A Miscellany (Revised) Page 3
To the vocal gesture which preceded grammar Lachaise is completely sensitive. Consequently, in his enormous and exquisite way, Lachaise negates OF with IS. To say that the 1918 exhibition at the Bourgeois Galleries drew from the “critics” more statements of ungentle unintelligence, and from the gallery-going public more expressions of enthusiastic ignorance, than any one-man show of sculpture previously held on the Avenue, is but to do justice to all concerned, including Monsieur Bourgeois. The Elevation, which, as we have already noted, occasioned, in the case of Mr. McBride, the sole unbiased reaction of “criticism” to this exhibition, was responsible for, on the one hand, more unclever exasperation and on the other more fulsome ecstasy than all the rest of the show put together. Lest any should accuse us of hyperbole, we will quote a sample of each “point of view” and let the reader decide for himself whether or not one is more incredibly meaningless than the other.
“It might be a satire on the stout woman who pinches her waist and wears high heels that stand her on her toes for life, or it might be an idealization of her. The answer is in the point of view. Mr. Lachaise is himself not very definite on this score. If it is a satire, it is curious that he should employ the figure as a motif so often. Mr. Lachaise is one of those modernists who hark back to the serenity of Greece and forward to new rhythms which shall be more active.
“She is the mother of men, with the scorn of wisdom and dominance on her brow. She is an unathletic—a queen bee-Amazon, different both from the ‘clinging vine’ or the pioneer companion that her mothers were. She is the creature toward which creation groaneth. She is man’s old ‘delicious burden,’ buoyed by his reverence like a mist above the ground.”
Perhaps it should be stated that one “critic,” instead of mentioning The Elevation by name, presented the world with a synopsis of what he, she or it is pleased to call “modernism.”
“One regrets that an artist so evidently serious in his aims should sacrifice too often to the extraordinary cult of ugliness which seems to have taken the place of beauty on the altars of ‘modernism’ à outrance. Strength, power, individuality, all of these qualities, must be conceded to Mr. Lachaise, but the tendency to emphasize and glorify the unsightly because it is supposed to represent force and have some deep symbolic meaning, can only lead to the apotheosis of ugliness, a consummation scarcely to be desired, even by the most ardent exponents of modernism.”
The reason why all official and unofficial “criticism” OF The Elevation fails, and fails so obviously as in the specimens quoted, is this: The Elevation is not a noun, not a “modern statue,” not a statue OF Something or Some One BY a man named Gaston Lachaise—but a complete tactile self-orchestration, a magnificently conjugation largeness, an IS. The Elevation may not be declined; it should not and cannot be seen; it must be heard: heard as a super-Wagnerian poem of flesh, a gracefully colossal music. In mistaking The Elevation for a noun the “critics” did something superhumanly asinine. In creating The Elevation as a verb Lachaise equalled the dreams of the very great artists of all time.
On the ground that it leads us to a consideration of Lachaise’s new show at the Bourgeois Galleries, which event is after all the excuse for this article, we ask the reader’s pardon for boring him with a final specimen of “criticism.” The author is a distinctly official “critic,” Mr. Guy Pène du Bois of the Evening Post, of whom it may fairly be said that he succeeds in taking himself more seriously than all the other members of his very defunct profession put together. He is speaking of the exhibition of American sculptures before mentioned.
“Indeed, in the instance of many of these exhibits, when one has said that they are amusing, full credit has been done to their creators. This is entirely true neither in the instance of Lachaise nor of Diederich. It is true that they are of the ultra-fashionables of sculpture, but it is also true that they are more than this—that they are exceedingly intelligent men, endowed, moreover, with more than the usual allotment of talent. Just now they reach for a very small and very particular audience, one jaded by experience in art, and demanding certain definite shocks, rare expressions, in order to be aroused. Lachaise’s figure of a woman is a real contribution to the so slowly growing gallery of portraits of her.”
Unless all signs err, Mr. Guy Pène du Bois is due to get—or should we say has already got, since by the time THE DIAL appears the new Bourgeois show will be in full swing—what may without exaggeration be called the surprise of his “critical” life, when he looks over the menu of the latest Lachaise exhibition. For in contrast to the previous show, in which the titles (Rhythme, Anéantissement, etc.) were chosen by Monsieur Bourgeois, the elements of the present show are, as we trust, to be named by Lachaise himself; in which case the “critic” of the Evening Post will find himself confronted by at least two titles which not only knock his “reach for a very small and very particular audience, one jaded by experience in art, and demanding certain definite shocks, rare expressions, in order to be aroused” thesis into a cocked hat, but will, we are confident, give him an attack of goose flesh into the bargain—id est, Love and Home. And why? because while any one except Lachaise might stand accused of insincerity in applying these stand-bys of morality to work whose inherent—which is to say ultimate—significance is purely for aesthetics, Lachaise has never stood and never will stand, apropos either his personality or his work, accused of this particular thing. Were it possible so to accuse him, Mr. Guy Pène du Bois would in our opinion be incurring considerable personal danger in so doing. It looks to us as though the gentleman is in the extraordinarily painful, not to say peculiarly undignified, position of being up a tree. At least we may expect of our “critic” that in this predicament he will comfort himself with the last line of that most popular wartime song, America I Love You, which goes, “And there’re a hundred million others like me.”
Unless some unforeseen accident occurs, the present exhibition should include a number of drawings (which totally negate the favourite contention of “criticism,” to the effect that Lachaise’s work constitutes the doing of one thing over and over), the bas-relief Dusk (already reproduced in the January DIAL), two reclining figures (Home and Portrait), a diving figure, the colossal Love, and last—and to our thinking best—The Mountain. We have already, in all probability, talked too much and said too little (to use a peculiarly conventional phrase) about The Mountain; yet it is without shame that we are guilty of a parting word, for which Lachaise’s infrequently paralleled mastery of stone is wholly responsible. In The Mountain as it appears in this exhibition Lachaise has completely enjoyed an opportunity to work directly in the stone Himself as he calls it. He has enjoyed it as his contemporaries to whom stone is not a tactile dream, but a disagreeable everyday tangible nuisance to be handled by paid subordinates, can never enjoy it. In the transformation from the patina’d plaster (which was at Penguin and later, unofficially, at the Bourgeois Galleries) to the stone now on view, several vastly minute and enormously significant changes have occurred—changes dictated purely by the superior medium. To speak accurately, now for the first time The Mountain actualizes the original conception of its creator; who, in contrast to the contemptible conventionally called “sculptor,” thinks in stone whenever and because stone is not, and to whom the distinction between say bronze and alabaster is a distinction not between materials but, on the contrary, between ideas. In The Mountain as it IS Lachaise becomes supremely himself, the master of every aspect of a surface, every flexion of a mass, every trillionth of a phenomenon.
The reader who expects an analysis of the other work which we have mentioned as being included in the exhibition (Dusk, Portrait, Love, etc.) is due for a pleasant disappointment. The very good reasons for our not attempting such an analysis (or rather analyses, since, once again—the whole tribe of Defunctives to the contrary—Lachaise’s “point of view” never repeats itself) are briefly: first, we do not feel that we are up to the job; second, if this essai means anything whatever it means tha
t the only very great sinners are the Gentleman Dealers In Secondhand Thoughts. God knows that in the course of the preceding pages we have sinned deeply enough. Rather than despicably to descend into mere praise of an artist who, if only for the reason that we profoundly admire him, does not merit from us a so conventional insult—a man in relation to whose extraordinary achievement praise cannot but constitute a sumptuous impertinence—we prefer to maintain or perhaps to regain silence.
From The Dial, February 1920. E. E. Cummings had long championed the artistry of Gaston Lachaise. For an exhibition of the sculptor’s work at the Weyhe Gallery, N.Y.C. (December 27, 1955–January 28, 1956), Mr. Cummings wrote: “It was many years ago that The reborn Dial saluted Gaston Lachaise. Those years comprise (among other drolleries) a complete reversal of public untaste; ‘nonobjective art,’ once anathematized, being now de rigueur. By contrast, the achievement of Lachaise remains passionately and serenely itself—a marvel and a mystery: the spontaneous and inevitable expression of one fearlessly unique human being.”
T. S. ELIOT
The somewhat recently published Poems is an accurate and uncorpulent collection of instupidities. Between the negative and flabby and ponderous and little bellowings of those multitudinous contemporaries who are obstinately always “unconventional” or else “modern” at the expense of being (what is most difficult) alive, Mr. T.S. Eliot inserts the positive and deep beauty of his skilful and immediate violins . . . the result is at least thrilling.
He has done the trick for us before. In one of the was it two Blasts skilfully occurred, more than successfully framed by much soundless noise, the Rhapsody and Preludes. In one of the God knows nobody knows how many there will be Others, startlingly enshrined in a good deal of noiseless sound, Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady carefully happened. But “this slim little volume” as a reviewer might say achieves a far more forceful presentation, since it competes with and defeats not mere blasters and differentists but τò ἕν -s and origins and all that is Windily and Otherwise enervate and talkative.
Some Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe are, to a student of Mr. T.S., unnecessarily illuminating:
“. . . this style which secures its emphasis by always hesitating on the edge of caricature at the right moment . . .
. . . this intense and serious and indubitably great poetry, which, like some great painting and sculpture, attains its effects by something not unlike caricature.”
Even without this somewhat mighty hint, this something which for all its slipperiness is after all a doorknob to be grasped by anyone who wishes to enter the “some great” Art-Parlours, ourselves might have constructed a possibly logical development from Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night along J. Alfred and Portrait up the two Sweeneys to let us say The Hippopotamus. We might have been disgracefully inspired to the extent of projecting as arithmetical, not to say dull, a classification of Eliot as that of Picasso by the author of certain rudimentary and not even ecclesiastical nonsense entitled The Caliph’s Design. But (it is an enormous but) our so doing necessarily would have proved worthless, precisely for the reason that before an Eliot we become alive or intense as we become intense or alive before a Cézanne or a Lachaise: or since, as always in the case of superficial because vertical analysis, to attempt the boxing and labeling of genius is to involve in something inescapably rectilinear—a formula, for example—not the artist but the “critic.”
However, we have a better reason. The last word on caricature was spoken as far back as 1913. “My dear it’s all so perfectly ridiculous” remarked to an elderly Boston woman an elderly woman of Boston, as the twain made their noticeably irrevocable exeunt from that most colossal of all circuses, the (then in Boston) International. “My dear if some of the pictures didn’t look like something it wouldn’t be so amusing” observed, on the threshold, the e.B.w., adding “I should hate to have my portrait painted by any of those ‘artists’!” “They’ll never make a statue of me” stated with polyphiloprogenitive conviction the e.w.o.B.
“Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.”
Says Mr. Eliot.
In the case of Poems, to state frankly and briefly what we like may be as good a way as another of exhibiting our numerous “critical” incapacities. We like first, to speak from an altogether personal standpoint, that any and all attempts to lasso Mr. Eliot with the Vorticist emblem have signally failed. That Mr. E. Pound (with whose Caesarlike refusal of the kingly crown we are entirely familiar) may not have coiled the rope whose fatal noose has, over a few unfortunate Britons, excludingly rather than includingly settled, makes little or no difference since the hand which threw the lariat and the bronc’ which threw the steers alike belong to him. Be it said of this peppy gentleman that, insofar as he is responsible for possibly one-half of the most alive poetry and probably all of the least intense prose committed, during the last few years, in the American and English language, he merits something beyond the incoherent abuse and inchoate adoration which have become his daily breakfast food—merits in fact the doffing of many kelleys; that insofar as he is one of history’s greatest advertisers he is an extraordinarily useful bore, much like a riveter which whatever you may say assets the progress of a skyscraper; whereas that insofar as he is responsible for the overpasting of an at least attractive manifesto, “Ezra Pound,” with an at least pedantic war cry, “Vorticism,” he deserves to be drawn and quartered by the incomparably trite brush of the great and the only and the Wyndham and the Lewis—if only as an adjectival garnish to that nounlike effigy of our hero by his friend The Hieratic Buster. Let us therefore mention the fact, for it seems to us worthy of notice—that at no moment do T.S. Eliot and E.P. propaganda simultaneously inhabit our consciousness.
Second, we like that not any of Poems’ fifty-one pages fails to impress us with an overwhelming sense of technique. By technique we do not mean a great many things, including: anything static, a school, a noun, a slogan, a formula: These Three For Instant Beauty, Ars Est Celare, Hasn’t Scratched Yet, Professor Woodbery, Grape Nuts. By technique we do mean one thing: the alert hatred of normality which, through the lips of a tactile and cohesive adventure, asserts that nobody in general and some one in particular is incorrigibly and actually alive. This some one is, it would seem, the extremely great artist: or, he who prefers above everything and within everything the unique dimension of intensity, which it amuses him to substitute in us for the comforting and comfortable furniture of reality. If we examine the means through which this substitution is allowed by Mr. Eliot to happen in his reader, we find that they include: a vocabulary almost brutally tuned to attain distinctness; an extraordinarily tight orchestration of the shapes of sound; the delicate and careful murderings—almost invariably interpreted, internally as well as terminally, through near-rhyme and rhyme—of established tempos by oral rhythms. Here is an example of Eliot’s tuning:
“Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.”
Here is a specimen of his compact orchestration:
“I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”
Here is Eliot himself directing the exquisitely and thoroughly built thing:
“His laughter was submarine and profound
Like the old man of the sea’s
Hidden under coral islands
Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence,
Dropping from fingers of surf.”
To come to our final like, which it must be admitted is also our largest—we like that no however cautiously attempted dissection of Mr. T.S.’
s sensitivity begins to touch a few certain lines whereby become big and blundering and totally unskilful our altogether unnecessary fingers:
“The lamp hummed:
‘Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,”
At the risk of being jeered for an “uncritical” remark we mention that this is one of the few huge fragilities before which comment is disgusting.
From The Dial, June 1920.
THE SOUL STORY OF GLADYS VANDERDECKER
Heiress to Tin King’s millions finds love in humble surroundings
By the Society Editor of Vanity Fair
Editor’s Note: So many New York debutantes, and heiresses at large, have of late been marrying their chauffeurs, butlers and other workers in the humbler industrial vineyards (and, what is more, finding the adventure greatly to their liking) that this absorbing story of how an heiress found married happiness with a chauffeur ought to be of interest and help to our more youthful readers. It teaches a wholesome lesson and is commended to them without reserve. The interview is the work of our Society Editor.