Creators (25 page)

If we analyze Twain’s other great piece of autobiography,
Life on the Mississippi
, we find essentially the same pattern: a score or so of major anecdotes; many minor ones; some padding. It is entertainment and most of it could have been delivered onstage. (Though as Twain himself noted, with books you may skip, but with lectures “you must hear the fellow out or leave altogether. I do not recommend mounting the platform.”) Twain’s two best-known books,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
his masterpiece, are also, when inspected closely, compilations of anecdotes. Each has more in common with
The Pickwick Papers
than with, say,
Bleak House
,
Middlemarch
,
Vanity Fair
, or
Portrait of a Lady
. It is true that Huck Finn’s relationship with the escaped slave Jim gives the book unity and a purpose, rather as Pickwick’s refusal to truckle to the lawyers who involve
him in
Bardell v. Pickwick
gives his adventures a plot and a climax. But the enjoyment, both in
Pickwick
and in
Huckleberry Finn
, consists essentially in the anecdotal episodes. Both are great works of art: unplanned, rambling, artistically irresponsible, and chaotic. They work, and work superbly, because of the authors’ inventive genius and sheer creativity.

In the end, creativity is what matters in art. Because of his central position in American literature, Twain has been much studied, not to much effect. There is a large Twain industry in academia. Much of it, in recent decades, has revolved around the question “Is
Huckleberry Finn
a racist book?” It is certainly not a politically correct book. After looking carefully into Twain’s views on blacks, their rights and wrongs, their place in society and how it could be improved, I came to the conclusion that, in all essentials, he had the same views as his older contemporary Abraham Lincoln. Like Lincoln, he was not obsessed with race (as we are supposed to be, and as a bossy minority actually is); rather, he was obsessed with justice. But, like Lincoln, he liked to laugh and make others laugh, and in Twain’s case laughter had priority even over justice, as a rule. That is all one can say about it. Huck’s Jim is the first penetrating and sympathetic portrait of a black in American literature (if we except the doubtful case of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
). There are faults in the book—there are faults, often grievous, in all Twain’s books—but they are outweighed by its astonishing beauty, authenticity, and (despite all Twain’s efforts) truth. In 1885 the library board of Concord, Massachusetts, voted not to buy
Huckleberry Finn
, on the grounds not that it was “racist” but that it was “the veriest trash.” But as Ernest Hemingway noted, two generations later, “It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There’s been nothing so good since.” An exaggeration, no doubt. But not by much. Every American writer has read it. It has influenced each, one way or another.
¹²
The whole of Twain’s vast, sprawling, dog-eared, careless, infuriating, delightful, and inspired output forms a great mountain of detritus which straddles the high road of American writing and forces those involved in it to pick their way over or through it. It is the basic fact of American literature. Hemingway learned from it. What American writer of his times, or since, has not? It is impossible to imagine
the American musical without Twain’s influence, often at second or third hand—or such institutions as Disney,
Time
magazine,
Reader’s Digest
, or the
New Yorker
. James Thurber’s
The Night the Bed Fell
is a literary grandchild of Twain’s. Indeed all of Thurber’s work springs from the fields Twain first tilled. It was the same with Dorothy Parker, who honed and polished the one-liner till it shone brightly, even in Hollywood. There was an element of Twain in the Marx Brothers and Raymond Chandler. Twain’s tricks made an entry into the White House, taking up themes Lincoln had left behind, in the age of Theodore Roosevelt, whose “Speak softly and carry a big stick” is pure Twain. (So, for that matter, is his distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”) Even the priapic John F. Kennedy at his (very rare) best has a twang of Twain. And the great Ronald Reagan occupied the White House for eight memorable years almost entirely in the Twain spirit. He communicated, he governed, by jokes, nearly all of them one-liners, of which he had, literally, thousands, graded and stored in his capacious showman’s memory. A typical one, with its powerful element of truth (as with Twain’s), was: “I’m not too worried about the deficit. It’s big enough to take care of itself.” If Twain was the stand-up comedian of literature, Reagan was the stand-up comedian of the cold war, finally bringing down the curtain on that long historical episode.

Some years ago the Oxford University Press had the inspired idea of reprinting by photocopy all of Twain’s books in their original format and type, together with their old illustrations, and with perceptive introductions added. I secured a copy of this twenty-seven-volume set at an amazingly low price, and it has been more frequently used, ever since, than any comparable series in my library. The way this audacious, vain, unscrupulous, untruthful, appalling man has survived into the twenty-first century is a wonder. It shows that, in the written and spoken word, you can’t beat the ability to create out of thin air.

L
OUIS
C
OMFORT
T
IFFANY
(
1848–1933
)
is an artist worth looking at not only because he was the greatest creator of glassware of modern times, perhaps of all time, but because he takes us into the mysterious and arcane world of glassmaking, the least understood of the crafts. Making fine glass is an extraordinary mixture of creative skill, science, and accident. Humans have been making glass for over 5,000 years; but only quite recently did they discover the chemistry of what they were doing, and there is still a large element of unpredictability in some of the processes. Few people in the art world fully understand glassmaking, be they collectors, dealers, art historians, or curators of museums, even those with large glass collections. Many people go on guided tours of Murano but gawk and pass on none the wiser. The few people who do understand glass, and even write about it, tend to be fanatics, and their accounts are often incoherent, dotted with the strange vocabulary of the craft—slumping, marvering, claw beakers, tweaking, pontils, pucellas, parisous, prunts, lehr, glory hole, annealing, and trailing. Some of the terms are thousands of years old.
¹

Tiffany’s own story, and its aftermath, is a bizarre tale of artistic fashion—a poor man who collected Tiffany’s stuff sixty years ago would be a multimillionaire today. One reason for the enormous prices now paid for these works is that art nouveau, the prevailing mode for most of Tiffany’s career, was totally eclipsed for over a generation, vast quantities of it being destroyed, often delib
erately. Both of his palatial homes, containing the best of his art, were sold off and demolished. No other modern style has had such a low survival rate, and Tiffany’s work suffered more than that of any other designer working in it. Of course glassware, being fragile, suffers more from time and chance than any other artifact, except gold work, which is melted down during hard times. Thus of Benvenuto Cellini’s output, the only major work that has come down to us is the salt of Francis I (and even that has now been stolen, from the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum). Tiffany has not suffered quite so much, but it is likely that only about 10 percent of his ware has been preserved, and many of his unique pieces have vanished forever.

Glass is made from sand or silicon dioxide or silica, with various additives to make it workable. The most common composition is 75 percent silica, 15 percent soda, and 10 percent lime. It defies exact definition, and scientists refuse to recognize it as a material. They write, rather, of “the glassy state” and explain it as a substance, regardless of its chemical composition, which has solidified from the liquid state without forming any crystals. Thus at the atomic level it has none of the regular structure of normal crystalline solids, being instead a random network of atomic bonds in the liquid state, which is preserved in the solid state. Therefore glass has been defined, by Keith Cummings, perhaps the greatest contemporary expert, as “a mobile supercooled liquid whose precise viscosity can be controlled by heat.” The artistic consequence of its indeterminate and indefinable chemistry is that glass can be, and always has been, made and colored from a vast range of different materials and worked in countless different ways at widely separated places all over the globe. It is therefore possible for an ingenious glassmaker to create his own new kind of glass, and this is what Tiffany did when he invented favrile.

New kinds of glass are related to the two basic ways of working it: hot and cold. The hot process is analogous to iron-making, the glass or iron being molded when it is still liquid or viscous; the cold derives from jewelry making, and is akin to a combination of sculpture and etching. The Romans, who united the varying glass technologies of the ancient world and pushed glassmaking forward almost to the point of mass production,
called hot-glass workers
vitrearii
and cold-glass workers
diatriarii
, so distinct were the methods. Susan Frank, whose book
Glass and Archaeology
is a window into how antiquity made glass, warns that all generalizations about glass run into trouble: “Glass is one of the most complex of substances [and] its scientific study as a disordered, multi-component system is in many ways still in its infancy.”
²
Most glass technology and products evolved by accident and were then imitated by craftsmen who did not understand the process. Take drinking glass. Originally people drank from horns, which could not be put down till empty. The earliest drinking glasses were imitative cones—hence the term “tumbler.” The design of the bowl with foot and stem was originally a piece of inspired improvisation, which became classic in the eighteenth century and is still with us today.

Heat is required to melt and stabilize the materials (silica, stabilizer, and flux) into glass. It is solid once cool, or rather supercooled into frozen liquid. The greater the heat, the more liquid it becomes. As it cools it creates an elastic boundary or skin at the point where it meets the air. This allows weird procedures like shearing of a liquid or toughening when the interior mass is under compression and the skin in tension (for instance, dropping in water makes “tough drops” or “Prince Rupert drops”). There are countless methods of working. Inflation, to create a bubble, makes use of the fact that glass hardens as it cools but can be softened by reheating. This involves constant rotation by hand and body movements and is the basis of the ancient skill of glass blowing. In modern times skilled human movements are replaced by complicated machinery. Then there is static pressing, or squeezing between two metal surfaces, to impress patterns, shapes, dates, names, and other devices on blobs of hot glass; this technique is used with buttons and buckles, for instance. It involves the same methods as small-scale metalwork and was a cottage industry in Bohemia. Molds were developed for complicated objects. Sheet glass, following steel technology, is produced between rollers fed by a continuous stream of molten glass. Then there is spinning, the use of centrifugal force, which, at 3,000 revolutions a minute, pushes liquid glass upward into a mold, and is splendid for individual
pieces designed by artists. In primary casting, the original material is pushed into the sand and then removed, leaving a designed void; hot glass is then poured into it direct from the furnace, using a ladle—this is obviously a good way of producing glass sculpture. The ladle can be replaced by an overhead casting machine, which melts the glass mixture and then pours it in a controlled stream. At this point we see an analogy with cooking, to join the analogies with iron founding and jewelry. The more mobile the mass of liquid glass is kept during its founding, the cleaner it becomes. So mobility is essential for clear glass (especially optical glass), and this entails continuous stirring, as in many cooking processes. The cleaner the glass, the stronger it is. Without continuous stirring, striation results, and that makes the glass ugly and fragile. Machines can be made to stir continuously in a way that is beyond the strength of a mere craftsman.
³

All these are primary methods of glassmaking. Secondary methods, using reheated solid glass, do not need high temperatures, so no foundry is necessary and many forms of handworking are possible. These include lamp working, involving a small but intense heating source, and tremendous dexterity of hands and fingers, producing rods and tubes twisted into a vast variety of shapes. This kind of decorative glass, which goes back to Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, calls for simple technology but enormous skill and dexterity, and is still in use. For paperweights and similar pieces, there is cone forming—coating a pliable cone with homogeneous layers, then removing the cone and fusing. It was first developed in ancient Egypt and is still in use for high-quality objects, employing similar methods for forms of sweet making such as Blackpool rock. It looks magic, and is typical of the way in which artistic glassmaking is miraculously more than the sum of its parts. Bending, which exploits the intermediate stage between solid and liquid glass, is still used after 4,000 years. Secondary casting creates a much wider range of qualities than the primary kind.
Pâte-de-verre
, for instance, uses finely crushed glass grains and powders and is now applied for ceramic tiles in spacecraft. Another form of secondary casting is the
cire perdu
method, used from antiquity in casting bronze.
⁴

It is vital to remember that glass is a solution, not a com
pound, and therefore a vast range of ingredients are possible. For instance, opaque white glass can be made by crystals, formed by putting in, say, fluorine; blue glass is made by adding cobalt or copper oxide; you add iron to produce green glass, or chromium, or a mixture of both; uranium oxide, tiny colloidal particles of silver or iron manganese, will produce varieties of yellow glass; cadmium sulphide is used for orange glass; various mixtures—cadmium sulphide plus selenium, antimony sulphide, or copper, gold, or lead—can be used for red glass.
⁵

Over the last 200 years artists and manufacturers have acquired continuously growing knowledge of how different constituents of glass function, and what is the best way of securing this interaction and working the result. Control and predictability have replaced mystery and empirical rituals. Sometimes science is used to produce major improvements in technology. Thus in 1959 Pilkingtons discovered the flat process in which molten glass is floated on a bed of molten tin to produce polished, even sheets; this ended the traditional method of flat glassmaking. In the last fifty years and especially the last twenty-five, glass of enormous strength has increasingly been used as a building material, to create the amazingly light, ethereal appearance of new railway stations and airports.
⁶

Tiffany came to glassmaking through jewelry. His father, Charles Lewis Tiffany, born in 1812, set up a shop in New York in 1837 selling stationery and fancy ware. He seems to have possessed extraordinary acumen in business, plus impeccable taste in choosing his merchandise, a form of creativity insufficiently acknowledged in the history of art, though the growth of studio-workshops in medieval Florence illustrates it perfectly. He had a strategy: to link the burgeoning wealth of the United States to the ancient fine arts and crafts of Europe. His progress from simple homemade stock to imported silverware from England and Germany; Swiss watches; jewelry from France; and glassware, porcelain, and bronze statuary from Italy is a classic example of entrepreneurial growth.
⁷
He then reinvested his profits from selling luxurious imports into creating his own workshops and training and employing American craftsmen. He started making his own jewelry in 1848, and by the 1860s he was running the
biggest business of its kind in America, with a busy branch in Paris. In 1851 he went into silverware and soon dominated the market. During the Civil War in the early 1860s his firm supplied the Union armies with swords, cap badges, buttons, and insignia. He used the enormous profits to expand his luxury business once peace returned, and a vast American plutocracy became his customers. In 1871, for example, his designer Edward Chandler Moore created “Audubon” flatware, silver services using bird motifs from the famous Elephant Folios of
Birds of America
, which Tiffany’s is still making and selling today nearly 140 years later.
⁸
Tiffany was the first American silversmith to adopt the top sterling standard of 925 parts of 1,000 pure silver, and he made the most of the huge Nevada silver boom—so strikingly depicted by Mark Twain—to encourage rich Americans to go in for enormous silver presentation pieces. The William Cullen Bryant vase, for instance, is thirty-four inches high. Even more opulent was a gold vase presented to Edward Dean Adams, designed by the Tiffany artist Paulding Farnham, combining jewelry and silver-and goldsmithing. It is decorated with pearls, rock crystal, amethysts, tourmalines, and spesartites and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Tiffany used the new resources of Nevada, California, New Mexico, and Arizona, supplying silver, gold, and precious and semiprecious stones, in bewildering quantities to make all-American artifacts of the highest quality, which won first prizes at the top European exhibitions.
⁹
He also took advantage of Europe’s political instability to buy up the jewels of royal and aristocratic families that had fallen from power. Thus in 1848 his agents bought up cheap jewel collections in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and Italy; sold them at a princely profit to the new court of Napoléon III in Paris, especially to Empress Eugénie; then bought much of the spoils back again in 1870, when Napoléon III fell and he and his court had to run for it. Grand Europeans also bought Tiffany’s originals: by 1900, two years before he died, Tiffany was selling jewels and silver to twenty-three royal families (including Queen Victoria), as well as 100 millionaires of America’s “gilded age.”

Louis Comfort Tiffany, his son and heir, was primarily an artist rather than a businessman, studying painting first in the
studio of George Inness, then in Paris under the orientalist landscape artist Léon Bailly.
¹⁰
The younger Tiffany was also much impressed by the works of William Morris and his workshop, and by the way artists and craftsmen worked together in the early stages of the arts and crafts movement. All his life Tiffany was an artist and a primary creator. But he was also, by nature, an organizer, a leader, and a businessman—a lavish spender and collector to be sure, but also a man who handled money circumspectly. He always paid his bills by return mail, a rare habit in his world; and he knew exactly how to create a viable business and cater to public taste, as well as improve it. He copied from Morris the idea of artists cooperating in firms. He first formed, in 1877–1878, the Society of American Artists (with John La Farge and Augustus Saint-Gaudens) to improve the quality of American painting and market it successfully. Then, in 1879, he set up, following Morris’s example, the interior decorating firm of Louis C. Tiffany and Associated Artists (the latter including Candice Wheeler, an embroiderer and textile designer). Interior design was the rage, thanks to Whistler, whose Peacock Room was a harbinger, and Oscar Wilde, whose notorious lecture tour of America carried the message of “living for art,” especially in the home. Tiffany’s firm carried out some notable schemes—in the Veterans’ Room in the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City; at Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut; and, not least, at the White House, which under Chester Arthur, president from 1881 to 1885, received its first large-scale makeover since it was built. Arthur got rid of twenty-six wagonloads of “old junk,” as he called it, and brought in Tiffany’s team.
¹¹