S. SCHAMA
A constant refrain throughout this long literature of complaint, and what European intellectuals even now find most repugnant, is American sanctimoniousness, the habit of dressing the business of power in the garb of piety.
Other characteristics of American life alienated the Romantics: the distaste for tragedy (a moral corrective to illusions of invincibility); the strong preference for practicality; the severance from history; and, above all, what the Germans called Bodenlosigkeit, a willed rootlessness, embodied in the flimsy frame construction of American houses. Europeans watched, pop-eyed, while whole houses were moved down the street. This confirmed their view that Americans had no real loyalty to the local, and explained why they preferred utilitarian “yards” to flower gardens. No delphiniums, no civility.
‘The British who arrived in the United States in the eighteen-thirtes and forties had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly and politically gauche, but with some hint of promise. What they found was a country experiencing an unprecedented growth spurt, both territorial and demographic, and characterized by an unnerving rudeness, in both senses of the word. Ladies and gendemen dodged quids of tobacco juice and averted their gaze from the brimming cuspidors thar greeted visitors to steamboat saloons and hotel and theatre lobbies. The hallmark of Jacksonian America seemed to be a beastly indifference to manners, the symptom of a society where considerateness to others was a poor second to the immediate satisfaction of personal wants.
The conduct of Americans at dinner said it all. They wolfed down their food, cramming cor bread into their sloppy maws during meals that were devoured in silence, punctuated only by slurps, grunts, scraping knives, and hacking coughs. (All those cigars.) At the Plate House in the business district of New York, naval captain and travel writer Basil Hall was astonished by the speed at which the comed beef arrived and then by the even greater speed at which it was demolished: “We were not in the house above twenty minutes, but we sat out two sets of company at least.” Only the boy waiters yelling orders at the kitchen broke the quiet. The lack of polite conversation suggested the melancholy and dispiriting monotony of American life, on which almost all the early reporters commented. Tocqueville explained the apparent paradox of anxiety amid prosperity as the result of the relentless obligation to be forever Up and Doing.
The European commentators’ dismay at the tyranny of American materialism was disingenuous, since many of them had come to the United States to repair their tattered fortunes or make new ones. Frances Trollope decided to sojourn in America when a rich uncle did the Trollopes the disservice of marrying late in life and, still worse, begetting an heir. Fanny Wright, whose ardor for America had been relit by the Marquis de Lafayette’s triumphal tour in 1824 and 1825, visited Mrs. Trollope at her expensive rented house at Harrow
....who were barely subsisting. Of the all important school there wits no sight and no prospect. Mrs. Trollope, aghast at the filth and the fever-bearmg mosquitocs, fled with her childten to Cincinnati, which was, alas, an “uninteresting mass of buildings,” where hogs rooted in the streets. Together with the French painter Auguste Hervicu (who had intended to teach at Nashoba), she flung herself into show business, remodelling a “Western Museum,” . which had hitherto been a _ collection of natural curiosities and patriotic waxworks. Her son Henry became the Invisible Girl, booming prophecies in creepy darkness, and, with the help of glass transparencies, she created a vision of the Infernal Regions, featuring frozen lakes with erupting fountains of flame, and electric shocks should the customers, peering through grates, try and touch the exhibits. Mrs. ‘Trollope’s next venture, a galleried, gaslit emporium of consumer wonders, stocked with fancy goods supplied from Harrow by her husband, ended in debt practically before it began.
Hollywood movies.. for the illiterate, for poor creatures stupefied by work and anxiety,” were the Trojan horse for the Americanization of the world. Jean Baudrillard’s belief that the defining characteristic of America is its fabrication of reality was anticipated by Duhamel’s polemics against the “shadow world” of the movies, with their reduction of audiences to somnolent zombies sitting in the dark.
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A headline in the Times of July 22, 1948, read “GORKY 'S COUSIN ENDS LIFE.” According to the brief obituary that followed, a Russian born American painter, forty-five years old, had hanged himself in a barn on his property in Sherman, Connecticut. The story was full of errors. The painter, Arshile Gorky, was unrelated to the celebrated Communist writer Aleksey Peshkov, whose pen name was Maxim Gorky. He was probably forty-eight years old, and was born Vosdanig Adoian, in a village in Turkish Armenia. The Sherman property wasn't his—he was too poor to own much of anything and tne building that he selected to die in was a shed. The obit’s major errors repeated lies that Gorky regularly told about himself. He kept secret his memories of the massacres, famine, and epidemics that decimated his people during the First World War. He spoke passionately of his mother but rarely of her death in his presence, at the age of thirty-nine, perhaps of starvation.
Herrera begins her book with a barbaric scene. In 1903, in an ancient monastery church near Lake Van, Turkey, “Arshile Gorky’s grandmother, the widow Hamaspiur, had brought the family together to hold a vigil for her youngest son, sixteen-year-old Nishan, who had vanished several days earlier. She suspected that he had been abducted by Kurds, for he had fallen in love with a Kurdish girl whose brother took offense. ... Only five years earlier, her husband, Sarkis Der Marderosian, the last of a long line of Armenian apostolic priests, had been nailed to the door of the church where he served in Van City.” As the family prayed, there was a thud at the door. Outside, they found Nishan’s blood-drenched body. Months of wild grief later, “to revenge herself against God,” Hamaspiur set the monastery church on fire. “Arshile Gorky would look back with admiration at his grandmother's rebellious spirit,”
Rejecting his father’s expectation that he would be a factory worker, Gorky enrolled in Boston’s New School of Design in 1922 and dove into the study of art, partly in schools but mainly in museums. He was savagely proud. When a teacher disparaged his work, he destroyed the canvas that he was working on and walked out of the class for good. He took menial jobs and earned money for a time on the vaudeville stage, chalking likenesses of American Presidents, one a minute, on a blackboard. He later told of swimming out into the Charles River to drown himself and being driven back to shore by the sudden thought, “What about painting?” In 1925, he moved to New York, where he became a charismatic teacher (one of his students was Mark Rothko) anda dashing presence. In 1929, he moved into a space at 36 Union Square which he rented for the rest of his life. Herrera writes that Gorky would stride into the square in “a long black overcoat, a red scarf, and either a proletarian-looking wool knit cap or, on days when he wanted to look prosperous or gangsterish, a black felt hat tilted forward over his eyes.” He haunted museums. His favorite Old Masters were Uccello and Ingres, both of them radical engineers of style. One day at the Metropolitan, a woman reacting to his long hair and beard quipped, “Are you Jesus Christ?” He answered, “No, Madam. I am Arshile Gorky.” He had | settled on the name in Boston, after toying with Archie Gunn and Archie Colt both inspired by Western films.
Gorky ‘shied away from girls, a friend said. “But girls didn’t shy away from him.” He idealized and was awkward with women, whom he called, fancifully, “skybabies.” He was chary of ~ sex. One former girlfriend told Herrera, _ “You thought that at the back of his mind, even while having intercourse, _ he was thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, all. my strength is going! I should save itup for painting!” When trouble arose between them, the same woman said, “The only way he could deal with me was to get hysterical and hit me and threaten suicide.”
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His name was Eric Vachell, except that it wasn't. He was known to me as Uncle Eric, but he was not my uncle. He was born an Anglican and died a Roman Catholic. He never married, because of something he had read in a book. He was a doctor who was laid low by the suffering that he witnessed. He was never famous, and his existence is now recalled by fewer than a dozen people in the world. More than twenty-five years after his death, however, he 1s still a pervasive in{xc xce on my life. And here's the strang-est th.tic T never met him. Ever that is not quite true. I did meet - Eric, but only at my christening, when I was not yet fit for human society. He was present that day, attending what was, by any standard, a minor event in the social calendar, because he was my great-uncle- the brother of my maternal grandfather. = I was wearing diapers at the time, and was therefore ill-equipped to engage Eric in discussion of his favored topics, such as Catholic doctrine and herbaceous borders. Even now, though, I wonder whether he did not lean over my crib and confer some murmured blessing: a hint of the link that would bind us.
That was our final encounter. I never saw him again—it was tacitly understood that Eric’s preference was for children of the unseen variety—and we never spoke on the telephone. Eric, born in 1897, hailed from a generation that mistrusted the phone and put its faith in letterwriting. According to my late mother, his niece, all his letters began with the phrzse “The weather is not clement ‘n tic 73° This was unsurprising, Hovs hc... z small town on the south coas. tf £ 2 gland to which, by traditicn, +: elderly have retired, there to stagger through tempests of ozone-rich breeze.
Anthony Lane. Beyond a Joke 2004
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