The Peripatetic Reviewer

by Edward Weeks

MY LIFE
by Oskar Kokoschka
Macmillan, $ 10.00

Now in his late eighties, Oskar Kokoschka is the last of the great painters responsible for the modern movement in art. He claims to have a poor memory, but this self-portrait, so admirably translated by David Britt, is an intimate account of his development, interrupted now and again by explosive comments on aesthetics and nationalism in “this nightmare of a century.” The technological revolution came too quickly, he argues, and society was wrenched out of its conservative style of life before it had found a new one. “. . . non-objective art led at last to the sterile elimination of the human image—and not only art but existence itself threatens to become objectless.”

His ancestors were Bohemians. His father, a skilled goldsmith in Prague, was forced by financial failure to move his family to Vienna, and the boy’s early memories are of Austria in the carefree days before World War I. As a young portrait painter, Kokoschka had warm friendships and particularly the backing of Adolph Loos, the architect who found sitters for him, some in Viennese society. One of them was the court tailor who made the clothes for the old emperor and who dressed Kokoschka in suits made to measure in exchange for having his portrait painted. In 1908, Kokoschka had his first showing in an international art exhibition, sponsored by the Klimt group, to which he contributed a tapestry cartoon in four large canvases and a painted clay bust entitled The Warrior, a self-portrait with open mouth, “the expression an impassioned cry.” His work became the laughingstock; the room in which it was shown was dubbed “the Chamber of Horrors.” Despite the jibes, both works were sold.

“Your son needs to get out of Vienna; I’m taking him to Switzerland,” said Loos to the artist’s mother, and those months in the Swiss winter landscape opened Kokoschka’s eyes to a new world and resulted in his canvas View of the Dents du Midi, purchased in 1912 by the Cologne Museum for 1800 gold marks. In Berlin, the old Prussian city which had become cosmopolitan overnight, Kokoschka was inspired by violent movement, the noisy traffic, the illuminated advertising signs, loudspeakers, and the night spots. His studio was an attic under a skylight, ice-cold in winter, but on the floors below were the offices of Der Sturm, in whose pages thirty-seven of his drawings appeared.

Confident in the knowledge that his canvases were wanted, he returned to Vienna, where two extraordinary things happened. His friend Carl Moll had brought back from Italy a painting by Titian, which he left in Kokoschka’s studio for six months, and as he studied it, Kokoschka learned “the triumph of light,” the quality of luminosity which set Titian apart from all other Italian masters. Women had eluded him, but now he fell passionately in love with Alma, Gustav Mahler’s widow—a stormy affair, for she had an abortion rather than bear his child. The lithographs and the double portrait he painted of them are, as he savs, “heavy with the essence of meeting, begetting and parting.” He left her impetuously to serve in the cavalry on the eastern front in the war that put an end to his beloved Austria, just as a Russian bayonet almost put an end to his art. I like his beginnings, and equally his refuge in London during the Blitz; his marriage to Olda, who had planned their escape from Prague; his political paintings; and his finding peace in his landscapes when Europe became human once again.

THE GLORY OF TFFE HUMMINGBIRD
by Peter De Vries
Little, Brown, $6.95

“Professions, like nations, are civilized to the degree to which they can satirize themselves,” writes Peter De Vries at the beginning of Chapter 13, and the hero of this amusing novel is a shining example of the deceptions which have recently proved so successful in the U.S.A. Jim Tickler has been well brought up in the Bible Belt of Indiana; his father is a poetry-writing traveling salesman who has no hesitancy in plagiarizing from The New Yorker and The Atlantic; his mother has been filling book on book with blue stamps for a pending divorce trip to Mexico. Their witty, well-read son, the brightest of their brood, is determined to escape from Wabash and “to glitter with the glory of the hummingbird” amongst the Beautiful People in Chicago.

Jim’s quickness in coining slogans—“Hot Diggety Dogs” for a new brand of sausage; “Joyce Carol Oates” for “the thinking man’s cereal”—earns his promotion in a market counseling firm, and his facility for ghosting speeches in the Agnew style wins the affection of his boss, and then of his boss’ daughter. Jim is in, and when he masterminds the most successful quiz show on TV, and raises its rating by appearing in it as the challenger, he has all the glitter of a national celebrity. There are some hilarious scenes on the way up: the glorious parody of Hiawatha that Jim’s father fabricates at a writers’ colony—

Jim’s family’s behavior when lubricated with champagne at Jim’s wedding; and the ironic skull sessions on advertising.

De Vries handles a long sentence with a quick jab in its tail; his puns are outrageous, his similes (“Clara’s witticism was like having chewing gum continually popped in your ear”) and metaphors are amusing.

THE INCREDIBLE PIERPONT MORGAN
by Cass Canfield
Harper & Row, $17.50

Having achieved a successful career collecting writers, Cass Canfield has been enjoying his retirement collecting drawings and writing, first his autobiography, and now this biography of his former neighbor on 36th Street. It is a selective and lively volume, emphasizing the high points in J. P. Morgan’s financial career and the touching points in his human relations. Canfield tells us that Napoleon Bonaparte was the subject of young Morgan’s graduation paper at the Boston English High School, and that when he was sent abroad to study, he showed a precocious ability in mathematics, solving by mental arithmetic problems involving cube roots and long decimals—early evidence of the concentration which he settled into later at times of financial panic.

His father, Junius S. Morgan, had established himself in London, a banker protecting British investments in America, and as young J. P.—“Pip” as he was called—matured, the father son combination played a dominant role in the post-Civil War development of the U.S. The father, in 1870, rescued the French government with a loan of fifty million dollars; the son, in 1895, floated a bond issue which saved the credit of the federal government and was the stopgap as panic after panic wracked Wall Street. Canfield’s close-ups of the determined, strongwilled J. P. in these crises are well done. He had the boldness to risk his own fortune and compel his colleagues to risk theirs; as Canfield neatly puts it, he was “a one-man Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.”

We see him in the fury of finance; we see the clash of wills between himself and his favorite minister; we see his contempt for Theodore Roosevelt as he remarks, “I hope the first lion he meets does his duty.” We observe him happy at home at Cragston, entertaining Maxine Elliott on his famous black yacht, Corsair, traveling in Egypt. The well-selected photographs illustrate these activities, and the halftones and beautiful color plates reflect his pursuit of art. It is a wonder that he had such a good eye for what he chose, and the answer is suggested in the first picture in Mr. Canfield’s sympathetic portrait, a sketch of a cottage made by “Pierpont for his Grandmother Morgan,” drawn when he was ten. The boy who made it could really see; he had looked at his subject and also at the manner in which his elders were accustomed to represent such items. Presumably he went on looking all his life.

WINTER IN THE BLOOD

by James Welch

Harper & Row, $6.95

James Welch is an American Indian, Blackfeet on his father’s side, Gros Ventre on his mother’s, whose poems and fiction have broken through the crust that has so long concealed the daily frustration of life on the Reservation. The hero of his novel is himself a Blackfeet, living on his mother’s ranch in Montana, capable with his hands when sober, loyal to the tribal tradition, and totally lacking in initiative at the age of thirty-two. He tells his story without a trace of self-pity, as it shuttles from his early setbacks to his present indolent pursuit of alcohol and women. His first disaster occurred at the age of twelve when, in the company of his beloved older brother, Mose, he was sent out to round up the family herd before it turned winter; they got the cattle out of the ravines and things were going smoothly until, as they crossed the highway, a wild-eyed roan balked at the last gate and the bulls stampeded into an onrushing car which killed Mose and injured the youngster. The death of his father ten years later was also a body blow: a heavy drinker but a good mechanic, his going snuffed out the last incentive at home.

ONE SPECIAL SUMMER
by Jacqueline and Lee Bouvier
Delacorte/Eleanor Friede, $7.95

In June, 1951, equipped with proper letters of introduction, the Bouvier sisters sailed for Europe. Jacqueline, who was twenty-two, had spent a year at the Sorbonne; she had command of French and a light touch in her verses and cartoons which decorate their journal; but for Lee, at seventeen, it was her first European journey, and her letters to their mother describe the thrills and embarrassments of the ingenue. In London, where they were entertained by Jackie’s friends from Oxford, they bought a small car—and their pulchritude was a guarantee that they would never have to change a tire. Lee was the comedian. At an evening of chamber music in Paris, amusingly illustrated by Jackie, Lee dropped her panties just as she was presented to an Indian ambassador; at Venice, where she went for a tryout before “the Queen of Sopranos,” Lee’s voice froze, and Jackie’s advice that she sing something from Call Me Madam only intensified the confusion. Jackie’s sophistication takes over in Spain, and in Florence both were worshipful in their visit to Bernard Berenson. What was intended as a grateful packet for home consumption has become, thanks to Jackie’s drawings, a curiosity piece for the unacquainted.