Читать книгу While Rome Burns - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 7
ОглавлениеHOW such oddly assorted char-
acters as Damon Runyon and a
certain celebrated Nazi became
involved in one pursuit of a will-
o’-the-wisp picture.
THE SACRED GROVE
Once upon a time, a great architect sat on the floor and spread out before me the plans for an apartment house that was to be a tower of copper and glass. One could picture the homing householder catching sight of it from afar, an opalescent shaft agleam and winking in the afternoon sunlight. It was when the architect added casually that he himself would design each interior, even unto the uttermost ashtray, and permit each tenant to bring with him only his own piano, that I made a mulish mental note not to take a flat in that iridescent tower. For it seems to me that the loveliest product of an unrestrained, unsubservient decorator is, as Edna Ferber once said of Switzerland, beautiful but dumb, with just about as much character as a birthday cake.
I would not mind a home of my own being an affront to every other eye so long as it was full of the accidentals of my own life. I doubt if I am any longer equal to such spasms of quaintness as animated young J. M. Barrie when, more than forty years ago, he was furbishing his first flat in London and used to paste on the back of each piece of furniture a copy of the newspaper or magazine article which had paid for it. But I do think that a man who is at least half-full of years is missing something of the salt of life if every stick and patch on which his lamplight falls does not tell him sad or funny stories of where and what he has been.
Surely it is so even with one’s pictures. My own lean gallery, from which one thrilling Utrillo has gone back home, to which another has just come for a visit and an early Noel Coward for good, and which is now even aspiring to shelter some day, if only for a few memorable weeks, the inexplicable magic of a serenely powerful O’Keeffe—my own gallery, I say, has pictures which no one else would take as a gift because they could not mean to anyone else what they happen to mean to me. In that sense, I have one fading photograph which I would not swap for a Vermeer. And in that sense, I cherish with an especial affection a certain Böcklin, even though it represents a kind of ham painting I have not enjoyed for years. You are doubtless familiar with it. It is the one with the file of white-clad priests emerging from a bosky dell to kneel at a Druidical altar. It is, mind you, only a reproduction, for the original, which that sentimental Helvetian painted in Florence fifty years ago, still hangs in the gallery at Basel—and may go on hanging there for all of me. It is the reproduction I want—this reproduction.
It was in 1916 that I entered upon the long train of inquiry, chance, skullduggery, and blandishment which finally brought this Böcklin to my door and hung it on my wall; there to remain until death, bankruptcy, or the dawn of Communism do us part. One fine afternoon of a day in that year, when I happened to be solvent, I went into a picture store on Fifth Avenue and asked the clerk there if they had a print of “The Sacred Grove.” A large and somewhat tumultuous-looking young man who was tending shop at the time said, “Ah, ‘Der heilige Hain,’ ” and brushed me aside, a trifle summarily, I thought, as if I were perversely asking the impossible. Well, if they didn’t have it in stock, how long, I persisted doggedly, would it take them to get me one? This innocent query wrung from him a very roar of displeasure.
That, remember, was in the time of strain when the American people were trying to hold on to their neutrality much as a voyager in the English Channel tries to hold on to his breakfast. With my perceptions sharpened by years of journalism, I had realized at once that the young art-dealer was not precisely what would have been called pro-Ally. If, however, I not only left his shop hastily but thereafter stayed away from it, it was not so much because I felt alienated by his failure to share my own wartime prejudices, but because, after all, it did seem improbable that, by further traffic with him, I would acquire what I had come for. Indeed, being one of little faith, I saw in those dark days no prospect of my ever owning “The Sacred Grove” at all.
Yet two years later, when, after America had taken to shipping men as well as munitions, I was ordered to Paris from my lowly post in Brittany, what should I see looking out at me enigmatically from a shop window in the Rue Drouot but a print of “The Sacred Grove”? Surely this was a sign unto me. Then and there I decided to buy it, even though I would need another sign to tell me how to get the money for the purpose, and even though I had not the slightest notion what I should do with the pesky picture when I got it. For the most part, impulses to mural decoration in the A.E.F. found expression in covers of La Vie Parisienne pinned on barrack walls. The welfare agencies, though addicted to culture and dedicated to ameliorating the bleak life of the enlisted man, had not yet reached the point of insuring to each soldier his own personal art gallery.
The purely financial aspect of the problem was cleared up a few nights later on the floor of the Yale rooms at the University Union. Among the participants or the kibitzers of that crap game were F.P.A., J. T. Winterich of The Colophon, Lee Wilson Dodd, and John Erskine. I remember the details of this contest not only because of its singularly pleasing outcome but because it was interrupted by an air raid which plunged the game (and, incidentally, the rest of Paris) into impenetrable darkness. As the lights went out, each winner flung himself shrewdly down upon his pile of francs, but Captain Adams, having been recently relieved by the fall of the dice from the oppressive burden of private property, was free to put on his helmet, drift out onto the balcony, and cravenly murmur “Kamerad! Kamerad!” in the general direction of the heavens. Owing, perhaps, to the shriek of the sirens, the spatter of anti-aircraft guns, and the occasional boom of a bomb falling in the city, this propitiatory effort went unnoticed by those to whom it was addressed. According to the heroic press next day, the damage done by the raid of the night before had been negligible, but I can testify that at least one building was completely demolished. I can so testify because when, with pockets agreeably stuffed with francs, I hurried next morning to the Rue Drouot, I discovered that on the night before, in the middle of the air raid, my picture shop had gone out of business in a big way. One German victory after another. I was minded to say with Shylock: “I never felt it until now.”
Even for the sake of the story, I will not pretend that this minor misadventure stiffened my will to victory. But I do remember feeling a faint if unjustifiable glow of personal triumph when, on a day in early December, after the American troops had marched to the Rhine and we were all savoring the experience of strolling unchallenged through the streets of Coblenz, there, looking out at me from a shop window, I saw a print of “Der heilige Hain” as ever was. Five minutes later, Damon Runyon, himself astroll in the thoroughfares of the bridgehead, found me still standing in front of the shop, staring pensively at a will-o’-the-wisp which seemed bent on both pursuing and eluding me, for the price tag was in full view and I had just remembered that in my jeans was no money at all. I did not even have that which was even more acceptable as currency in the Rhineland just then—a cake of soap. Indeed, all the soap supply of our outfit was gone, and our dreamy old mess sergeant was even then languishing in the brig, awaiting trial on the charge that he had given it all to sundry matrons in Trier in return for favors unspecified in the indictment.
The kindly Runyon was so puzzled by my anachronistic absorption in the art of the late Arnold Böcklin that I was forced to tell him the story just as I have told it to you, and then work up a fairly convincing start of grateful surprise when he walked grandly into the shop and bought the picture.
“Fröhliche Weihnachten,” said the lavish old linguist, as he put it into my hands. “Und,” I replied, “ein glückliches Neujahr.” I rather had him there.
I shall not describe the immense amount of shenanigan involved in getting that print to Paris, beyond saying that it made the journey by ambulance, hidden under a blanket which also, by the way, concealed the tremulous person of the aforesaid mess sergeant, who had escaped from his guard and was starting A.W.O.L. for parts unknown. Nor shall I tell you how, against all the laws of the A.E.F., the picture went from a French post office to a guardian appointed in New York. I need only describe how, myself back in New York the following year, I regained custody of it and, with the print still rolled in its cardboard mailer, hurried around to the nearest picture-framer. This was a little place in Fifty-seventh Street across from Carnegie Hall, and blandly in charge as I walked in was the once distraught young picture-dealer of yesteryear. This time he was all affability, and at the sight of me he delved deep into what must be a prodigious memory.
“Ah,” he cried, “the man who likes Böcklin! Which one was it? Yes, yes, ‘Der heilige Hain.’ Ah, well, my friend, I can get it for you now.”
I suppose I derived some slight malicious pleasure from unrolling my picture and sticking it under his nose. He was properly astonished.
“Well, well,” he said, “where did you get it?”
When I answered “In Coblenz,” he suppressed a visible and creditable impulse to tear it up and throw it in my face, but the rest of the transaction was carried out in moody silence. Anyway, he did frame it for me.
All of which I remembered when in the spring of 1933 I came upon his photograph in the rotogravures. He was seated at an elegant desk, signing things furiously. Beside him stood some minor functionary in such an obsequious posture as must have given him pleasure to watch. From the caption I learned that he was a Harvard man named Hanfstaengl and that he had just become confidential secretary to some German politician whose name, as I recall, was Hitler.
