Why John Wayne walked away

 

From the poster for The Searchers 

At the end of The Searchers, Ethan Edwards, the character played by John Wayne, after seven or more years of searching, finally returns to what remains of his family carrying the kidnapped niece he has just “rescued” from the Indians, and does a very strange thing. Here is the climax of the film, the searched-for object found. He brings her to the doorway, but then walks away. He doesn’t set foot inside the house.  

Why does he walk away? In that moment, that gesture, for better or worse, Ford has created a myth, a clash of cultures, an undoubted (if uncomfortable) achievement of film-making. There are of course many interpretation of why he walks away. For me, that walking away represents the sheer impossibility of his character’s homophobia, racism, sexism, and belief in violence co-existing in an (equally mythic) world of communities and families, the “everyday” that we, the viewers, believe we inhabit.

After watching The Searchers, the first Western I had seen for several years, I couldn’t stop thinking about the character played by John Wayne.

Like most boys of my generation, I grew up saturated by Westerns: books, films, games, actors. If it wasn’t a Western movie, it was a Western TV series. There were series for kids (The Lone Ranger), series for adults (The Virginian, Rawhide) quite apart from individual Western movies, of which there must be thousands. John Wayne is simply the tip of the iceberg; most of these artefacts displayed the culture of the Western, the myth of a new America, the image of the frontier, the dream of self-sufficiency assisted by a bit of honest hand-fighting and the occasional use of the gun.  

After an upbringing in which the Western was a such component of everyday life, so taken for granted, it is very difficult to stand back from such a barrage of propaganda and to realise how odd it all was. For John Wayne to learn to be an actor in those days, one key requirement was to learn to ride a horse; I didn’t realise that such a skill, essential in Western world, had to be learned.  

Seeing another western movie after several years made it apparent how peculiar that world was. I remember reading chivalric epics such as the Morte D’Arthur to my children when they were young, and how they fell about laughing at the ludicrousness of the situations that clearly did not create mirth when first written: the very title “Sir Beaumains”, for example, could be the name of a pantomime character today, but clearly was a perfectly acceptable name when Malory was writing.  

What struck me about The Searchers not the landscape, or the shooting, or even the cowboys versus Indians, all part of the stock Western ethose, but the deeply unpleasant and uncivilised character of John Wayne in all his unredeemed misanthropy. He spends the whole movie as if afflicted by a personal religious quest; not for him the trivia of a wedding party, or a social event. Like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, he is obsessed. Like Ahab, he is a monster. But unlike Ahab, Wayne is the hero of the film. We are expected to admire, or at least to accept, his racism, sexism and inability to form any kind of equal relationship with others. For director John Ford, this is the subject of the movie. It’s not about the Indians (although, inevitably, they come off worse): it’s about Wayne’s monomaniacal quest, which, for all I know, is probably still underway today.  

I’m not the only one to be disturbed by the character of Wayne; let’s see what other critics make of him. Gary Will (yes, the historian who writes about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington), in his John Wayne: The Politics of Celebrity (1997), looks a good place to start. Wills is accurate about what Wayne stood for:  

Wayne […] stood for an America people felt was disappearing or had disappeared, for a time “when men were men”. [p14]  

Anecdotes of John Ford’s drinking sessions seem to suggest that Ford himself believed he was one of those men out of their time. Wills gets to the heart of The Searchers by describing that very moment when Wayne walks out at the end:  

Wayne’s deep fires of revenge burn so fiercely through the picture that extinguishing them in the final scene looks contrived. [p17] 

Not so much contrived as impossible to believe in the context of the traditional white settler, love and marriage narrative of the average Western. Wayne is doomed at the end of The Searchers to wander the world retelling his story, like the Ancient Mariner. And, just as I would do if I ever encountered the Ancient Mariner, I would give Wayne a wide berth.

Fantasizing about our ancestors

 

I haven’t finished Ancestors, by Professor Alice Roberts (the word “professor” appears with the author’s name on the cover)  – this is a long book, around 133,000 words, for a popular science book - but I wouldn’t complain if the text justified the length. Sadly, from the first few chapters, I don’t think I have the interest to continue. 

Choice of subject

Archaeology, as the study of prehistory, without written records, is often of necessity based around inferring a background from the sometimes very partial evidence. But if that evidence is very sparse, it may not be possible to reach any reasonable conclusion. What should we do in this case? Speculate wildly, knowing there is no way to refute our ideas, or simply refrain from making inferences in the absence of more concrete data? 

On the basis of the first two chapters, it would seem that the seven subjects chosen in this book are finds of very early, palaeolithic, remains, a period that is challenging for researchers because of the lack of evidence in and around the sites. Often, there is not much that can be stated with certainty; yet the author is not short of ideas. However fascinating Roberts might find these excavations, it is very unsatisfying to this reader to be presented with so much speculation. The “Red Lady” is a case in point. This collection of human bones found in a Welsh cave included the so-called Red Lady,  the subject of much unwarranted fantasizing by the Reverend William Buckland, who studied the bones during the 1820s. Subsequent examination suggested the bones were of a male rather than female, but Roberts continues to refer to the bones by their romanticized title. You can’t help thinking that, potentially, the real subject matter is the dreams and assumptions that researchers assign to their finds. To study this would require the author to be more aware of her own daydreams, but instead of following this strand, she indulges in further speculation that clearly has little evidence behind it: in the absence of evidence, nobody can say she is wrong.  What researchers imagine (and what popular science authors dream) tells you more about them than about the remains, but this does not seem to be investigated by Roberts. 

Did the Neanderthals bury their dead? There is no general agreement about this, it seems:

While all the evidence from Sima de los Huesos … is inconclusive, there are other sites that suggest at least one other human species did practise burial. The debate – you won’t be surprised to learn – is far from settled, but there are a handful of discoveries … that suggest that Neanderthals themselves may hav e buried their dead. [p98]

We then get 20 pages on one excavation, which seems to suggest (according to the excavator) that it was a Neanderthal burial. But even if this was an example of a burial, it is clear that “[burial] certainly wasn’t the norm. Very ancient burials are few and far between – sporadic. Only a small number of people were ever treated in this way when they died.” That looks to me like stating the position four times over. And what conclusion should we draw? The author suggests that now we should think of the Neanderthals “less like unfeeling brutes. More like cousins”.

You might think this an unwarranted interjection of modern ideas about what burial means, based on our own preconceptions, but the author reassures us. It’s OK, states one of the research team, as long as we are looking at each site with “the utmost rigour and with as few preconceptions as possible”.

If I felt the author had been more aware of her own preconceptions, it might have made a more interesting book. Plus, of course, taking a red pen to the many unnecessary words – for example, you don’t examine remains, you “painstakingly comb through the remains” (p110) .  

Fantasizing

The chapter on the Red Lady ends with two pages of fantasy, imagining how the “Red Lady” might have got into the cave:

“We can imagine the day of his burial. He could have been a murderer, or murdered. But let’s imagine him as a fallen hero.” 

This is followed by three pages of pure imaginative reverie. Yet, elsehwere, the author warns us against too much speculation: “Such tantalising suggestions of grave good and perhaps even stones placed as grave markers. But it’s so important not to let the imagination run wild”. [p113] 

When I read a popular science book, I like to be told about what has been discovered. I’m perfectly happy with uncertainty, but above a certain level, uncertainty just leaves me (the typical general reader) dissatisfied. 

Compared to this book, I found other popular science authors such as Francis Pryor (for archaeology) and Steve Jones (for evolution and genetics) far more informative and readable. And less idly speculative.

The Voyage of the Beagle: the best popular science book ever?

 

Darwin in 1840, by George Richmond (Down House)

The Voyage of the Beagle might not be the first ever popular science book, but it certainly has a claim to be the first significant example, and today remains one of the best popular science books ever written. Even today, with thousands of popular science books on the market, Darwin’s account compares very favourably. It’s interesting to examine why that should be. 

By “popular science” is meant to convey scientific thinking in a format that non-specialists can follow. It means more than simply exposition. It certainly does not mean a textbook, which starts from the premise that the author knows but the reader does not.

The popular science genre

There are examples of earlier science books for the general reader, but the genre seems to have emerged during the 19th century; according to Wikipedia, the earliest popular science book was Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), probably best known today because Whewell created the term “scientist” in a review of this book. 

Today, popular science is a well-established component of trade publishing. For some authors, their academic reputation has not suffered as a result of their popular writing (Steven Jay Gould and Douglas Hofstadter spring to mind). Wikipedia contains a list of no fewer than 200 popular science authors, the majority of them still alive today. Its popularity, it would seem, has never been greater. But there is one great difference between science today and in Darwin’s time: the growth of the science academy has transformed and professionalized the study of science, and in many areas limited or removed the role of the amateur. Today, there is often an expectation that science will be practised (or written about) only by professionals, and this affects the tone and style of writing science for the common reader. Here is Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, and well-established popular science writer, writing about evolution and religion: 

Today’s biology emphasises how little relevance the subject has to the issues so often and so tediously discussed by non-biologists. [Darwin’s Island, 2009, Preface] 

In other words, non-scientists should keep out of this discussion: biology is for (professional) biologists only. Cat Jarman, writing about genetics and archaeology, uses the pronoun “we” to mean, not all of us, but professional archaeologists, not including the reader: 

… the new isotopic and genetic evidence on migration has forced us to rethink the interpretation of these burials … The remarkable shift in the way we are learning from the past and the scientific evidence … is having a tremendous impact.  [Cat Jarman, River Kings, 2021, pp 150-152] 

There is a very different feel when we travel with Darwin on the Beagle: we feel we are sharing his discovery as he sees new unexplained rock structures, new evidence of extinct animals. We don’t feel that he knows, and we do not. Crucially, we often don’t know what we are going to find: this is true of people, plants, animals, and rocks. 

Darwin avoids lecturing by sharing his thinking. Although for each new landing, Darwin is happy to present what is already known on a topic, as a result of his background reading, he soon moves on to his hypothesis, which he shares with us: not to tell us that he knows and we don’t, but to say “I think this might be the cause … what do you think?” In other words, he respects the reader. We all notice what is around us when we travel, and we make observations, but not quite as incisively as Darwin. The most commonplace objects and events start him thinking. For example, he is crossing the Cordillera Mountains between modern-day Peru and Argentina, and then, presumably during a rest halt, notices the mule train carrying their luggage: 

In a troop each animal carries on a level road, a cargo weighing 416 pounds (more than 29 stone), but in a mountainous country 100 pounds less; yet with what delicate slim limbs, without any proportional bulk of muscle, these animals support so great a burden! The mule always appears to me a most surprising animal. That a hybrid should possess more reason, memory, obstinacy, social affection, powers of muscular endurance, and length of life, than either of its parents, seems to indicate that art has here outdone nature. [The Voyage of the Beagle, 2nd edition, chapter 15]. 

You can almost see Darwin’s thought processes in action; and you feel encouraged to look, and to think, for yourself. When he writes about “the upraised recent shells along more than 2,000 miles on the western coast” of Latin America, you suddenly think, yes, of course, that’s how to demonstrate earth movement on a large scale. Unlike much other popular science writing, Darwin’s Voyage makes you want to go out and to look for yourself. I’d love to know how many people became scientists as a result of reading Darwin’s account of his epic journey. 

Is the Voyage just a popular account, a travelogue? It’s certainly not a fully-fledged scientific treatise; it is an account of a voyage, with, afterwards, separate specialist publications examining the various finds from the expedition. Nonetheless, I bet that for every reader of the books about the specialist findings, there are a hundred readers of this book. And, unlike the specialist accounts, Darwin gives us a gloriously joined-up account. He pulls everything together, displays the evidence he has found, gives his interpretation, but appears to make you think that your opinion is valued.  You can disagree.

Darwin the observer

For Darwin, his focus on science does not prevent him responding to non-scientific events. During the voyage, he encounters people and places that he responds to, quite openly. In Brazil, he is horrified by the evidence of slavery: 

On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco … [The Voyage of the Beagle, 2nd edition, chapter 21]

Some of his attitudes are of course out-dated; in Mauritius he praises the English-built roads and compares them unfavourably with the earlier French colonial infrastructure (and you suspect not without a little national pride). He takes a great dislike to everyone in New Zealand. But we can make allowances for what appears as prejudice to modern eyes. Certainly, Darwin’s five-year journey was not value-free, whatever Steve Jones claims: 

As Darwin put it in The Descent of Man, ‘We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it.’ Science can do that, and no more.  [Steve Jones, Darwin’s Island, preface] 

For me, the unfortunate distinction between “the truth” and everything else is what science has lost in the last hundred or so years. For me, the Voyage represents science at its best: thinking, questioning, no doubt sometimes wrong, but always observing. The experience of reading the Voyage is to share one scientist’s inquisitive examination of everything he sees. Right at the end of the book, Darwin asks himself if he would recommend a similar journey to anyone: “If a person asked my advice before undertaking a long voyage, my answer would depend upon his possessing a decided taste for some branch of knowledge, which could by this means be advanced.” For me, the magic of Darwin is the distinction between his taste for knowledge, and his openness to discovery of things he did not know when he set out: genuine scientific enquiry, and genuine inquisitiveness.

A quick tour of museums in the Netherlands

 

The Depot Boijmans van Beuningen: ostentatious  example of conspicuous consumption

Three days, three art galleries in the Netherlands. The impression from two out of three of them was excellent; one was very disappointing.

The Hague Kunstmuseum, courtyard and cafe

First, the successes. The Kunstmuseum in The Hague was a revelation: a glorious 1930s design by H P Berlage. Having visited The Hague a couple of times before, I am astonished that I didn’t see this gallery, but perhaps it has something to do with the museum’s title: until 2019 it was called the “Gemeentemuseum”, which doesn’t convey (to me) what the museum actually is: a collection of art. It is a joy to wander round this purpose-built gallery, with concealed ceiling lights and tile decorations throughout. Although the museum is vast, there are small, intimate exhibition spaces as well. The exhibition we saw (Josef and Anni Albers) was well presented, and the café (located in courtyard, formerly open to the elements, now enclosed) was a dream.

The Museum de Lakenhal (that is, “cloth museum”  in Leiden was another great success. Here was the best kind of local collection, a museum that showed artists with a connection to Leiden, but most of all to show the history of the cloth industry in Leiden. Where better than the building where the cloth was authenticated as genuine before being sold? Paintings took up less than half the exhibition space; the rest of the vast building showed cloth-making details, something about the siege of Leiden, and some fascinating early 20th-century art. This museum had been closed for some years for refurbishment; it was worth the wait.  

It is a good idea that art galleries are periodically refurbished; but what do you do with a museum during the building works? The Rotterdam Boijmans Van Beuningen museum is an example of how not to do it. Alongside the main building is a highly impressive egg-shaped building covered in reflective mirroring. This building, the Depot, we are told, is the future of museums. For the first time ever, the museum store was being opened to the public. This store, comprising five floors, with a restaurant at the top and a roof garden above, is big enough, we are told, to hold all the museum’s artworks – no fewer than 151,000 objects. For 20 Euros, we can buy a ticket to see the store. But what do we see? There are precisely 14 pictures on display with captions. To view these, you queue and are admitted a few at a time to the single room with these works on display.

This room has the 14 paintings on display from the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (not, admittedly, just from the back, but if the pictures were against the wall, you could show more).

I quite understand why museums need to close. But to charge €20 to see 14 paintings seems to me a not very fair transaction. Almost alongside this room, which had a queue of visitors waiting patiently for admission, there was a much larger room that was completely empty. It would have been possible to show not 14 but 140 paintings on the walls of this room, complete with captions. Why was this not done?

To be fair, the museum website states quite clearly that the highlights are just 14 pictures. But there is no explanation why only 14 are shown. Worse, an accompanying wall display explains that the presentation of just 14 paintings was “made possible” by a sponsor. Is the display of works of art not what a gallery is for? Does it require a sponsor to show 14 works? 

The astonishing explanation for the 14 paintings that were on display

Had the museum not used “crystal easels”, many more paintings could have been displayed in the one room. On another floor, there was a vast empty room, which could have held, in my estimate, ten times as many paintings. In other words, it was clearly not lack of space to display the pictures. The impression overall of the depot was that space was not at a premium; there was a vast atrium through the centre of the building. No expense had been spared in building the depot.

What made things worse was that dotted around the store were many objects that had been clearly put on display, but without any information about the object. There was a complete lack of the kind of information I would expect from a gallery – who created this artwork? When was it done? – and instead, a smug presentation that made it clear that the museum knows what it is doing, even when it doesn’t. 

Objects displayed to demonstrate the museum's display skills, but not, it seems to tell us anything about what they are

To give a further example. One of the multimedia displays comprised several large numbers, which on closer examination were totals from a search of the  collection’s digital catalogue. By interrogating the catalogue, the display proudly told us, we can see how many objects in the collection have no image. Or have no metadata. In other words, the online catalogue is not complete – yet this is presented as a kind of achievement, rather than a failure. 

Similarly, the museum had a room dedicated to a project based around slavery. This comprised one picture, of a 19th century sugar plantation in Brazil, that had been annotated, like this:

This is an example of labour, just in case you hadn't noticed

There were similar captions for “slavery”. The aim seemed to emphasise to the visitor that the museum was fully aware of the issues raised by some of its collection, and had taken action. Now we all know this represents labour, so there is nothing more to worry about.

In summary, I would give The Hague Kunstmuseum and De Lakenhal 10/10; The Rotterdam Boijmans van Beuningen, 0/10, for a patronizing and unwelcoming attitude to its visitors. 

Impressions of Carnival at Kettle’s Yard

 

Paul Dash, detail of The Float

If you hadn’t seen the title as you entered this show, you could be forgiven for not knowing what is was about. The title is actually Paint Like the Swallow Sings Calypso, which doesn’t tell you much either, until I noticed the introductory text explaining that “The Mighty Swallow” was a calypso singer protesting against inequalities. But I didn’t see much sign of inequalities in the works of the show.

The phrase “Impressions of Carnival” actually appears on the Kettle’s Yard website describing the exhibition. It serves as a reasonable title, if you interpret it (very) broadly. But the problem for me was not just with the show title, but also at the micro-level, reading and understanding the captions, which contained many unexplained references – for example, what a Schönbartbuch is. Like much in this show, I had to resort to Google and to Wikipedia to get some idea about things being described. It didn’t help that the captions to the works appeared to be in reverse order, so the caption that told you who Paul Dash is appears in the corner of the room opposite the entrance.

Unbelievably billed as bringing together the collections of Kettle’s Yard and the Fitzwilliam for the first time, it looked to me that the genesis was an invitation to three artists, Paul Dash, Errol Lloyd and John Lyons (who is also a writer), to see what they found interesting in the two collections, and what comparisons could be made (or “in dialogue”) with their own. So this kind of explains why we get two Crucifixions, one by Graham Sutherland, and one by the curators – but what does that have to do with Carnival? We also get an abstract work entitled “Torture”, and a sweet little work by William Orpen accepting an invitation to his friend Charles Conder’s party. There is a Picasso print, mistakenly called an oil painting, about the Minotaur, although I fail to see any connection with carnival. If there is one, could they tell us, so we can all share it?

On the positive side, if we become a bit more relaxed about the ostensible theme, there are some lovely works. Paul Dash does some very good scenes of groups of people, done almost entirely with pen and ink.

Avinash Chandra, detail of Black Feast

Avinash Chandra has a tumultuous scene that could be many people, or could just be an abstract pattern, in a lovely combination of yellow, orange and black. A 17th-century engraving of a Bacchanal shows putti dancing in an exquisite horizontally oriented print. Fritz Moeser’s Monstrous head breathing is a fine linocut. 

John Phillips, Spanish Carnival (no date)

And, finally, a real gem from the Fitzwilliam collection, Spanish Carnival, by John Phillip. It sounds a hackneyed topic, and I’ve never heard of the artist, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has never been exhibited in the galleries. But the painting, viewed close-up, has a wonderful immediacy; two figures have just removed their masks, and the woman seems to be captured in the act of turning to face the viewer, while the man, holding a guitar, is intimately close behind her. It would be an achievement for a photography to capture such immediacy.

But for me, this show would be all the better for some further investigation: where did the Caribbean carnival originate? Was it brought from Europe via the masked ball? In this show we have a masked ball (although I struggled to find any masks in it). It shouldn’t be difficult to document the connection, the development, and the modern-day manifestations. Wikipedia has no fewer than 16,500 words on the topic “Carnival”. That would make a useful start. 

How to read (rather than read about) Charles Darwin

 

Christmas Day at Port Desire, 1833, by the expedition draughtsman, Conrad Martens

We are reading Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), which skilfully blends travelogue, notes on geology and zoology, as well as climate, ethnography, and even recent politics. Darwin writes in a wonderfully accessible way, but his book, although intended for a general audience, was published over 175 years ago, and so not surprisingly, many of the names, ideas, and thinking within it are now superseded: names of species, for example. Darwin’s epic journey was so wide-ranging that the details of the journey are fascinating in their own right, but the fact that Darwin was able to identify birds, plants, mammals, and insects, as well as making educated guesses about the formation of rocks, means that he combines a unique eye-witness account with an inspiring intellectual curiosity. He is not lecturing, but sharing with us what he has read (he appears to have done his homework before every field trip, so he has an idea of what he expects to see), but also what it means. For many of the rock formations or fauna and flora he has to guess, but his thought process is compelling. We can make it even more of a gripping experience by comparing what he thought with what is currently known

Unfortunately, this is where reading Darwin becomes challenging. Quite what did he see? Exactly where did he go? I am a general reader, but the Voyage is probably among the top 20 science books for general readers. (The Internet tells me Darwin’s Voyage is the 226th greatest nonfiction book of all time, which is some honour – one day I will look at the 225 above it). But I get no help from the edited editions I have been reading. Where is a good annotated edition? What do I mean by annotated?

• It should include a reasonably detailed map that shows where Darwin went. It is surprisingly difficult to recreate exactly where Darwin travelled from the text of the Voyage, because he frequently went back as well as forward.
• It should include a chronology. The original text simply states “June 1” or whatever, so I lose track of what year I is.
• It should explain differences in terminology – for example, all the names of individual islands in the Galapagos are now referred to by Spanish, not English names. So Darwin’s Albemarle Island is today Isabela Island, and so on. That’s fine, and Wikipedia provides both names, helpfully. But none of the editions of the text I have looked at provide the modern equivalents. 

The Arden edition of Shakespeare, Hamlet (1899). There is a clear division of text, textual variants, and editorial notes, which cover both problems of word meanings ("bruit") and encyclopedic background ("Wittenberg")

Here is an annotated edition of a literary text, one of the most famous annotated editions: the Arden edition of Shakespeare, one volume for each play. The interested reader can consult on the same page explanations of unusual words in the text; even if the modern-day editor cannot solve all the problems, he or she can at least indicate potential explanations. Amazingly, there seems to be no equivalent for Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle.

The actuality of the Beagle journey is that there are several sources, a mixture of journals and letters done during the voyage, as well as accounts written after the end. Captain FitzRoy wrote an account, for example, and Darwin kept more than one journal. Some editions make use of this material. I tried three editions.

Penguin Classics edition (1989)

The Penguin Classics edition, edited and abridged by Janet Brown and Michael Neve (1989) has two editors credited, yet the text appears to be without any annotations. Darwin writes, for example, about a kingfisher in the Cape Verde Islands, which he calls Dacelo jagoensis, but the genus Dacelo, according to Wikipedia, applies only to four species of the Australian/New Guinea bird the Kookaburra. Has nobody checked to see which bird Darwin was referring to? Darwin’s visit to the Cape Verde region includes visits to Praya (modern Praia) and to St Paul and St Jago. Where are they? Wikipedia is my friend, but it doesn’t answer every question I have. 

Better than the Penguin edition is The Voyage of the Beagle: The Illustrated Edition, published by Zenith Press, and copyright Quarto, 2015 (presumably a packaged title that was then published by a US publisher). This edition is based on the second edition of Darwin’s book, and is also abridged (but you only discover this on page 481). But here again, while an attempt has been made to include some illustrations (which vary wildly from standard picture agency shots to drawings by the official artist on the voyage) yet I have found no annotations of the text itself. This is tantalizing indeed, for it is clear from the illustrations that someone knowledgeable has identified the modern name for a species described by Darwin – yet they have not identified that the modern and old names are of the same thing. Two completely different names are used in close proximity, for example, the Galapagos land iguana is described as Conolopholus subcristatus in a photo, then, two lines further down, as Amblyrynchus Demarlii by Darwin. They are presumably describing the same thing.

Neither of these two editions includes a usable map or chronology. Nor does the third edition, The Beagle Record (Cambridge, 1979), although this tries to do something rather different. It contains selections from the various letters and journals by the participants, plus a wonderful collection of contemporary images. However, here again, no attempt is made to link old and new species names.   

Do editions of classic science texts not include annotation? I was astonished to read on the endpaper of The Beagle Record an ecstatic endorsement for an edition of Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection by R C Stauffer: 

I cannot praise highly enough the meticulous work of Stauffer … in rendering the text right down to the details of Darwin’s misspellings … Stauffer has even attained the ideal of scholarly selflessness by adding not a word of commentary on ideas or concepts … What can I say except that Natural Selection is a joy to read?

This comment is by none other than Stephen Jay Gould. A joy to read it may be, for scholars as familiar with the literature as Gould. While there are any number of books about Darwin, where are the texts of Darwin’s words, made accessible for the common reader? I would quite enjoy a word or two of commentary on ideas and concepts. Or am I alone? 

 

Ruggles of Red Gap and national stereotypes

Ruggles of Red Gap. Laughton (centre), at this point still a butler, has been asked to drink with two noisy and raucous Americans, who have just annoyed the entire cafe by jumping on each other's backs and running around. I’m with Laughton here: I'd rather be somewhere else.

The 1935 Hollywood comedy, Ruggles of Red Gap is rated positively by all the reviews I have read, and yet I found the film deeply disturbing. Perhaps I am over-reacting; there are plenty of other films of that decade in the US that have similar sentiments. My appalled fascination in the film is from its success as a work of propaganda, both at the time of its release (it was very successful) but also today. In its way, this film is as insidious as the Catholic Church instilling an outdated morality on generations of believers. In this case, the believers are the American public, and the power providing the propaganda is the Hollywood studio. 

The plot is simple. We are in Paris. Charles Laughton plays Ruggles, a butler to English aristocrat the Earl of Burnstead, memorably played by Roland Young. Ruggles finds himself traded in a game of poker and won by Egbert and Effie Floud, a nouveau riche couple from the American West. Effie is a would-be social climber, but her husband, Egbert, prefers check suits, and the saloon rather than the Parisian café.   

Ruggles travels with the Flouds back to their home town of Red Gap, in Washington State, and for the remainder of the film we are entertained by an English butler trying to come to terms with the raw West. We pass over in silence the fact that Ruggles has been won in a card game, which sounds like slavery to me (in fact, Laughton himself calls it “the country of slavery”). In the end, Ruggles declares his freedom and gives up being a butler. He opens a restaurant and decides who can eat (and who can’t eat) in it. We are expected to be entertained by the rip-roaring genuineness and bonhomie of the uncultured but genuine Americans, contrasted to Laughton’s excessive reserve after a lifetime of service. 

Leo McCarey is the director. You would expect him to be a master of comedy: He paired Laurel with Hardy, back in the 1920s, and directed many of their best early films. Hence, you would expect him to have a sense of comic timing. 

My claim is that Hollywood was responsible for much of the complacency, populist xenophobia, and blatant dishonesty of much of the 20th-century USA. It’s all here: misogyny, racism, but worst of all, a smug satisfaction with mythical American values that did not represent the American people, yet were foisted on them by the studios. 

1. The land of equality. This is a theme repeated by many of the characters, and even, by the end, by Ruggles himself. Yet when Ruggles first arrives at Red Gap, where everyone is supposedly equal, he encounters black and Chinese servants. Clearly, the land of equality is not for everyone. And not mentioned is the fabulous wealth of the Flouds, who can afford to destroy all the clothes they have just purchased, not once but twice in the film. The vast inequality in income seems to be countered by Egbert Floud’s fondness for drinking in the saloon: in other words, he is one of us.  
2. Laughton’s character is not fully fleshed out. The story attempts to show his “gradual liberation from generations of class predestination” [Village Voice] yet fails miserably at that one attempt of character development. We enjoy Laughton’s reserved British butler, but his attempts to look drunk, and his transformation to independent thinking, don’t convince. Comedy is not Laughton’s forte.
3. The so-called “liberal” American values celebrated seem to comprise boorish behaviour, heavy drinking, treating sales people (in Paris, of course), and ignoring others. The scene depicted in the still from the movie shows Laughton drinking with two back-slapping Americans, who greet each other so loudly that they bring an entire café to a standstill by their antics.
4. You will say the film is a caricature both of Americans and of Europeans. But by the film’s own terms, that caricature is what Laughton chooses to be part of. The film attempts to be both serious and caricature, and fails to reconcile the two. Laughton displays his new-found fondness for equality by bodily ejecting a diner from his restaurant – just like throwing someone out of the saloon. 

If you think I am exaggerating, ask yourself: how many American comedies include a complete retelling of the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln? Let’s look at that scene in detail. We are in the Red Gap saloon. One character is not able to remember any of the words from Lincoln’s famous speech. It is funny, of course, that nobody in the saloon can remember even one word of perhaps the most quoted speech in US history. But then follows a blatant betrayal of the principles of film-making: don’t repeat the point too many times. The camera follows the bartender as he asks everyone in the saloon if they know the words. Nobody does. OK, it’s funny, we get the point, so why does the film have to repeat the question six or seven times? Twice, at most three, would have been plenty. 

It gets worse. With each repetition of the question, we laugh less. By the fifth or six time, we start to question the director’s ability to gauge his audience’s  response, so we should not feel too surprised when the climax of the scene, presumably what the director (or studio) must have felt was the film’s most important moment, is when Laughton quietly reveals he knows the address in full. The full Gettysburg address is only 272 words, and took Lincoln just two minutes to recite, but two minutes in a comedy is at least a minute too long. Mercifully, the rendition begins with Laughton speaking so softly, it is several sentences before you realise what he is saying. Unfortunately, once we do recognize the speech, it becomes clear he is going to recite the whole thing. At this point, Laughton switches gear to his classical serious theatre pose (which means he takes even longer over the speech, another error in the comedy) – but his delivery is aimed at the viewer, not the other characters. Yet, unbelievably, in case we didn’t get the message that is so clumsily imposed on us by the director, the camera moves around the room to show the raucous drinkers and gamblers in the saloon, silenced and transfixed by Lincoln’s words. It is simply not believable; a grotesque error of timing; an offense to the audience that the director so blatantly instructs us how to respond by depicting an utterly improbable silence and reverence. I don’t doubt that the Gettysburg Address is moving, but if I recited it in a Western saloon, it would be laughed down. Unless, of course, you are a Hollywood studio boss, shamelessly and crassly exploiting the vast entertainment machine you have created to try to influence popular feeling. And what happened to the “lowbrow good, highbrow not to be trusted” tone of the movie? 

The worst aspect of Lincoln’s address is that his words about equality did not apply in Red Gap, and were still being forgotten for over a hundred years after he said them. 

It is one of the most blatant and sickening examples of club-footed populism in Hollywood cinema. The worst of it is that, here in the 21st century, almost one hundred years after the film, critics praise the film to the skies, and, specifically, that recitation of the Gettysburg Address! Here are some comments by others on the film: 

In its optimism and faith in the American principle of equal opportunity, Ruggles of Red Gap ranks among other great movies about outsiders who transform their lives through political study [Kozak’s Classic Cinema, June 30 2018) 

Its big scene – Laughton … reciting the Gettysburg Address in a saloon, as the camera pans across the awed faces of the cowhands. It’s a bit much, but it works like magic. [Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 2007] 

this is the archetypal film they don't make any more, partly because comedy has now grown too raucous to favour the quiet drollery of players like Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland [Time Out, 2012] 

The director celebrates the friendship, openness, spontaneity, joie to vivre, and solidarity of the Americans. [Guide des Films, Laffont, Paris, 1997] [perhaps the French reviewer is warming to a mythical image of a republic]

Ruggles of Red Gap left me feeling uncomfortable, in the same way that, in a night out with a group of friends, they drink too much and start behaving badly to bystanders, and you feel you either tolerate uncomfortably their bad behaviour, and feel uneasy about it, or become ostracised for standing up for the rights of others. It’s not a situation I want to be in, and I certainly don’t want to be celebrating a piece of back-slapping populism that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. 

Ruggles encounters American liberal values

Turning non-fiction into narrative

Photo by Ben Griffiths on Unsplash

An interesting article by Michael Gorra (TLS, 2 October 2020) explains the thinking behind his 2012 book Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the making of an American Masterpiece:

I wanted to tell the story, not of a life but of a work. I wanted to turn criticism itself into a narrative act.

I haven’t read Gorra’s book, but I am fascinated by what he was trying to do. Gorra articulates something that has been taking place for several years in non-fiction publishing, although I haven’t seen it so clearly stated as here. 

1. “Literary Criticism in the 1950s had an artificially large audience, one fed by the paperback revolution, the expansion of higher education, and the mid-century aspirations of middlebrow culture …[but] these conditions will not return”.
2. But the general public still reads – just different things. Gorra states “A lot of people will sit still for the time it takes to read a 2,000-word review”. This is true (it tallies with my estimate for review length of around 1,400 words for a review in the TLS, and 3,000 words for reviews in the London Review of Books; the former is similar in length to a blog post, but the latter strays into essay territory, and I get bored).
3. Beyond that, readers want narrative! “If readers go for biography, they do so … because they want narrative, and prefer that narrative to discursive forms of argument.”.
4. “I wanted to turn criticism itself into a narrative act … hoping it might then reclaim some fraction of the readership that critics such as Edmund Wilson once had.”

Gorra is correct that the lit crit market for books has all but disappeared. as a book genre for non-specialists has more or less disappeared.  Critics who wrote for a wide audience, such as Edmund Wilson or John Bayley, have no successors. Books of literary criticism published today are typically by academics looking to gain or keep a tenured position. 

I can think of several examples of non-fiction books, not all of them literary, that combine narrative with more of an exposition. Frances Pryor’s The Fens (2019) is an excellent combination of the author’s archaeological excavations, with the work of others, combined with his own experience of living in the Fens. It makes for a remarkable work, that as a reader you relate to, rather than simply following a researcher’s project (for example Cat Jarman’s River Kings, 2021, which simply doesn’t have the same tone of personal involvement as Pryor’s work). 

Most lit crit titles (and humanities works generally) have no narrative drive. But it’s surprising to think of classic non-fiction books you have read, and to realise how many of them did have some kind of story-telling thread to them. Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment (1966-69); Paul Hazard’s The European Mind 1680-1715; R.R. Palmer’s Twelve who ruled (1970) and yes, the biggest page-turner of all, Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940), all have an addictive quality – even over multiple volumes, in Gay’s case. 

One note of caution: when autobiography takes over, and the author starts describing the queues at the airport as they fly off to their latest excavation, this reader is not overwhelmed with engagement. Yes, I want a narrative, and yes, I want to learn things, but no, I don’t want a blow-by-blow account of the minutiae of the writing and research process – unless it is, say, Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, which is a classic narration that reveals the author’s thinking as he begins to formulate his ideas about evolution. 

Excitingly, Michael Gorra continues his article about narrative criticism by giving several examples of works that he likes. I’m not familiar with most of the books he mentions, but they will certainly be worth following up. Gorra broadens his discussion to include books about films and their making, as well as texts about art. He mentions Julian Barnes, one of the few writers on literary topics I find worth reading when I don’t have to read fiction for examination purposes. Barnes on Flaubert’s parrot (in the book of the same name), and on Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa, are examples of the approach Gorra advocates. 

On reflection, the mixing of genres has been around for many years. Novelists have frequently used their engagement with the reader to air their interests and prejudices about topics they feel are important. How many readers of Anna Karenina enjoy all the lengthy chapters about land reform and the organisation of local government? Clearly, Tolstoy thought they were important for him. Better at combining social issues with fiction is Dickens, in Hard Times and Bleak House, for example. A less successful (because too obvious) mixture of fiction and presentation of the 19th-century debate about evolution is Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered (2018), which leaves me slightly uncomfortable because I feel the joins between the two aspects are too visible. Reading Darwin himself adds the process of genuine discovery to a historical narrative.

My thanks to Michael Gorra for outlining this approach. I certainly intend to follow up his recommendations for further reading. And don’t be surprised if my account of what I have read takes the form of a narrative…

The ageing Cary Grant, sex idol

 

Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (1938)

David Thompson called Cary Grant “he was the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema” [New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2003 edition]. But something happened to the best actor during the 1950s. Was it just that he was showing his age?   

To make Thompson’s remark more precise, Grant was of course not the best actor in cinema, but he was perhaps the best at one very specific kind of role: the male lead, the heartthrob, the young man in the movie that all the women in the audience dream of marrying. But there has to be more to it than that, for at least two reasons. 

Firstly, there are plenty of attractive male leads. What made Grant so special? It wasn’t just the looks. Burt Lancaster and Rock Hudson are examples of hunks with little acting ability. They didn’t have to do anything, they just had to be. Grant, on the other hand, looked good and played exquisitely. We think of him for his effortless superciliousness, the impression he gave of not caring – which frequently extended to not caring about others trying to get round him. In An Affair to Remember, he repeatedly snubs an elderly man who wants to introduce his wife and sister to Grant. It is impolite and jolting to see him ignore and ridicule the approach, but that is part of Grant’s charm. Maybe he says the things we dream about but dare not say. 

In addition, we remember him for his sublime mannered way of hesitating and not speaking. It sounds crazy for an actor to be remembered for what he didn’t say, but in film after film he makes a noise, or audibly hesitates, or begins to say something under his breath, and it just seems so natural. 

Yet, if Grant was an icon of desirable masculinity, he lost it at some point in the 1950s. in his more standard male star roles he was losing effectiveness and becoming less convincing during the 1950s. After all, this is a man born in 1904. So by the time he made films such as: 

An Affair to Remember (1957)

To Catch a Thief (1955)

Charade (1965)

he was decidedly middle-aged and unconvincing – you cannot play an eligible bachelor aged 53 (as he does in An Affair). An Affair to Remember is an interesting case, because it is a remake, almost shot for shot, of Love Story, made by the same director 20 years earlier. The remake stars Grant and loses all the chemistry of the original film. Why was that? Irene Dunne is far sexier than Deborah Kerr; the later film is in lurid colours while the original was in other-worldly black and white; but that doesn't explain the success of Charles Boyer, who was never more than a competent lead male, compared to Grant at his peak. However, Grant aged 53 gives the impression, for the most part, that is he simply going through the motions; he never once looks captivated by any of the women in the film. 

There are only a few touches that remind us of his hesitations, his sheer naturalness, particularly in the final scene where he meets again Terry McKay, the woman he fell in love on the boat. For the most part, he appears flat, no longer brimful of life, activity, and sarcasm. Just the sarcasm, in fairly small doses. 

An Affair to Remember (1957): an old man unconvincing as the seducer

Perhaps the most revealing limitation, for me, is that Kerr is never for a moment his equal. When Kerr tells him the story of her life, after the first romantic episode, she states that is all there is; her story is just one page. It’s a terrifying admission by the woman that she is inconsequential. By that statement she abandons any real pretence to match Grant, something that would never happen with Katharine Hepburn or Irene Dunne. Throughout Kerr’s narrative, there is an undercutting by Grant that mixes sexual overtones with impatience: 

Terry McKay: We were talking about the place where I was born...

Nickie Ferrante: I can hardly wait for you to grow up.

This is Grant at his best; but sadly, the film fails because Grant is no longer depicting for us the man we would all like to marry (or remarry). 

And yet, under a great director, such as Hitchcock, Grant was capable of playing an utterly convincing role in his fifties, in North by Northwest (1956).  For many male actors, the physique declined but a character took over. Jack Nicholson, Jeff Bridges, Laurence Olivier, even Dirk Bogarde managed to move to highly successful character-based lead roles later in life. For Grant, it was not so simple, so clearly there is an element of the sexual about him; the way with words and the immaculately groomed hair were no longer sufficient. Perhaps the truth is that we wanted Grant to be the male sex idol, endlessly young, sublimely unconcerned about reputation and propriety. We didn’t want that to end, so we carried on paying for our cinema tickets just to see an old man act out his young steps once again for us – even if it doesn’t really work. As Thompson says, “he was very likely, a hopeless fusspot as man, husband, and even father”. But who cares? In his best roles, he made us forget that side; domesticity didn’t exist for him. We want him for 90 minutes of escapist erotic magic.

Why I’m no longer reading Alexandre Dumas

 

I admit it, I love page-turners: novels that you can’t put down. I remember being totally hooked on Bond books, Gone with the Wind, Dickens, even Agatha Christie, trying to find what happened next. I loved The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, when I read it some years ago. I followed that with The Three Musketeers, and it must have kept me interested, even if not as good as The Count, because I finished it. 

So why abandon Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, when I’ve only read four chapters? Have my standards got higher? I think that’s unlikely. Because of a lack of historical accuracy? To be honest, I’m not bothered if it gives me a good story, even though the edition I am reading, by David Coward (World’s Classics, 2008), makes it clear Dumas has a very cavalier attitude to facts and events. No, the cause for my dislike was very specific: because the chapter I read, chapter VI, “D’Artagnan at Forty Years of Age”, which was the first to provide some detailed depiction of the main character, left me feeling unhappy with the author’s attitudes. What happened in this chapter to set me against the novel?  

A bit of background. D’Artagnan, one of the musketeers, is the hero of this novel. For the novelist to win us over, he has to begin the novel by getting us to like the main character. This chapter is the moment when he gains our sympathy for the hero. D’Artagnan has been lodging at a hotel in the Rue Tiquetonne, where he has been having an affair with the mistress of the house. Her “inconvenient husband” had run away after “d’Artagnan had made a pretence of running his sword through his body” (not surprising, perhaps, he ran away). Even though the husband has departed, d’Artagnan refuses to marry the (unnamed) woman, for fear of bigamy. 

As the action begins, D’Artagnan returns from a (wholly fictitious) military expedition of several months in the Franche Comte, only to discover that the mistress now has a new partner, a Swiss. She claims she is going to marry her Swiss partner; D’Artagnan states “you cannot marry Madame without my consent, and … I do not give it”. What follows is a fight between the Swiss and D’Artagnan, and even though the Swiss is a foot higher than our hero. “I am a lieutenant in the Musketeers of his Majesty, and consequently your superior in everything”. D’Artagnan wounds the Swiss twice.  

At that point, D’Artagnan, having regained the mistress, returns to the lodging, and immediately rejects her: 

‘Now, fair Madeleine,’ said he, ‘you know the distance between a Swiss and a gentleman! As to you, you have conducted yourself like a low tavern-keeper. So much the worse for you—for by this conduct you lose my esteem and my patronage. I drove out the Swiss to humiliate you; but I shall lodge here no longer. I do not take quarters where I despise people.”

Dumas Alexandre; (père). Twenty Years After (Oxford World's Classics) (p. 62).

What are we to make of this? The Swiss has done nothing, except get in D’Artagnan’s way; yet he is ejected by force, the second of two males to suffer this fate. This blatant misogyny is presented in Dumas’ cheerful style as  the conduct of a swashbuckling hero, resembling in many ways a kind of male behaviour celebrated in the Hollywood Western. The principles are: 

I admit it, I love page-turners: novels that you can’t put down. I remember being totally hooked on Bond books, Gone with the Wind, Dickens, even Agatha Christie, trying to find what happened next. I loved The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, when I read it some years ago. I followed that with The Three Musketeers, and it must have kept me interested, even if not as good as The Count, because I finished it. 

So why should I abandon Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, when I’ve only read four chapters? Have my standards got higher? I think that’s unlikely. Because of a lack of historical accuracy? To be honest, I’m not bothered if it gives me a good story, even though the edition I am reading, by David Coward (World’s Classics, 2008), makes it clear Dumas has a very cavalier attitude to facts and events. No, the cause for my dislike was very specific: because the chapter I read, chapter VI, “D’Artagnan at Forty Years of Age”, which was the first to provide some detailed depiction of the main character, left me feeling unhappy with the author’s attitudes. What happened in this chapter to set me against the novel? 

A bit of background. D’Artagnan, one of the musketeers, is the hero of this novel. For the novelist to win us over, he has to begin the novel by getting us to like the main character. This chapter is the moment when he gains our sympathy for the hero. D’Artagnan has been lodging at a hotel in the Rue Tiquetonne, where he has been having an affair with the mistress of the house. Her “inconvenient husband” had run away after “d’Artagnan had made a pretence of running his sword through his body” (not surprising, perhaps, he ran away). Even though the husband has departed, d’Artagnan refuses to marry the (unnamed) woman, for fear of bigamy. 

As the action begins, D’Artagnan returns from a (wholly fictitious) military expedition of several months in the Franche Comte, only to discover that the mistress now has a new partner, a Swiss. She claims she is going to marry her Swiss partner; D’Artagnan states “you cannot marry Madame without my consent, and … I do not give it”. What follows is a fight between the Swiss and D’Artagnan, and even though the Swiss is a foot higher than our hero. “I am a lieutenant in the Musketeers of his Majesty, and consequently your superior in everything”. D’Artagnan wounds the Swiss twice. 

At that point, D’Artagnan, having regained the mistress, returns to the lodging, and immediately rejects her: 

‘Now, fair Madeleine,’ said he, ‘you know the distance between a Swiss and a gentleman! As to you, you have conducted yourself like a low tavern-keeper. So much the worse for you—for by this conduct you lose my esteem and my patronage. I drove out the Swiss to humiliate you; but I shall lodge here no longer. I do not take quarters where I despise people.” (page 62)

What are we to make of this? The Swiss has done nothing, except get in D’Artagnan’s way; yet he is ejected by force, the second of two males to suffer this fate. This blatant misogyny is presented in Dumas’ cheerful style as  the conduct of a swashbuckling hero, resembling in many ways a kind of male behaviour celebrated in the Hollywood Western. The principles are:

1. Get your way by your fighting. If you can beat a rival in a fight, then you deserve the woman
2. Once you have chosen a female sexual partner, she is your property, even when you are absent. She no longer has a right to independent action.

At this critical moment of the novel, instead of making me feel warm towards the principal character, I felt repulsed by D’Artagnan’s misogyny. The rest of the novel will no doubt display similar attitudes. Might is right, if you are skilled with a sword.

Who translated this edition of Twenty Years After? I noticed on the title page that the book is stated as “Edited with an Introduction and Notes by David Coward” – with no  mention of a translator. Did David Coward really translate Dumas afresh? It doesn’t look like it. Coward states in the Introduction to the World’s Classics edition: 

A version of the authorized French text, by William Robson, was issued in London by Routledge in 1856. Robson’s classic version served as the basis of most subsequent ‘new’ translations and survives substantially in the present edition.

In what way does it “survive substantially in the present edition”? In the errors in the French? Do the inverted commas around "new" make it clear this is nothing of the kind?

There are several schoolboy errors in the translation, for example: 

And he assumed an air of astonishment that Mondori or Bellerose,* the two best comedians of that day, would have envied him.

This is a translation from the French “les deux meilleurs comédiens de l'époque”.  But “comédien” does not mean “comedian”; it means actor. Here is Robson’s 1856 version of the same sentence:

 And he armed his features with a stupidity which Mondori and Bellerin might have envied him, and they were the two best comedians of the period. 

Quite apart from outright errors, much of the phrasing in this edition reads to me like 19th-century English. From page one: 

the light from a candelabra filled with candles illumined it in front. 

In Robson’s translation, this appears as: 

Whilst the front of his figure was illumined by the wax-lights of a candelabre [sic].

My guess is that Oxford have been using the Robson translation, updated and amended piecemeal, in all editions of the book since it was first issued. The imprint page of the Kindle edition I was reading shows simply “Editorial material <C> David Coward 1993” – no claim to copyright is made for the translation. I haven’t been able to find the date of first publication of this edition of Twenty Years After, but my guess is that it was first published quite early in the series, and has remained in print (and never retranslated) ever since. The World’s Classics series was founded in 1901, and the series was bought by Oxford in 1905, and Oxford claim “A continuous program of new titles and revised editions ensures that the series retains its breadth and reflects the latest scholarship.” Not in the case of this translation, clearly.

The unacceptable attitudes, and the poor translation, combined, as I read chapter six, and left a bad taste in my mouth. Rather than passively accepting an outdated translation by an author with objectionable views, I stopped at that point. I’m no longer reading Dumas, and in future I’m going to look very carefully at foreign literature in World’s Classics. 

The oil sketch from nature

Corot, Le petit chaville, 1823-25, Ashmolean

I’ve been reading about landscape art, based on the recent True to Nature exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum. It was only after visiting the exhibition that I realised that all the works were oil sketches, which turns out to be a genre in its own right. Several of those pictures had all the freshness and lightness of a watercolour, and my assumption, since the sketches had been done in the open air, that they were done using relatively portable tools like watercolour paint.

Valenciennes, Pierre-Henri de, Study of clouds over the Roman campagna, 1782-85, NGA

On reading the catalogue, the oil sketch from nature seems to have existed back to the 18th century, and even before, if we include the pen and ink sketches done by Claude, although it seems to have been a private form of art, not intended for public display. Only relatively recently has there been an interested in collecting and showing these works, with the Fitzwilliam one of the first to collect them. The catalogue mentions exhibitions in 1969, 1977, and 1980 (at the Fitzwilliam), so the oil sketch is today hardly a secret.

It seems incredible that here is an alternative tradition, as it were, that was known to art historians – Clark writes about it in Landscape into Art, back in 1949 – but it was not taken seriously as part of landscape painting history. Why was this? Perhaps fine art curators and writers were, for many years, obsessed with gold-leaf frames: formal kinds of art that sold for high prices and reflected well on the collection that owned them. Sketches and drawings not intended for sale were simply not taken so seriously, even when by the same artists who executed the more highly prized formal works (and put fancy frames around them).

Corot, Convent of Sant'Onofrio on the Janiculum, 1826, Fitzwilliam

The classic example is Corot. Here is Clark on Corot’s first trip to Italy: 

Corot went to Rome as a student in 1825 … with the intention of following in the footsteps of Poussin and of the recent master of classic landscape, Pierre Henri Valenciennes. The sketches he made from nature were undertaken simply as material for later compositions. We must remember that all the classic landscape painters of the time made such studies - those of Valenciennes himself are of considerable beauty – but they were not considered of more than private or professional interest, and were generally destroyed … the sketches made on this first journey are, in some ways, the most remarkable he ever did … looking at these crystalline visions it is hard to believe that they were practically never seen in Corot’s lifetime 

Landscape into Art, chapter five “The Natural Vision”

Just as with Constable, these early sketches are today often more highly prized than Corot’s more formal exhibition pieces. The True to Nature exhibition reveals many, many other artists whose sketches turn out not to be lost, but very evidently part of the naturalistic landscape tradition. Why does Clark not make more of them in his history of landscape art?