all very well but was the symptom of an unhappiness too deep to cure.

In the course of my career, several publishers and friends have suggested that I write a life of BB. His conflicts of interest and the ambiguities of his character are beyond resolution. It’s trivial but still indicative that after that lunch he gave me a copy of The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, the book that made him famous, and whose dust jacket spells his name Bernhard, although he signed the title page “with the best wishes of Bernard.” Of course it was now out of the question to write a school essay about the Dreyfus affair. Alan came up with the suggestion that I should give an account of the great men I’d been introduced to on our journey. He proposed the working title of “Four Human Monuments.”

Back at Eton, I spent my spare time writing up these encounters. An uncomfortable silence fell over the room when I finished reading this first attempt of mine at journalism. Nobody had a comment. Robert Birley, then the headmaster and a kindly man with a lot of abstruse knowledge at his fingertips, at last said that it wasn’t done to write about one’s friends, and besides, if they were famous it was snobbish.