Survivors: Still in Evidence, but a Shadow of Their Former Selves
by Cullen Murphy
A FEW months ago, finding myself in the vicinity, I called at Poplar Forest, the house Thomas Jefferson built near Lynchburg, Virginia, as a refuge from the crush of visitors at Monticello. The house, a brick octagon, was in private hands until a decade ago, when it was acquired by a group intending to restore it. Poplar Forest has neither the grandeur of the University of Virginia nor the quirky intelligence of Monticello. The house is elegant but simple, and one can imagine oneself actually living in it.
For the time being, one can also appreciate the building in a state of minimalist purity. As part of the restoration process the interior walls have been stripped of plaster and trim, and the entire house is now a bare brick shell. Looking closely at the walls, though, one can see signs of how the house has been altered since Jefferson’s day. Certain features in the brickwork indicate that many of the windows were once higher. A fireplace set in a wall now looks small, but the faint outline around it of a much larger mantelpiece shows that the design once made it grander. Throughout the house, patterns of small gouges in the mortar hold the secret of lost details of the original interior woodwork. In an odd way, the house Thomas Jefferson knew still exists inside this shell. I was pleased to learn that all those faint but unmistakable indications of a building’s former state are known to architectural historians as “ghosts.”
The tides of time and history can be as capricious in what they preserve as in what they carry off. At the end of the Second World War the tides mysteriously swept from its repository in Berlin the hoard of treasure unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann at the site of ancient Troy, in 1873. Last summer they suddenly tossed the treasure back into public view. (The Russians had it all along.) One can only be grateful for such acts of restoration, and for other instances of unbidden bounty —the revelation of a Tut’s tomb, a Tara brooch, a Boswell’s diary. But the acts of preservation I appreciate most are less stunning and complete, more delicately indirect, and have above all a certain aloofness: the things being preserved come a certain distance forward and no further. One may think of them, like the masonry lineaments at Poplar Forest, as ghosts.
A possibly fanciful but widely discussed recent example was provided by Michael Crichton in his book Jurassic Park, in which he held out the possibility that if, many millions of years ago, an insect bit a dinosaur and was then trapped and preserved in amber, the DNA of that dinosaur might yet be extracted from the blood in the insect’s thorax. Scientists have not gotten as far as the blood in an insect’s thorax, but they have amplified and sequenced DNA from an extinct species of weevil, entombed in amber some 120 million years ago, and have done the same for bees and termites entombed in amber 25 to 40 million years ago.
Most of the dwellings occupied by people in prehistoric and imperial Roman times have long since disappeared from the European countryside. But remnants of structures survive beneath the surface—walls and foundations, filled-in pits and ditches —and affect the retention of moisture, which in turn may retard or enhance the rate of growth of grain directly above relative to that of the grain all around. On some mornings, when the sun is strong and low, the taller stalks cast shadows on the shorter. If the field is viewed from above, the outlines of buildings and enclosures stand out clearly, as if in an architectural drawing. The apparitions vanish as the sun climbs toward midday, and then reappear before sunset.
In cities and towns throughout Europe buildings down the centuries have been erected abutting major structures that themselves were slowly eaten away. A precisely shaped vacancy preserves the soul of the departed: the oblong Piazza Navona, in Rome, once a stadium; the elliptical Piazza del Mercato, in Lucca, once an amphitheater. In their way these public spaces evoke the private cavities in the hardened volcanic ash at Pompeii, which, injected with plaster, reveal ghosts of their own: the recumbent forms of the victims of Vesuvius.
Ghosts come in many mediums. Johannes Brahms wrote a composition for two pianos called “Variations on a Theme by J. Haydn,” which is the only place where this theme from Haydn, if it ever truly existed, can now be found. In the museum at the Los Alamos National Laboratory a test tube holds sand from a beach on an island in the Pacific that no longer exists, having been destroyed during the testing of a thermonuclear device. Of the handful of signatures that there are grounds for believing may be authentically Shakespeare’s, one can be recognized as such only because it bled through the page to the underside, from recto to verso. The mirror-image version—the signature as seen from behind—is the only version now legible.
By their very nature the visual arts provide an abundant supply of ghosts. In his book The Lost Museum the historian Robert Adams devotes himself to “the work of art that is no longer around to speak even stutteringly for itself, but which speaks nonetheless through a secondary veil or mirror.” He notes, to give one example, that while only the Wailing Wall survived the razing of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70, we do actually know something about what the temple’s furnishings looked like, because images of plundered objects were sculpted in bas-relief on the Arch of Titus, in Rome. Another example from Adams: Sir Anthony van Dyck’s famous triple portrait of Britain’s King Charles I—left profile, full face, and right profile, all on one canvas—may be admirable in its own right, but it was originally intended to serve merely as “notes” for the sculptor Bernini, who was working in Italy on a bust of the king. It is now our only link to that bust, which was destroyed in a fire in 1698.
In a category of their own are paintings that survive only inside other paintings. We no longer have the Franz Hals picture titled Woman With a Pipe, for example, but it appears hanging on a wall in the background of two different paintings by Jan Steen. The genre of painting known as gallery painting is a rich secondary source. Prominent collectors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would commission artists to paint pictures of their galleries, whose walls were closely hung with works of art. Not surprisingly, some of the paintings in those galleries—real works for which there is documentary evidence—were somehow later destroyed or can no longer be found. The only record of what they looked like is their depiction in gallery paintings. Willem van Haecht’s The Picture Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest (“Geest,” appropriately enough, means “ghost”) contains several pictures of lost art works, including Marriage Bath, by Jan van Eyck. There is something especially haunting about the situation of these paintings within paintings. Visitors from a threedimensional world, they are now stranded for eternity in two dimensions, accessible to the touch and yet impossibly remote.
One does not need to look to the world of architecture or archaeology or fine art in order to find ghosts. This, to my mind, is one reason why they have such resonance. They can be vestiges of a distant past, but they are also a presence in daily life. They are pervasive, of course, in our speech. In metaphor and simile, and in the very building up of words, we preserve prior meanings and carry forward a record of conditions and concepts that may no longer be current. “Mad as a hatter.” “Hold your horses.” “Rake over the coals.” The science of etymology amounts, in a way, to tracing the genealogy of ghosts.
Ghosts crop up elsewhere. Think of unfaded rectangles on the wall where pictures used to be, or the small depressions in the carpet that the removal of furniture leaves behind. Driving down a country road that has been straightened once or twice, I notice how the curves of the old route occasionally braid in and out of the new one. When I open a book I haven’t read in many years, I’m sometimes surprised, even chagrined, by ghosts in the form of my marginal notations—evidence of reactions to the text (“!!???”) that must once have been pregnant and powerful but that now elude full apprehension. Often when riffling through old photocopies, I come upon pages in which a person’s fingertips or the ball of a hand can be seen along an edge, surely belonging to someone I know.
I worry that ghosts are becoming too common, losing some of their magic, as methods of secondhand preservation proliferate. In 1961 Goya’s celebrated portrait of the Duke of Wellington was stolen from the National Gallery in London. The movie Dr. No, which appeared a year later, shows James Bond doing a subtle double take when he sees the painting on an easel in Dr. No’s undersea lair. Of course, the only reason the picture could be shown is that copies of it existed, by the thousands. Photographs and computers have enhanced the prospects for the survival of almost anything. Broadcasting sends messages into infinity.
Even so, as I was reminded one day recently, the role of serendipity remains. I was walking through a park, absorbed in thought and oblivious of the world, when I heard a faint “click” to my left followed by nervously polite laughter to my right. I looked up to see that I had strayed at exactly the wrong moment between a prosperous Asian man with a camera and his carefully posed family. At least part of me is now playing the role of Woman With a Pipe in an album far away. It’s good to know, in case something happens to the original.
