Creators (27 page)

There were other developments that also made Tiffany uneasy. He loathed the fauves. He hated the cubists still more. He was deeply upset in 1913, when the Armory Show introduced modern art from Paris to America, especially as half a million people went to see it. Tiffany responded by using his wealth to embellish his houses and entertain lavishly. At his home on Seventy-second Street, the principal theme was ancient Egypt, with decor by Joseph Lindon Smith. Delmonico did the catering for Tiffany’s dinner parties, at which Tiffany often wore Turkish clothes and donned a turban. To compensate for the pain caused him by the Armory Show, he staged a masque at his Madison Avenue showroom. On the stage were some of his most magnificent favrile vases, beautifully spotlighted. The New York Philharmonic Orchestra played, and one of his girlfriends, the dancer Ruth St. Denis, wearing a microskirt, did an Indian hatchet dance to music specially written by Thomas Steinway. The
New York Times
called it “The most lavish costume
fête
ever seen in New York.”

In Oyster Bay, Tiffany took over an estate of 580 acres, with a long shoreline facing Cold Spring Harbor, demolished an old hotel there, and built Laurelton Hall, a vast steel-frame mansion, probably the most elaborate house ever conceived in America. A stream ran through its central court, feeding an immense bronze fountain in the shape of a Japanese dragon. Water bubbled through a vast
Greek amphora that changed color electrically and gave the effect of sunlight on a lake. There was a campanile, and the entrance lay between granite columns flanked by ceramic mosaics, using many of his finest iridescent blue tiles. The house rose above a yacht basin—like many other millionaires in the gilded age, Tiffany commuted to his New York office by steam yacht—and contained eighty-four rooms and twenty bathrooms. The roofing was of copper, and the building as a whole, conforming to his art nouveau principles, had the appearance of a magic mushroom. Gaudi, the outstanding architect of the age, had a hand in it, though Tiffany himself was the master designer. There were “dark rooms,” lit mainly by electricity; and “light rooms,” where sunlight was the chief source of illumination. The living room (dark) contained his five masterpieces in colored glass—
Four Seasons
, cut into separate panels;
Feeding the Flamingos
, which had won the prize at the 1894 Chicago World Fair;
Flowers, Fish, and Fruit
(1885);
Eggplants
(1880); and
The Bathers
, specially designed for the house. There was a room for his collection of Native American artifacts, as well as a Chinese Room, various tearooms, a music room, and an elaborate conservatory with palm trees.

This was by far the most publicized house in America, but it was not a happy home. Tiffany squabbled with other neighbors besides Theodore Roosevelt. His second wife, much loved, died in 1908. His three daughters—Julia, Comfort, and Dorothy—grew up and left home; all were gone by 1914. Tiffany was lonely and entertained frantically, with one mistress after another as his resident hostess. In 1911 he invited 150 “gentlemen intellectuals,” as he called them, to Laurelton Hall “to inspect the Spring Flowers,” and consume a “feast of peacocks” served by floozies dressed as ancient Greek maidens, with real peacocks perched on their shoulders. An orchestra played Bach and Beethoven.
¹⁹

By this point, Tiffany could feel public taste slipping away from him, as the jazz age and the society described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in
The Great Gatsby
took over. In 1916 Tiffany published—through Doubleday, but not for sale—a sumptuous volume, printed on parchment, called
The Artwork of Louis C. Tiffany
. Just 502 copies were made, 300 of them given to friends. The text consisted of a series of interviews with Tiffany, conducted by
Charles de Kay. (The book is now very scarce and a prime collector’s piece.) The same year he gave a new masque at Laurelton, “The Quest for Beauty,” which used a revolutionary system of dome lighting. The forty-five-member cast included “Beauty” herself, who emerged from an iridescent bubble of blown glass, a minor miracle of new technology. The cost was $15,000. All was to no avail. Tiffany could still get important commissions overseas—in 1925 he decorated the presidential palace in Havana, with twenty-three of his special rugs and fifteen lamps. Also in 1925, Robert de Forest, the farsighted director of the Metropolitan Museum, bought Tiffany’s tremendous landscape window, now the center of a vast display. But by then Tiffany’s art was decidedly out of fashion, and yearly becoming more so, as art deco ousted the last vestiges of art nouveau. He shut down his favrile production center in the early 1920s and sold off the stock. Other bits of his empire were disposed of. He had a redhaired Irish girl, Sarah Hamley, to look after him, as a nurse and mistress—he remained sexually active to the end—but died on 17 January 1933, at age eighty-four.

There followed one of the most ruthless artistic massacres in history. By the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression, about the last thing Americans wanted was art nouveau, even its finest flowering, Tiffany ware. In 1938 the house on Seventy-second Street was dismantled and razed to the ground. Its contents fetched virtually nothing. The same year 1,000 precious items of Tiffany stock, including twenty large colored-glass windows, were sold off at low prices. Unsold items were thrown away. In his old age, Tiffany had tried to turn Laurelton Hall into a home for artists, but the scheme did not flourish. In 1946 its wonderful contents were auctioned for tiny sums; one large, signed favrile vase fetched only $20. The house and its surrounding acres, once valued at $20 million, were sold for $10,000, and the house itself burned down.

Fashion is a flirtatious mistress and a savage master. It is impossible now to convey the contempt, amounting to hatred, with which art nouveau was regarded during and just after World War II. By then much of this art had been deliberately destroyed. One important collection, however, emerged unscathed. In the
1880s, Joseph Briggs, a lad from Accrington in Lancashire, went to America to better himself. After working on the railroads, he got employment with Tiffany at the Long Island works. He rose through the ranks to become general manager, and each time he was involved in a new product he kept a copy of it. After Tiffany’s death, Briggs retired and returned to Accrington, bringing his collection with him, and when he himself died he bequeathed it all to the local museum. It consists of 120 pieces, including sixty-seven vases and forty-five tiles, and many of these items are unique. The museum was urged, just after the war, to “get rid of the rubbish,” but refused. As late as the 1950s the entire collection was valued at only £1,200. But at about that time, collectors started to look again at art nouveau, and auction prices rose. The museum was again advised to sell “and buy something decent” but again refused. It now has the third largest collection of Tiffany in the world, after the splendid holdings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Gallery in Winter Park, Florida, which has over 4,000 pieces as well as Tiffany’s Byzantine ceramic chapel, originally created for a New York Episcopal cathedral.

The Tiffany revival began with Robert Koch’s book
Louis C. Tiffany: Rebel in Glass
(1964) and continued with Mario Amaya’s
Tiffany Glass
(1967). At the same time auction prices of Tiffany vases and, still more, lamps began to skyrocket. The immense destruction carried out from 1935 to 1955 made for rarity and high prices. By the early twenty-first century good pieces were fetching over $1 million each.
²⁰
More important was the regard now felt for objects involving brilliant design and invention and superb craftsmanship, noble to look at, exciting to touch, and, when illuminated, singular tributes to the first age of electricity. Tiffany lived at a time when American art and craftsmanship first came of age and took their place with the other great creative civilizations of Europe and Asia. After splendid but meretricious fame in his youth and neglect and contempt in his old age, followed by near-oblivion, Tiffany stands in the top rank of transatlantic craftsmen, a creative artist alongside Benvenuto Cellini, Grinling Gibbons, Thomas Chippendale, and Paul de Lamerie.

T
HE CASE OF
T. S. E
LIOT
(
1888–1965
),
the Anglo-American magus, who launched modern poetry in the English-speaking world in 1922 with the publication of
The Waste Land
, is a strange one, perhaps unique in world literature. As a rule, the great creative innovators in the arts, those who effect revolutionary changes in the way we see, feel, and express ourselves, are also radical human personalities, at any rate at the time when they overthrow the existing creative order. Thus Wordsworth and Coleridge, the creators of romantic poetry, who achieved a similar revolution with their publication of
Lyrical Ballads
in 1798, were then doctrinaire utopians, who had applauded the extinction of legitimacy in France; Coleridge planned to establish an egalitarian community in America. T. S. Eliot, however, both at the time he wrote
The Waste Land
and before it—and after it, and throughout his life—was a conservative, a traditionalist, a legitimist, and, in many respects, a reactionary. He came from a deeply conventional, sober, stable background; received a long, thorough, exhaustive education of a kind calculated to reinforce these factors; and, most important, was of a temperament that venerated the riches of the past and regarded their disturbance with abhorrence. His very appearance reflected this orthodox inner man, who declared himself “a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Whereas Byron, Keats, and Shelley, all poetical innovators in their day, abhorred starched, buttoned-up collars and favored loose,
unrestrictive garments, Eliot was never once (except on holiday) photographed without a tie, wore three-piece suits on all occasions, kept his hair trimmed, and was the last intellectual on either side of the Atlantic to wear spats. Yet there can be absolutely no doubt that he deliberately marshaled his immense creative powers to shatter the existing mold of poetical form and context, and to create a new orthodoxy born of chaos, incoherence, and dissonance.

There is nothing in Eliot’s background except inhibition, repression of emotions, and strong cultural continuity. He was born in St. Louis, where his father became a successful brick manufacturer, but his family origins were Boston Brahmin. One forebear had been part of the initial Massachusetts settlement of 1620—Puritan, strict, and individualistic. Another had been a Salem witch-hunter. But the family members were not, by the nineteenth century, Calvinists. They were Unitarians, living on that last staging post which links Christianity to outright disbelief in God. They denied the divinity of Jesus but recognized his virtue, seeing him as a superior Emerson. They were extremely careful, in discussing their religious beliefs, to use words meticulously and sparingly, preferring ambiguity to assertion. Later, Eliot himself wrote an ironic poem holding up to ridicule the temperament and habits he inherited from this Unitarian past:

Eliot was brought up in a family enjoying affluence but without ostentation of any kind, and to privilege mitigated by strong concepts of duty and service, to God, country, community, and culture. His inheritance was virtue, probity, and righteousness. It was softened, however, by circumstance. He was by far the youngest of a large family, the delightful afterthought child of an adoring mother who wrote poetry and cultivated the best
taste; and he was attended by an angelic quartet of sisters, much older than he was, so that in effect he had five careful mothers. They did not spoil but concentrated on him, ensuring that he was taught to be good, conscientious, hardworking, well-mannered, civilized, and pure. Having learned to read early under their careful tuition, he absorbed books voraciously all his life, reading richly and thoughtfully, rereading and analyzing, storing lines and passages of poetry—and prose too—in his heart, so that the habit of quotation and reference became second nature and habitual.
¹

The range of Eliot’s reading was wide from the start, and continued to widen and deepen throughout his childhood and adolescence. If ever there was a creative genius nourished by reading the classics of all nations, it was Eliot. In this respect he was like Milton and Browning, the best-educated—and self-educated—of English poets. At a very early age his mother put before him Macaulay’s
History of England
, which he read with delight. The family oscillated between St. Louis, on the enormous Mississippi River, and Gloucester, a New England fishing port where they also had a house; and Eliot devoured books on rivers and the sea—and birds. There survives his annotated copy of the
Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America
, given to him on his fourteenth birthday. He loved studying tiny things in great detail over long hours—a bird’s wing, small sea urchins in rock pools. At Mrs. Lockwood’s school in St. Louis he was plunged into Shakespeare, Dickens, and the romantic poets, especially Shelley and Keats. At Smith Academy, the preparatory school for the local university, Washington, funded by his grandfather, he learned Latin, Greek, French, and German and read the literatures of these languages. He loved Aeschylus and Euripides in Greek, Horace and Ovid in Latin. The “set books” on which he was examined in his final year at Smith included Molière’s
Le Misanthrope
, Racine’s
Andromache
, Virgil’s
Aeneid
(Books III and IV), Homer’s
Iliad
, Ovid’s
Selected Poems
, Horace’s
Odes and Epodes
, Shakespeare’s
Othello
, Burke’s
Writings on America
, Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, Macaulay’s
Essays
, Hill’s
Principles of Rhetoric
, Addison’s
Cato
, and La Fontaine’s
Fables
. He learned masses of poetry by heart—at twelve he could recite Kipling’s relentlessly tragic
Danny Deaver
, at thirteen Omar Khayyam. Thence he moved to
Edgar Allan Poe, and on to Byron’s
Childe Harold
. He later said that his adolescent “drowning” in verse was akin to “daemon’s possession.” He wrote poetry himself, and as all good budding poets do, he became a master of pastiche and parody, so much so that his mature poetry is in a sense an epitome or anthology of all poetry.

At Harvard, he lived on the fashionable “Gold Coast” and belonged to good clubs, associating superficially with the rich and wellborn but in essence leading a life of study, meditation, and sheer hard work on texts and languages. His learning spread wider and wider, “like a benevolent pool of water” (to use one of his similes) “on the parched earth of his ignorance.” Eliot always worked hard at whatever he was doing, being conscientious, and consumed with guilt if he was “lazy” (a rare state), and having moreover the priceless gift of concentrating. He could set to work immediately, first thing in the morning, without any time-consuming preliminary fiddling or rituals. If interrupted, he could refocus immediately and resume work. The intensity with which he worked was almost frightening. He saw time as a precious commodity, never to be wasted. The word “time” occurs very often in his best, mature poems: the sense of time provokes a continual chronic punctuation of his verse, varying in volume and intimacy from tickings and heartbeats to the rhythmic throbbing of drums. (It was Ezra Pound who first spotted the “insistent drum-beats” that gave “unity and power” to Eliot’s work).
²

This fear of time passing inexorably and permanently—“time lost”—made Eliot greedy for knowledge. If he had been English and gone to, say, Balliol College at Oxford, or King’s at Cambridge, he would have been obliged by the rigidity of the curriculum to concentrate on ancient texts and Greek history and philosophy. At Harvard, however, the multiplicity of learned courses, and the right of the student to pick and choose, was of inestimable benefit to him. He spread his net as wide as possible, and although this often leads to superficiality and shallow epicureanism, Eliot brought up a goodly harvest from the oceans of knowledge, and feasted on it, digesting and retaining much. In his first year at Harvard, 1906, he took courses in Greek literature, German language, medieval history, English literature, and the art of constitutional government. He followed these with
courses in French literature, ancient and modern philosophy, comparative world literature, and forms of religion. He got himself tutored in English composition and made a special study, himself designing the parameters, of the life and work of Baudelaire—regarded as very daring in 1908. He memorized much of James Thomson’s unsettling poem
The City of Dreadful Night
; and he read widely in the English poets of the 1890s, especially Wilde, Dowson, and Davidson. He read not only Symonds’s poetry but also Symonds’s
Symbolic Movement in Literature
, and Symbolism, the first advanced movement he absorbed, became a permanent element in his work. (Indeed it can be argued that Eliot was a Symbolist, though he was also much else.) By the end of 1908, he was beginning to plunge deeply into philosophy, to the point where he thought seriously of becoming a professional student of the mind and its empire.

Here we come to an important feature of Eliot’s life, which was central to his achievement—the absence from it of sports (including almost every form of strenuous physical activity) and sex. As a child, he suffered from what was called a double hernia, was fitted with a truss, and wore one virtually all his life. He was thus excused from games, and later declared unfit for military service. The period 1850 to 1914 was, for young men from wealthy families, the age of games. Eliot’s inability to participate in this vital and time-consuming dimension of life left a huge hole to be filled by academic work, pursued all the more furiously because of his feelings of guilt that he was not drudging away and distinguishing himself on the playing field. His physical weakness, then, was a priceless gift of time, to be spent worthily on his books.

In the mysterious area of sex, that greedy consumer of a young man’s time and energy, less is known of Eliot’s activities or inactivity. He said he was a virgin until his marriage, and there is no reason to doubt his word. Indeed the only question is whether he remained a virgin all his life. A childhood dominated by a mother and four elder sisters can produce an adult male who is thoroughly at home with women and familiar with their ways, so that he has no difficulty in forming close attachments to the other sex at all times of his life. On the other hand, if the mother
is fond but frigid, and the sisters are loving but dowdy and fearful of men, the opposite effect can be produced—and that was precisely Eliot’s misfortune as a man, and (perhaps) his creative destiny as a poet. It is doubtful that he ever achieved full sexual congress with his difficult and mentally disturbed first wife; and by the time he found happiness in the motherly arms of his second, he was in his late sixties. What is certain, however, is that as a young man Eliot found no woman to provide him with sensual gratification, and was too inhibited and fearful to turn to prostitutes, though he evidently often thought about them: the image of a beckoning woman in a lighted doorway on a dark or foggy street is a recurrent one in his poetry.
³

With no sports or sex, the reading and cerebral exploration went on relentlessly. Eliot conforms perfectly to my definition of an intellectual: “a person who thinks ideas are more important than people.” It is not clear that Eliot ever thought a particular person important, though he perceived that some people were useful, at least to him. Not that he was selfish. Self-centered, of course: what intellectual isn’t? But there was no doubt about the importance—perhaps “import” would be a better word—he attached to ideas. The first major adult spinner of ideas for the maturing Eliot was Jules Laforgue (1860–1887), a Symbolist poet, now nearly forgotten, who was born in Latin America, came to Paris in 1876, starved, wrote poetry, went to Berlin, wrote more poetry, married an English governess, returned to Paris to starve, and died of tuberculosis at age twenty-seven. You have only to read his three-volume
Oeuvres Complètes
, which Eliot bought in 1909, to realize his importance to the poetry to come. Irony, allusion, quotation, apparent incoherence masking unity of mood, music rather than rhythms and prosody, impersonality, emotional detachment concealing (or rather emphasizing) intense pessimism—these are all there. Laforgue was a proto-Eliot, without much talent. Eliot observed him completely, digested him, then excreted and forgot about him.

Next came a host of “idea figures.” Eliot earned his bachelor’s degree in 1909, then earned a master’s degree in English literature. His tutors included Irving Babbit, who took him through a course in French literary criticism. Babbit insisted on “stan
dards” and “discipline”—attractive words (often used later) and powerfully attractive concepts to Eliot’s conservative mind. Under Babbit’s influence (it is said), Eliot took up the East—specifically Sanskrit and Buddhism, and acquired a certain knowledge of both, mainly superficial, though one can never be quite sure with Eliot. He saw them as ideas, and they did not run deep into his psyche, but he found them very useful as background noises (and rhythms).

In 1910 Eliot persuaded his father to let him visit Europe, and to finance the trip, and off he trundled in search of more ideas and mentors. (He ate both to fill hungers deprived of other sustenance.) I have a feeling that, in mid-Atlantic, as he watched the sea furrows of the vessel widening—another favorite image—he became aware for the first time of his statelessness. Earlier, the fact that he had been born in St. Louis, and to its vast, rolling, muddy river, but had roots in New England Puritanism and spent summers in Gloucester with its fierce, sparkling sea, made him, when he thought about it, and he often did think about it, a divided American, a hyphenated southerner or southwesterner and Yankee New Englander, or rather neither, a kind of American specter. He seemed, already, a visitor in the land of his birth. This is, or at any rate was, not uncommon among Americans, especially in the nineteenth century and in the years just before World War I, when the country was expanding and reinventing itself with every generation, almost with every decade. Dickens recalled traveling by train across the American vastness in the 1860s, in one of the new dining cars, and committing some solecism. He apologized to the waiter for his ignorance, pleading, “You see, I’m a stranger here.” The waiter replied: “Mister, in this country we are all strangers.” Eliot was a stranger at home and felt himself a stranger, or at any rate strange. But was he more at home on the other side of the Atlantic? Paris, Berlin, and London were cultural centers rather than homes. Since Eliot did not leave the United States until he was twenty-six, he might be considered entirely an American. But he was not. Indeed he gradually lost his American accent completely—something few American expatriates do. In Paris he learned to speak French, fluently and correctly though not idiomatically—he was not a man for vernaculars
except in pastiche. In Paris (he said later), he knew “nobody,” adding that the best way to profit from the city was to remain isolated, since the people there he was likely to meet were “futile and time-wasting.” He was fascinated by its red-light district and brothel doorways, and by the brasseries where the buxom waitresses serving bock were to be had, but never penetrated one or the other. However, he read about such horrifying delights, especially in a novel called
Bubu de Montparnasse
, by Charles-Louis Philippe, describing the brothel culture of the Left Bank, which Eliot said was symbolic of Paris in 1910 to 1914 to him. In Paris, too, he went to the lectures of Henri Bergson, another man interested in time, who discoursed humorlessly on
le rire
; and he became fascinated by Charles Maurras, a revolutionary conservative who believed in violence, especially against Jews, atheists, and anyone who criticized national symbols such as Saint Louis and Jeanne d’Arc. Eliot enjoyed watching the riots Maurras organized with his rabid student groups.