A RESPONSE TO BRAUFFER FROM LUCIA KAHN
In his essay entitled “Come on Over Here, Honey and Leave Me Alone—The Paradox of the Artist as a Social Animal,” in the spring 1980 issue of the Purdue Review, Richard Brauffer proposed the thesis that the artist is constitutionally unfit to relate with other people. He suggested that personal relationships deplete the artist’s “well of creativity,” that communicating with others individually somehow fritters away the artist’s ability to communicate collectively. Here Brauffer brought up the well-known remark of Balzac’s, that every orgasm cost him the chapter of a book.
The Balzac syndrome may or may not hold true generally (in fact some artists have reported the opposite effect) – the important point is that Brauffer obviously thinks of orgasm as a mode of meaningful interpersonal communication. Interestingly enough, the woman who cohabited with Richard Brauffer for the last three years recently left him because, as she wrote to her sister, “I suddenly realized that the stranger I was living with was such an alien that he could speak only in sign language.”
Brauffer’s theory would seem to make things look pretty dismal for the friends and lovers of artists, but Brauffer offers them a ray of hope when he says, “The soul the artist hides from others in his daily life reveals itself in his art—not for the public, which is involved only in the work’s universal aspects, but there to be read by the artist’s intimates.” (It would not be out of place to mention here that Brauffer’s own work consists of what he calls “series” of small panes of glass, each etched with four or five horizontal and vertical lines.)
To make his point Brauffer retells the anecdote of the last Tyrelle opening, first related by Charlotte Ochiwitz in A Taste of Salt, Volume III (1958-1977) of the Journals, Remarks Brauffer:
As Tyrelle swept his stick around at the walls hung with his paintings,
“booming incredulously” (according to Ochiwitz) “‘What do you mean, uncommunicative?!’” he was not only expressing the fact that his art
communicated universally, but also that it communicated personally, that
anyone wishing to understand Robert Tyrelle, the man—including Claire
Tyrelle, whose complaints were what precipitated the remark—could only
do so through Robert Tyrelle, the artist.
Although it is true that Claire Tyrelle appears in many of Tyrelle’s major works—most notably, The Window at the Fuji, Fill ‘er Up (1952), and Behind the House, it is unlikely that she found much consolation in those stony portraits, the most flattering view of which is expressed by Tyrelle’s official biographer, Roger Wyndham:
Claire’s Junoesque stolidity, which contrasts so splendidly with the vibrancy
and vivacity of the landscapes, objects, animals, vehicles that surround her,
reserves for her a divinity-like immutability, reminding one of the monumental
quality of primitive fetishes. In terms of the universe encompassed by the work,
Claire is the source of creation. She is the artist’s inspiration.
Roger Wyndham
Tyrelle
There are other reactions to the Claire figure, however:
The prime example of the appearance of the body taboo among Western
artists is that of Robert Tyrelle, whose inability to paint the human figure
is proverbial.
Emmett Grogan Wilson
“Totem, Taboo, and the Scene Downtown.”
Purdue Review, Spring 1978
or,
Lady martyrs, pierced with arrows,
drawn and quartered, die
grimacing. New made widows
grieve beside the sea foam. Uncorseted
maidens lower their eyes
and stare at stocking feet in shame--
thus I have seen unhappy women painted.
But none so stupefies me with despair
of woman for her own kind as this lady in red,
arms stiff at her side, who stands beside the carp pool,
expressionless, watching the swans.
Gretchen Poachmaan
One Day at the Whitney
As an example of how art can be used successfully for communication on a person-to-person basis Brauffer offers the Schumanns. The classic description of that relationship is found in the memoirs of Lotte Wieck.
When Robert was absent, Clara did not bother to read his letters, which
contained only practicalities, but handing them to her secretary would rush
to the piano to play the music he had sent, singing out occasionally, in a kind
of pitched moan, “Yes, Robert, yes, Robert, yes, Robert, yes.”
Lotte Wieck
Memoirs
Brauffer ignores the fact that the Schumanns are a special case: both husband and wife were artists. Most artists are married to non-artists, who, unlike Clara Schumann, cannot plumb their spouses’ hearts by listening to their music or looking at their paintings. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that modern music is difficult to listen to and modern painting hard to look at.
Up to a point Brauffer’s arguments, wrong as they are, at least are grounded in reality, but Brauffer does not stop with granting artists a special dispensation not to have to relate to other people—no, by the time Brauffer is through, the artist has become a messenger from God.
Brauffer leads off the second part of his article with Picasso’s well-known remark to Pierre Fresnoe, “One cannot talk with a woman and believe one is immortal at the same time,” then continues: "Picasso here touches on the root of the conflict between universal expression and personal expression."
It is not necessary that the artist believe he is immortal in order to create a work of art—that just happened to be Picasso’s method. What is necessary is that the artist, by hook or by crook, be able to subdue his ego—only in that way can he become a medium for universal expression. There are as many ways of accomplishing this as there have been artists—contemplation of a paradox, drug use, tantric yoga, reading Leaves of Grass. The list ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, a case in point being the particular form of creative meditation practiced by Picasso, himself, who achieved his sense of immortality by behaving like an eight-year-old.
Does Brauffer seriously suggest that the only person who can (or may!) crave transcendence is an artist? Absurd. As the Bhagavad-Gita reminds us,
Arjuna, you are not a prince among Brahman’s myriads.
An artist may be a prince of South Truro, Soho, or the Medici Ateliers, but he is no more than another artisan in the eyes of God. Certainly, an aromatic pot of tripes à la nicoise, succulent crabmeat Ramik for four en coquilles, a fresh-baked baguette, a salad of Boston lettuce with a dressing with a base of home-made mayonnaise, and a rich, creamy flan to finish counts for as much, in Divine estimation, as a Louise Nevelson.
One weekend last March Josey Michaelis and Marc Oscher came up to Northampton. Richard was in the middle of one of his Series, so I volunteered to drive to Delphi at 4:30 to pick them up at the station, but at 4:30 I just couldn’t leave the kitchen—the tripes à la nicoise had turned out more complicated than expected. I went out to Richard’s studio in back of the house. He was bent in meditation over one of his panes of glass, rolling a glass cutter back and forth along a straight edge. When I asked him to go to the station he smiled stiffly and his eyes filled with the anguish of an animal at bay.
One of the things that makes Richard so difficult is that he has the odd notion that verbal communication is all that one is responsible for, that by nature nonverbal activity is uncontrollable, that it simply wells up in one like a geyser, so he made no effort to control his rising disgruntlement as he lurched around the house, with only one boot on for some reason, looking for his wallet, his cigarettes, his car keys, his pocket knife. Then, as a climax, he wrenched a cap he seldom wore from the top shelf of the closet, causing a plastic bag full of sweaters to be dry cleaned to empty itself onto the floor.
A friend of Richard’s, Martin Golrhine, in the Philosophy Department, once published in this journal a discussion of the existential elements in King John, including a close analysis of Hubert de Burgh’s defense of Gurney before the King and assembled lords in Act Four, Scene Four—the passage beginning,
Admitted, sirs, in verity are deeds
More eloquent than words, but these eruptions
From Gurney’s heart or soul or loins or knees
Or where’er, these twitchings, sputt’rings, grimacings,
That so dismay’d the guard—who ne’er saw else--
Our Gurney’s sov’reign, censor’d deeds were not.
It could have been Richard Brauffer’s motto.
As I stood at the kitchen window, watching Richard back down the driveway—for some reason flicking his parking lights on and off—I found myself feeling sorry for him. I tried to place the blame on the cookbook, which had neglected to warn me earlier that the pork rind and olives had to be parboiled, then on Josey and Marc for inviting themselves up, but the wee bit of pique I was able to generate toward Josey and Marc and the cookbook was nothing compared with the bitter resentment toward me that lurked behind Richard’s silent little tantrum. Was I that much at fault?
That rang the bell—a little bell in my mind that rings whenever someone tries to make me feel guilty—a mechanism I once worked out with a therapist.
My response to the bell was supposed to be to “play Kant,” that is, realize that everyone makes his own choices. Playing Kant at this point I would have understood that Richard chose of his own free will to interrupt his work to go to the station. He could have told me he could not go, he could have called the station, had Josey and Marc paged, and told them to wait—they were always oohing and ahing about the architecture there anyway. Of course, I could have done that myself, and not have had to go out and interrupt Richard.
That is the trouble with playing Kant—it does not eradicate guilt, it only makes everyone equally guilty—which is why, after some trial and error, I had discovered that the better response was to “play anthropologist.” While there is admittedly something shallow about it, it at least gets rid of guilt—instead of everyone being guilty, no one is guilty. Playing anthropologist, the preparation of the tripes and bread and mayonnaise and flan and crabmeat Ramik en coquilles was surely as vital an activity as the monotonous work that was so absorbing Richard.
It was a point worth passing on, so I took the piping hot, colorful tripe stew in its large Creuset pot out to Richard’s studio and placed it on his wooden stool; behind, on the table, I lay the bread basket. Emerging from a white napkin of fine embroidered linen, the russet of the phallic baguette faintly echoed the ripe orange of the vulval Creuset ware. In front of the bread basket I arranged the crabmeat Ramik in individual shells—four circlets of rude, tomatoey pink softened by thick swirlings of heavy cream. Against the window, next to Richard’s pot plant, I placed the teak salad bowl, tipping it forward, so that some of the rich green lettuce leaves, marbelized with the mayonnaise dressing, fell out onto the pale gray sill. The arrangement seemed to lack an entropic, humanizing touch, so just as Richard sometimes introduces a daring bit of crosshatching in the corner of a piece, I served the flan de plat, easing the custard out of its dishes onto numbers 1 through 8 of Series CCVII. The sepia of the caramel syrup struck out boldly down the glass grooves.
I phoned a friend in Lafayette and was packed and out of the house before Richard came back with Josey and Marc. I later heard that they went out for pizza.
Brauffer’s idea that artistic endeavor is impeded by meaningful interpersonal communication can be traced back to Harry Stack Sullivan’s 1932 psychoanalytic biography of Paul Gauguin, Flight to Limbo. Since Sullivan based much of his analysis of Gauguin’s personality on Somerset Maugham’s character Charles Strickland, his book was never taken seriously, but its premise has persisted, in the guise of Freudian theory. Ironically so, since throughout his life Freud remained in awe of the source of the artistic impulse, often characterizing it as Geheimnisvoll, mysterious.
The Sullivan thesis was refuted once and for all by Frauncis Lemon Porter in Chapter Three of his study of the relationship between society and culture, Republic Six, where he suggests that since of all people the artist is the least tainted by cultural values, his approach to personal relationships is the most natural, stemming as it does from primordial societal patterns. Republic Six concludes with the plea that government be regarded as an art form and its practitioners as artists, and that national policy should be based on aesthetic objectives.
Porter happened to be my mentor during my graduate studies at Yale. He was tall, red-headed, with a rather compressed, friendly face and a quiet twinkle in his eyes. He had been a widower for over twenty years when I knew him. His wife, anthropologist Naomi Huxley Porter, had been conducting research in a leper colony in Burma when it had been overrun by the Japanese. “They wanted the lepers for experiments,” Porter told us. “Naomi locked the lepers in the infirmary and swallowed the keys. It was a stupid move, especially for an anthropologist—the Japs had no compunctions about cutting her open and taking them.”
The tragedy of Naomi Huxley Porter took a triple toll on Frauncis Porter. Besides depriving him of a wife and a distinguished colleague, the incident engendered in him a Japanophobia which alienated him from many of his most devoted students
I remember a singular incident that occurred after one of Porter’s seminars on the role of the image in art. It was evening. He and I were making our way across Reutershan Quad on our way to the Shipley parking lot and had stopped for a moment beneath the large oak across from Kelsey Hall so that Porter could put his foot up on the bench to tie his shoelace. There was something about the gesture—it was so gratuitous, it made Porter suddenly so simple and human. I said,
“The teacher stand
on one leg,
ties his shoe.
A student watches,
takes notes.”
Porter smiled. “Nice,” he said, “but the theme is a bit thin.”
“The theme is the human condition,” I said, (one of Porter’s axioms was that the greatness of Western art lies in its ability to express la condition humaine) “the very human condition of being lost in the moment, the magic moment when Frauncis Lemon Porter becomes only a man tying his shoelace.”
“Yes, and in the next moment Frauncis Lemon Porter could become only a man killing a woman,” he said, pausing and turning toward me a sweet, crinkly grin.
“In which case Lucia Kahn would become only a woman dying.” I quoted Eliot. “‘The moment of death walks hand in hand with the moment of killing.’”
Porter finished with his shoelace and sat down on the bench, clasping his hands behind his neck, his elbows beating the air in time with his words as he spoke. “Unfortunately, not all of us are as capable as others are of enjoying such ineffable and fleeting experiences. I’m afraid I still prefer beer and skittles, bread and circuses, a good five-cent cigar, et cetera, and when I get to Heaven, like Peretz’s Bontshe, I’ll prefer a hot buttered roll to satori.”
“It can melt in your mouth,” I said.
“What can?” asked Porter. “The roll? Satori?”
“It,” I said. “The instant.”
“There you are—that damn instant again. Instants alone are worthless.”
“No, how can you say that? Worthless?” I knelt down on the bench beside him. “I’ll show you how worthless they are.”
Porter shielded his face with his elbows. “I don’t want to be kissed,” he said calmly, but firmly. Then he stood up and we continued on our way to the cars, neither of us speaking until we were passing through the Bigelow-Torgesen archway, when he said in the same calm, firm tone, “I want to get married.”
Porter is retired now and spends most of his time at Feather’s End, his cottage on Rocky Neck Point, near New London. He eventually did marry one of his students—novelist Nancy Eienbrun. The wedding, incidentally, is the single occasion when Frauncis Lemon Porter and Richard Brauffer met face to face—but only on the reception line. No doubt they would have found a good deal to talk about, but little to agree on, had they been given the opportunity.
The differences between their points of view can be sized up by a comparison of these two strikingly parallel passages, both of which hark back to Coleridge's remark in Biographia Literaria: “Art is the sacred fount from which one drinks one’s dark mortality and experiences the rapture of gods.”
The artist is a sacred vessel and, as such, may be ill-made, may be ill-used,
it might be worshiped for a time, but eventually will be neglected, broken and forgotten. What is perfect, what is eternal, and yet is still of this world, is art
itself, the sacred nectar which fills each vessel, taking on the particular flawed
and temporal shape of each.
Frauncis Lemon Porter
“Lend Me Your Mirrors”
Collected Essays
The artist as an individual has no intrinsic value, no more than the clay from
which a piece of pottery is made. But as a vessel for universal communication
the artist has as much extrinsic value as does a votive cup or sacred urn.
Richard Brauffer
“Come on Over Here, Honey, and Leave Me Alone --The Paradox of the Artist
as a Social Animal”
Purdue Review, Spring 1980
To be frank, my first reaction to Richard’s recent article was anger—anger that he had been given the opportunity to dignify by publication the rationalizations he had worked out to justify his neurotic destruction of our relationship. Not that he ever came out and openly said anything to me like, “I am an artist and therefore I have the right to treat you like a domestic pet”—no, Richard preferred to act out his role as sacred urn, stalking woodenly around the house and flashing wild-eyed looks of fear and ecstasy at the walls as if he were expecting the Final Judgment at any moment.
As soon as I read the Brauffer essay I knew I had to respond publicly, inappropriate though it might have seemed previously. I wanted to get my thoughts on paper while they were still fresh, but I did not want to appear vitriolic or vicious. To calm myself down I went for a walk along the river.
It was mid-August, but the day was surprisingly cool, although the sun was bright. The edges of things were sharp; an early morning windstorm seemed to have scrubbed the campus clean. As I passed Philosophy I met Martin Golrhine. He asked me what I had heard from Richard. “All I know is what I read in the papers,” I said.
Golrhine is a pushy little man—one of those people who thinks he’s on intimate terms with anyone he’s ever seen cry at a party. “I thought you two kept in touch,” he said.
“We never kept in touch,” I said, pointedly. “Never.”
“The thing about Richard,” said Golrhine, “is that he has to be humored.”
“Well, I just couldn’t be bothered. He certainly never bothered to humor me.”
“But you don’t want to be humored, do you? You’d be insulted if you thought someone were humoring you. I would too. But Richard needs humoring. So why not? I find it gives me a big kick to humor someone, a gratifying sense of superiority.”
“I prefer intimacy and meaningful communication in my love relationships,” I said.
Golrhine grasped my arm so that the back of his hand brushed against my breast, and drawing his body up against mine, he whispered hoarsely, “Intimacy, meaningful communication, we are there already, darling, and it’s a beautiful afternoon for love.”
I pulled away and started down the hill.
“Are you still seeing Georgette Minkle?” he called. “I’m still with Dr. Applebaum. It’s been six years now.”
The river was choppy, and the white caps glistened silver in the bright sun. It reminded me of how the ocean had glittered one morning in Connecticut, out the kitchen window of Frauncis Porter’s cottage, Feather’s End, where I had sometimes been invited, along with one or two other students—never alone—for weekends.
I had awakened earlier than usual, put on my robe, and wandered down to the kitchen to find Frauncis already there, sitting at the wooden table, a small cutting board in front of him, chopping walnuts for his specialty waffles. He dealt with the walnuts one at a time, not exactly chopping, but hewing each one into twenty or thirty tiny chunks, which he swept into a mixing bowl before turning to the next. I stood in the doorway and watched for a while—I don’t know whether he was aware of me or not. There was something magical about the scene—the bright sun glinting off the waves and off his knife and off the odd strands of his sparse hair that rose into its beams from his tousled head. Finally he looked up. “This is not the most efficient way to do this, I know,” he said, “but I left the concept of Time back in New Haven.”
Twenty-five years later, standing and watching the Wabash, remembering Frauncis and the walnuts and the sunlight, I felt an odd longing to have been one of those walnuts—not to have been chopped up and mixed into waffle batter, but to have been handled with such care, treated so delicately, given so much consideration, if only on weekends. I tried to stop myself, but I knew I was about to be overwhelmed by one of the most wasteful and absurd of emotions—regret—and nothing I could summon up—anger, acceptance, objectivity, hope—nothing I could do—play Kant, play anthropologist, play Buddha, play Bette Davis—could arrest it. If only I could have wept, but no tears came, only the words themselves, wrenched out into the river wind, “I should have married Frauncis Porter.”
In his essay entitled “Come on Over Here, Honey and Leave Me Alone—The Paradox of the Artist as a Social Animal,” in the spring 1980 issue of the Purdue Review, Richard Brauffer proposed the thesis that the artist is constitutionally unfit to relate with other people. He suggested that personal relationships deplete the artist’s “well of creativity,” that communicating with others individually somehow fritters away the artist’s ability to communicate collectively. Here Brauffer brought up the well-known remark of Balzac’s, that every orgasm cost him the chapter of a book.
The Balzac syndrome may or may not hold true generally (in fact some artists have reported the opposite effect) – the important point is that Brauffer obviously thinks of orgasm as a mode of meaningful interpersonal communication. Interestingly enough, the woman who cohabited with Richard Brauffer for the last three years recently left him because, as she wrote to her sister, “I suddenly realized that the stranger I was living with was such an alien that he could speak only in sign language.”
Brauffer’s theory would seem to make things look pretty dismal for the friends and lovers of artists, but Brauffer offers them a ray of hope when he says, “The soul the artist hides from others in his daily life reveals itself in his art—not for the public, which is involved only in the work’s universal aspects, but there to be read by the artist’s intimates.” (It would not be out of place to mention here that Brauffer’s own work consists of what he calls “series” of small panes of glass, each etched with four or five horizontal and vertical lines.)
To make his point Brauffer retells the anecdote of the last Tyrelle opening, first related by Charlotte Ochiwitz in A Taste of Salt, Volume III (1958-1977) of the Journals, Remarks Brauffer:
As Tyrelle swept his stick around at the walls hung with his paintings,
“booming incredulously” (according to Ochiwitz) “‘What do you mean, uncommunicative?!’” he was not only expressing the fact that his art
communicated universally, but also that it communicated personally, that
anyone wishing to understand Robert Tyrelle, the man—including Claire
Tyrelle, whose complaints were what precipitated the remark—could only
do so through Robert Tyrelle, the artist.
Although it is true that Claire Tyrelle appears in many of Tyrelle’s major works—most notably, The Window at the Fuji, Fill ‘er Up (1952), and Behind the House, it is unlikely that she found much consolation in those stony portraits, the most flattering view of which is expressed by Tyrelle’s official biographer, Roger Wyndham:
Claire’s Junoesque stolidity, which contrasts so splendidly with the vibrancy
and vivacity of the landscapes, objects, animals, vehicles that surround her,
reserves for her a divinity-like immutability, reminding one of the monumental
quality of primitive fetishes. In terms of the universe encompassed by the work,
Claire is the source of creation. She is the artist’s inspiration.
Roger Wyndham
Tyrelle
There are other reactions to the Claire figure, however:
The prime example of the appearance of the body taboo among Western
artists is that of Robert Tyrelle, whose inability to paint the human figure
is proverbial.
Emmett Grogan Wilson
“Totem, Taboo, and the Scene Downtown.”
Purdue Review, Spring 1978
or,
Lady martyrs, pierced with arrows,
drawn and quartered, die
grimacing. New made widows
grieve beside the sea foam. Uncorseted
maidens lower their eyes
and stare at stocking feet in shame--
thus I have seen unhappy women painted.
But none so stupefies me with despair
of woman for her own kind as this lady in red,
arms stiff at her side, who stands beside the carp pool,
expressionless, watching the swans.
Gretchen Poachmaan
One Day at the Whitney
As an example of how art can be used successfully for communication on a person-to-person basis Brauffer offers the Schumanns. The classic description of that relationship is found in the memoirs of Lotte Wieck.
When Robert was absent, Clara did not bother to read his letters, which
contained only practicalities, but handing them to her secretary would rush
to the piano to play the music he had sent, singing out occasionally, in a kind
of pitched moan, “Yes, Robert, yes, Robert, yes, Robert, yes.”
Lotte Wieck
Memoirs
Brauffer ignores the fact that the Schumanns are a special case: both husband and wife were artists. Most artists are married to non-artists, who, unlike Clara Schumann, cannot plumb their spouses’ hearts by listening to their music or looking at their paintings. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that modern music is difficult to listen to and modern painting hard to look at.
Up to a point Brauffer’s arguments, wrong as they are, at least are grounded in reality, but Brauffer does not stop with granting artists a special dispensation not to have to relate to other people—no, by the time Brauffer is through, the artist has become a messenger from God.
Brauffer leads off the second part of his article with Picasso’s well-known remark to Pierre Fresnoe, “One cannot talk with a woman and believe one is immortal at the same time,” then continues: "Picasso here touches on the root of the conflict between universal expression and personal expression."
It is not necessary that the artist believe he is immortal in order to create a work of art—that just happened to be Picasso’s method. What is necessary is that the artist, by hook or by crook, be able to subdue his ego—only in that way can he become a medium for universal expression. There are as many ways of accomplishing this as there have been artists—contemplation of a paradox, drug use, tantric yoga, reading Leaves of Grass. The list ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, a case in point being the particular form of creative meditation practiced by Picasso, himself, who achieved his sense of immortality by behaving like an eight-year-old.
Does Brauffer seriously suggest that the only person who can (or may!) crave transcendence is an artist? Absurd. As the Bhagavad-Gita reminds us,
Arjuna, you are not a prince among Brahman’s myriads.
An artist may be a prince of South Truro, Soho, or the Medici Ateliers, but he is no more than another artisan in the eyes of God. Certainly, an aromatic pot of tripes à la nicoise, succulent crabmeat Ramik for four en coquilles, a fresh-baked baguette, a salad of Boston lettuce with a dressing with a base of home-made mayonnaise, and a rich, creamy flan to finish counts for as much, in Divine estimation, as a Louise Nevelson.
One weekend last March Josey Michaelis and Marc Oscher came up to Northampton. Richard was in the middle of one of his Series, so I volunteered to drive to Delphi at 4:30 to pick them up at the station, but at 4:30 I just couldn’t leave the kitchen—the tripes à la nicoise had turned out more complicated than expected. I went out to Richard’s studio in back of the house. He was bent in meditation over one of his panes of glass, rolling a glass cutter back and forth along a straight edge. When I asked him to go to the station he smiled stiffly and his eyes filled with the anguish of an animal at bay.
One of the things that makes Richard so difficult is that he has the odd notion that verbal communication is all that one is responsible for, that by nature nonverbal activity is uncontrollable, that it simply wells up in one like a geyser, so he made no effort to control his rising disgruntlement as he lurched around the house, with only one boot on for some reason, looking for his wallet, his cigarettes, his car keys, his pocket knife. Then, as a climax, he wrenched a cap he seldom wore from the top shelf of the closet, causing a plastic bag full of sweaters to be dry cleaned to empty itself onto the floor.
A friend of Richard’s, Martin Golrhine, in the Philosophy Department, once published in this journal a discussion of the existential elements in King John, including a close analysis of Hubert de Burgh’s defense of Gurney before the King and assembled lords in Act Four, Scene Four—the passage beginning,
Admitted, sirs, in verity are deeds
More eloquent than words, but these eruptions
From Gurney’s heart or soul or loins or knees
Or where’er, these twitchings, sputt’rings, grimacings,
That so dismay’d the guard—who ne’er saw else--
Our Gurney’s sov’reign, censor’d deeds were not.
It could have been Richard Brauffer’s motto.
As I stood at the kitchen window, watching Richard back down the driveway—for some reason flicking his parking lights on and off—I found myself feeling sorry for him. I tried to place the blame on the cookbook, which had neglected to warn me earlier that the pork rind and olives had to be parboiled, then on Josey and Marc for inviting themselves up, but the wee bit of pique I was able to generate toward Josey and Marc and the cookbook was nothing compared with the bitter resentment toward me that lurked behind Richard’s silent little tantrum. Was I that much at fault?
That rang the bell—a little bell in my mind that rings whenever someone tries to make me feel guilty—a mechanism I once worked out with a therapist.
My response to the bell was supposed to be to “play Kant,” that is, realize that everyone makes his own choices. Playing Kant at this point I would have understood that Richard chose of his own free will to interrupt his work to go to the station. He could have told me he could not go, he could have called the station, had Josey and Marc paged, and told them to wait—they were always oohing and ahing about the architecture there anyway. Of course, I could have done that myself, and not have had to go out and interrupt Richard.
That is the trouble with playing Kant—it does not eradicate guilt, it only makes everyone equally guilty—which is why, after some trial and error, I had discovered that the better response was to “play anthropologist.” While there is admittedly something shallow about it, it at least gets rid of guilt—instead of everyone being guilty, no one is guilty. Playing anthropologist, the preparation of the tripes and bread and mayonnaise and flan and crabmeat Ramik en coquilles was surely as vital an activity as the monotonous work that was so absorbing Richard.
It was a point worth passing on, so I took the piping hot, colorful tripe stew in its large Creuset pot out to Richard’s studio and placed it on his wooden stool; behind, on the table, I lay the bread basket. Emerging from a white napkin of fine embroidered linen, the russet of the phallic baguette faintly echoed the ripe orange of the vulval Creuset ware. In front of the bread basket I arranged the crabmeat Ramik in individual shells—four circlets of rude, tomatoey pink softened by thick swirlings of heavy cream. Against the window, next to Richard’s pot plant, I placed the teak salad bowl, tipping it forward, so that some of the rich green lettuce leaves, marbelized with the mayonnaise dressing, fell out onto the pale gray sill. The arrangement seemed to lack an entropic, humanizing touch, so just as Richard sometimes introduces a daring bit of crosshatching in the corner of a piece, I served the flan de plat, easing the custard out of its dishes onto numbers 1 through 8 of Series CCVII. The sepia of the caramel syrup struck out boldly down the glass grooves.
I phoned a friend in Lafayette and was packed and out of the house before Richard came back with Josey and Marc. I later heard that they went out for pizza.
Brauffer’s idea that artistic endeavor is impeded by meaningful interpersonal communication can be traced back to Harry Stack Sullivan’s 1932 psychoanalytic biography of Paul Gauguin, Flight to Limbo. Since Sullivan based much of his analysis of Gauguin’s personality on Somerset Maugham’s character Charles Strickland, his book was never taken seriously, but its premise has persisted, in the guise of Freudian theory. Ironically so, since throughout his life Freud remained in awe of the source of the artistic impulse, often characterizing it as Geheimnisvoll, mysterious.
The Sullivan thesis was refuted once and for all by Frauncis Lemon Porter in Chapter Three of his study of the relationship between society and culture, Republic Six, where he suggests that since of all people the artist is the least tainted by cultural values, his approach to personal relationships is the most natural, stemming as it does from primordial societal patterns. Republic Six concludes with the plea that government be regarded as an art form and its practitioners as artists, and that national policy should be based on aesthetic objectives.
Porter happened to be my mentor during my graduate studies at Yale. He was tall, red-headed, with a rather compressed, friendly face and a quiet twinkle in his eyes. He had been a widower for over twenty years when I knew him. His wife, anthropologist Naomi Huxley Porter, had been conducting research in a leper colony in Burma when it had been overrun by the Japanese. “They wanted the lepers for experiments,” Porter told us. “Naomi locked the lepers in the infirmary and swallowed the keys. It was a stupid move, especially for an anthropologist—the Japs had no compunctions about cutting her open and taking them.”
The tragedy of Naomi Huxley Porter took a triple toll on Frauncis Porter. Besides depriving him of a wife and a distinguished colleague, the incident engendered in him a Japanophobia which alienated him from many of his most devoted students
I remember a singular incident that occurred after one of Porter’s seminars on the role of the image in art. It was evening. He and I were making our way across Reutershan Quad on our way to the Shipley parking lot and had stopped for a moment beneath the large oak across from Kelsey Hall so that Porter could put his foot up on the bench to tie his shoelace. There was something about the gesture—it was so gratuitous, it made Porter suddenly so simple and human. I said,
“The teacher stand
on one leg,
ties his shoe.
A student watches,
takes notes.”
Porter smiled. “Nice,” he said, “but the theme is a bit thin.”
“The theme is the human condition,” I said, (one of Porter’s axioms was that the greatness of Western art lies in its ability to express la condition humaine) “the very human condition of being lost in the moment, the magic moment when Frauncis Lemon Porter becomes only a man tying his shoelace.”
“Yes, and in the next moment Frauncis Lemon Porter could become only a man killing a woman,” he said, pausing and turning toward me a sweet, crinkly grin.
“In which case Lucia Kahn would become only a woman dying.” I quoted Eliot. “‘The moment of death walks hand in hand with the moment of killing.’”
Porter finished with his shoelace and sat down on the bench, clasping his hands behind his neck, his elbows beating the air in time with his words as he spoke. “Unfortunately, not all of us are as capable as others are of enjoying such ineffable and fleeting experiences. I’m afraid I still prefer beer and skittles, bread and circuses, a good five-cent cigar, et cetera, and when I get to Heaven, like Peretz’s Bontshe, I’ll prefer a hot buttered roll to satori.”
“It can melt in your mouth,” I said.
“What can?” asked Porter. “The roll? Satori?”
“It,” I said. “The instant.”
“There you are—that damn instant again. Instants alone are worthless.”
“No, how can you say that? Worthless?” I knelt down on the bench beside him. “I’ll show you how worthless they are.”
Porter shielded his face with his elbows. “I don’t want to be kissed,” he said calmly, but firmly. Then he stood up and we continued on our way to the cars, neither of us speaking until we were passing through the Bigelow-Torgesen archway, when he said in the same calm, firm tone, “I want to get married.”
Porter is retired now and spends most of his time at Feather’s End, his cottage on Rocky Neck Point, near New London. He eventually did marry one of his students—novelist Nancy Eienbrun. The wedding, incidentally, is the single occasion when Frauncis Lemon Porter and Richard Brauffer met face to face—but only on the reception line. No doubt they would have found a good deal to talk about, but little to agree on, had they been given the opportunity.
The differences between their points of view can be sized up by a comparison of these two strikingly parallel passages, both of which hark back to Coleridge's remark in Biographia Literaria: “Art is the sacred fount from which one drinks one’s dark mortality and experiences the rapture of gods.”
The artist is a sacred vessel and, as such, may be ill-made, may be ill-used,
it might be worshiped for a time, but eventually will be neglected, broken and forgotten. What is perfect, what is eternal, and yet is still of this world, is art
itself, the sacred nectar which fills each vessel, taking on the particular flawed
and temporal shape of each.
Frauncis Lemon Porter
“Lend Me Your Mirrors”
Collected Essays
The artist as an individual has no intrinsic value, no more than the clay from
which a piece of pottery is made. But as a vessel for universal communication
the artist has as much extrinsic value as does a votive cup or sacred urn.
Richard Brauffer
“Come on Over Here, Honey, and Leave Me Alone --The Paradox of the Artist
as a Social Animal”
Purdue Review, Spring 1980
To be frank, my first reaction to Richard’s recent article was anger—anger that he had been given the opportunity to dignify by publication the rationalizations he had worked out to justify his neurotic destruction of our relationship. Not that he ever came out and openly said anything to me like, “I am an artist and therefore I have the right to treat you like a domestic pet”—no, Richard preferred to act out his role as sacred urn, stalking woodenly around the house and flashing wild-eyed looks of fear and ecstasy at the walls as if he were expecting the Final Judgment at any moment.
As soon as I read the Brauffer essay I knew I had to respond publicly, inappropriate though it might have seemed previously. I wanted to get my thoughts on paper while they were still fresh, but I did not want to appear vitriolic or vicious. To calm myself down I went for a walk along the river.
It was mid-August, but the day was surprisingly cool, although the sun was bright. The edges of things were sharp; an early morning windstorm seemed to have scrubbed the campus clean. As I passed Philosophy I met Martin Golrhine. He asked me what I had heard from Richard. “All I know is what I read in the papers,” I said.
Golrhine is a pushy little man—one of those people who thinks he’s on intimate terms with anyone he’s ever seen cry at a party. “I thought you two kept in touch,” he said.
“We never kept in touch,” I said, pointedly. “Never.”
“The thing about Richard,” said Golrhine, “is that he has to be humored.”
“Well, I just couldn’t be bothered. He certainly never bothered to humor me.”
“But you don’t want to be humored, do you? You’d be insulted if you thought someone were humoring you. I would too. But Richard needs humoring. So why not? I find it gives me a big kick to humor someone, a gratifying sense of superiority.”
“I prefer intimacy and meaningful communication in my love relationships,” I said.
Golrhine grasped my arm so that the back of his hand brushed against my breast, and drawing his body up against mine, he whispered hoarsely, “Intimacy, meaningful communication, we are there already, darling, and it’s a beautiful afternoon for love.”
I pulled away and started down the hill.
“Are you still seeing Georgette Minkle?” he called. “I’m still with Dr. Applebaum. It’s been six years now.”
The river was choppy, and the white caps glistened silver in the bright sun. It reminded me of how the ocean had glittered one morning in Connecticut, out the kitchen window of Frauncis Porter’s cottage, Feather’s End, where I had sometimes been invited, along with one or two other students—never alone—for weekends.
I had awakened earlier than usual, put on my robe, and wandered down to the kitchen to find Frauncis already there, sitting at the wooden table, a small cutting board in front of him, chopping walnuts for his specialty waffles. He dealt with the walnuts one at a time, not exactly chopping, but hewing each one into twenty or thirty tiny chunks, which he swept into a mixing bowl before turning to the next. I stood in the doorway and watched for a while—I don’t know whether he was aware of me or not. There was something magical about the scene—the bright sun glinting off the waves and off his knife and off the odd strands of his sparse hair that rose into its beams from his tousled head. Finally he looked up. “This is not the most efficient way to do this, I know,” he said, “but I left the concept of Time back in New Haven.”
Twenty-five years later, standing and watching the Wabash, remembering Frauncis and the walnuts and the sunlight, I felt an odd longing to have been one of those walnuts—not to have been chopped up and mixed into waffle batter, but to have been handled with such care, treated so delicately, given so much consideration, if only on weekends. I tried to stop myself, but I knew I was about to be overwhelmed by one of the most wasteful and absurd of emotions—regret—and nothing I could summon up—anger, acceptance, objectivity, hope—nothing I could do—play Kant, play anthropologist, play Buddha, play Bette Davis—could arrest it. If only I could have wept, but no tears came, only the words themselves, wrenched out into the river wind, “I should have married Frauncis Porter.”