The Errant Æsthete

From the time Leo Marks was a boy, he yearned for the world of secrecy, deceit and camouflage. At the age of eight, he discovered the game of code-making and -breaking in his father’s London bookshop, after stumbling across an edition of Edgar Allen Poe’s, The Gold-Bug.

As World War II was being played out in earnest, the young Mr. Marks, now a strapping twenty-three-year-old lad, hoped to use his strengths for the Allies, but found his mission circumvented when he failed to get into British Intelligence’s cryptographic department. As everyone else on his course heads off to Bletchley Park (“the promised land”), he is sent to what his sergeant terms “some potty outfit in Baker Street, an open house for misfits.”

Nevertheless, as the aspiring code breaker tells it in his famed and wonderfully humorous memoir Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941 – 1945, he was right in the thick of it, “a prodigy immersed in a pasty world of subterranean old men.” Assigned with monitoring code security, common wisdom held at the time that it was easiest for men and women in the field to transmit messages by memorizing and using well-known poems.

Unfortunately, since the Germans had equal access to the classics, particularly poems, Marks readily pointed out to his doddering colleagues that “Reference books are jackboots when used by cryptographers,” insisting, instead, that agents should write their own poems (or better yet, use his), several of which were cheerily obscene.

The title of Marks memoir was taken from a question posed to the codebreaker when asked why Europe should have their cryptographic material written on silk, which was in very short supply. (Codes printed on silk and hidden under clothing was undetectable in a pat-down, whereas paper was easy to detect). Marks wryly replied that it all came down to being “between silk and cyanide,” meaning that swaths of silk would save his agents from swallowing their “optional extra,” a cyanide capsule.

Ultimately, WOKs (worked-out keys) printed on silk replaced the older methods of transmission, with code breakers composing their own original poetic creations.

“The Life That I Have” (sometimes referred to as Yours) was just such a coded poem composed on Christmas Eve 1943, originally written by Marks in memory of his girlfriend Ruth, who had recently died in a plane crash in Canada. “I transmitted,” he writes in his memoir, “a message to her which I’d failed to deliver when I’d had the chance.”

In a curious twist of events, Marks subsequently passed the poem on to Violette Szabo, an Allied secret agent during WWII, who was eventually captured, tortured and killed by the Nazis. It was made famous by its inclusion in the 1958 movie about Szabo, Carve Her Name with Pride, where the poem was said to be the creation of Violette’s husband Etienne.

The deceptively simple poem was to be made famous again, a little over a fortnight ago at the opulent Astor Courts estate, a private Beaux-Arts mansion overlooking the Hudson River in upstate New York, when the decades-old poem was included in the wedding nuptials of former President Bill Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea to Marc Mezvinsky. The 1943 poem “The Life That I Have” by WWII cryptographer Leo Marks was read aloud by a friend of the couple:

 

 

“The Life That I Have”

 

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

 

Czech Republic, Prague, painting of old town square at night; 19th century, Jacob Johann Verreyt (1807-1872), Muzeum Hlavniho Mesta Prahy (Prague Museum)
Woman in Dark Robe, Photographer: Jim Ballard, Getty Images
Remaining Photos: Random

 

 

When Hobbes went hob-nobbing and Locke locked lips with a nice port, the vessels from which they sipped were as beautiful and complex as the thoughts that spilled from their fertile minds. If there is nothing else to be taken away from The Age of Enlightenment, an elixir-laced exhibit currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is this: it was, indeed, an era to fully and ferociously imbibe.

Or as, scribe and noted imbiber, Henry David Thoreau, might say:

 

“The
whole
body
imbibes
delight
through
every
pore.”

Drinking clubs abounded, as great thinkers, the fashionably lush, and the prominently disposed gathered in a haze of spirits to experiment, sample, and invent an assorted collection of the finest alcoholic beverages ever known to keep body and soul apart as the cocktail swilling savant, herself, might say. (And yes, the Errant Aesthete proudly declares a full imbibing half of Irish ancestry).

Drawn from the Museum’s collection, the exhibit brings together objects employed in both the service and the consumption of beer, wine, champagne, and even the occasional exotic newcomer, like punch, for example.

From simple lead crystal wine glasses to gleaming white porcelain jugs to classic silver tankards, there is enough here to entice, stimulate and inspire intimate reveries and quiet contemplations over a small etched crystal of “fortification.”

For the lover of the novel and unusual, delightful accoutrements include a swirling silver nutmeg grater made in Birmingham, England, a lovely blue-and-white porcelain wine glass cooler from Chantilly, France, and a much-admired colorful tin-enameled earthenware wine jug from early 18th-century Germany.

May Your Glass
Be Ever Full:
Drinking in Seventeenth -
and Eighteenth-Century Europe

 

 

1.) Goblet, c. 1745, possibly with later engraving. Artist/maker unknown, English. Lead-crystal glass with wheel-engraved decoration; drawn stem, Height: 8 3/8 inches (21.3 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, The George H. Lorimer Collection, 1953.

2.) Monteith, 1707-8. Workshop of Gabriel Sleath, English (active London), 1674 – 1756. Silver, 8 1/4 x 11 inches (21 x 27.9 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of George D. Widener, 1972.

3.) Two-Handled Cup with Lid(1706-8). 3.) Workshop of David King, Irish (Dublin), active from 1690, died 1737. Made in Dublin, Ireland. Silver with engraved decoration. 13 x 13 x 7 1/2 inches (33 x 33 x 19.1 cm) The Henry P. McIlhenny Collection.

4.) Wine Jug, c. 1720. Decorated by M. Schmidt, German (active Nurnberg), from c. 1712. Tin-enamelled earthenware; pewter, 14 7/16 x 8 1/4 inches (36.6 x 21 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Bloomfield Moore Collection, 1882.

5.) Wine Glass Cooler, c. 1770. Made by the Chantilly porcelain factory, Chantilly, France, c. 1730 – 1792. Soft-paste porcelain with underglaze blue decoration, 4 1/8 x 6 1/8 inches (10.5 x 15.5 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Morris Hawkes, 1942.

Images: The Curated Object

 

 

May your glass be ever full.
May the roof over your head be always strong.
And may you be in heaven
half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.

Irish Blessing

“I don’t
think
photography
has
anything
remotely
to do
with
the
brain.

It
has
to do
with
eye
appeal.”

- Horst

 

 

Horst P. Horst, Advertisement for Chanel perfume, 1987

ANTON CHEKHOV 1860 – 1904

 

“Give me
a wife
who,
like the
moon,
won’t
appear
in my sky
every day.”

 

A fascinating collection of a few of literature’s most memorable farewells, from Lord Byron’s heroic “Come, come, no weakness; let’s be a man to the last!” to James Joyce’s woeful lament, “Does nobody understand?” was recently featured in The Guardian’s Literary Last Words.

One of my personal favorites was that of Anton Chekhov, the beloved Russian short-story writer, playwright and physician. In reading Chekhov’s biography, a fascinating narrative, I learned what is rarely taught in classes on literature: that he had been called “Russia’s most elusive literary bachelor,” preferring passing liaisons and visits to brothels over commitment.

It appears that the physician who practiced his trade throughout most of his literary career, once declared medicine as “my lawful wife,” and literature as “my mistress.” So emphatic on the subject of matrimony, was this noted man of letters, he once penned his feelings to a friend:

 

By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto—that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her… give me a wife who, like the moon, won’t appear in my sky every day.

 

To his delight, he found such a creature, Olga Knipper, a former protegée and sometime lover of Nemirovich-Danchenko whom he had first met at rehearsals for The Seagull. On the 25th of May in 1901 the couple married quietly, some might say covertly, owing to the bridegroom’s horror of weddings. But, alas, though love came late, mortality arrived early. The couple’s brief union ended in the summer of 1904, by most estimates, a span far too short, yet by Chekhov’s lunar preferences, one might conclude, a perfectly reasonable duration.

 

“It’s a
long time
since
I drank
champagne.”

 

As one of the greatest short-story writers in the history of world literature (in the year of his death, he was second in literary celebrity only to Tolstoy), it seems only fitting that Chekhov’s death has become one of “the great set pieces of literary history”, retold, embroidered, and fictionalised many times since, notably in the short story Errand by Raymond Carver.

Terminally ill with tuberculosis, he traveled with Olga to Badenweiler in 1904, although by all accounts “the nearer Chekhov was to the end, the less he seemed to realize it.” Several years later, Olga wrote this account of her husband’s last moments:

 

“Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): “Ich sterbe” (I’m dying). The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: “It’s a long time since I drank champagne”. He drained it, lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child … “

 

For more Literary Last Words

Book: Immortal Last Words: History’s Most Memorable Dying Remarks, Deathbed Statements and Final Farewells, Arcturus, 2010

 

BEFORE PLANNING YOUR OWN LAST WORDS

 

You might want to consider how to go about penning the words you are living now. Right now. I can think of no finer inspiration and at no fairer price ($5.95) than Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature. From Daedalus Books Online, it is described thus:

“Genius is one of those words upon which the world has agreed to form no clear consensus,” Joseph Epstein notes in his introduction. How then shall we define “literary genius?”

In this collection, 25 contemporary authors endeavor to answer that question by considering 25 classic writers and their enduring works. We learn that, more important than mere originality or creativity, it is the ability to make us experience the world in new ways that sets these writers apart.

“My task,” Joseph Conrad wrote, “is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it’s above all to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.”

“A chair
has waited
such a long time
to be with
its person.

Through shadow
and fly buzz
and the floating dust
it has waited
such a long time
to be with
its person.

What it remembers
of the forest
it forgets,
and dreams
of a room
where it
waits —

of the cup
and
the ceiling —

of the
Animate One.”

The closest many of us will ever come to a genuinely intimate relationship is that we share with a chair, particularly a long favored chair, like this gaily stripped bergère. A bergère is an enclosed upholstered French armchair, (fauteuil) with back and armrests supported on an upholstered frame. While the seat frame is over-upholstered, the rest of the wooden framing is exposed.

A bergère may be moulded or carved, beech painted, or gilded, or of fruitwood, walnut or mahogany with a waxed finish. It may include padded elbow rests perched atop the armrests. It is fitted with a loose, but tailored, seat cushion and designed for lounging in comfort, with a deeper wider seat than that of a regular fauteuil (armchair), although more formal models of the bergère are available as well. In the White House for example.

In the eighteenth century, a bergère was essentially what is known as a meuble courant, which literally translates to a current piece of furniture. Current, because it was designed to be moved about to suit convenience, rather than being ranged permanently or formally along the walls as part of the decor.

 

Hence,
one might say,
the bergère
is the most
attentive of suitors,
extending its arms,
legs
and soft cushion
to catch you,
hold you,
embrace you,
and in the
memorable
words
of more
than one
love song,

“never let you go.”

 

Who could resist its warmth, whimsy and happily stripped countenance that smiles from whichever corner it graces? Like the friend who accompanies you to a party reminding you you’re not alone in a room of strangers, the silent, sturdy and reliably devoted bergère is your private accomplice, your most trusted confidante, the one true plush pal that will never drop you, disappoint you or let you down. The fold of its strong, unyielding arms never wavers, equivocates or shuns the simplest of life’s surprises: a post-party collapse, a vexing decision, a defeated slump, a quiet cry, a stunned silence, or the blissful fog of sleep.

Each day it greets you with the gentlest of nudges, the softest of caresses, and each night, in grateful commendation, it gathers you into its protective arms to soothe, shelter and calm, reminding you once more, lest you forget, of its fealty, faithfulness, and unapologetic love.

 

Photos: (Top) Getty images; (Bottom) le style
Excerpt (Top): “A Chair” by Russell Edson, The Very Thing that Happens

It is difficult to imagine summer, even this very unsettling one in the year, 2010, without remembering another of long ago when the consummate Golden Couple, Sara and Gerald Murphy, reigned, embracing the very embodiment of the season itself.

While both frolicked in their youth on the shores of the Hamptons, it was their arrival at Antibes, in the south of France, during the Summer of 1923, that christened the dawn of a new era. Their very appearance on the French Riviera that summer, she sunbathing in her signature pearls cascading down to the small of her back (she explained, they wanted sunning), and, he, meticulously clothed and accessorized in sartorial perfection, fueled the same renaissance in arts and letters as did the excitement of Paris, especially among the cafés of Montparnasse.

Gerald and his beloved Sara, considered one of the great American beauties of her generation, were icons of the most enchanted period of our time; handsome, talented, and wealthy expatriate Americans; they were at the very center of the literary scene in Paris in the 1920s. Her magnetic hospitality, along with her spontaneity and adventurous spirit, and his fun-loving antics, humor and warm regard, drew people to them for life.

The Murphys hosted the Picassos and just about everyone else who counted in adventurous art and literature in those heady days of abandon, including Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Jean Cocteau, Archibald MacLeish, John O’Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley.

The Murphys claim on the French Riviera was immediate and, one might conclude, revolutionary. In the 1920′s if one were to walk the sands of that famed stretch of beach in summer, their gaze would have been met with shuttered hotels, boarded residences and empty, desolate beaches as the fashionable and famous thought only to winter there, in the south of France. The mere idea of spending the high summer months along the wind swept sands of the Mediterranean was simply unimaginable.

Enter the Murphys in the summer of 1923. In a stroke of sheer genius and social virtuosity, they convinced the famed Hotel du Cap to do what had never been done — remain open for the summer season so they might sensibly entertain their friends, hence, sparking a new era for the French Riviera as a summer haven. Imagine.

Three years later, the couple purchased a villa in Cap d’Antibes and named it Villa America, residing there with their three children for many memorable years to come, all the while hosting many unforgettable parties to follow. So stylishly de rigueur and trend setting were the pair, they were the first to introduce the outlandish idea of sun bathing, swimming and cavorting on the beach of the Riviera.

The notion of the beach as being a place simply to sun was unthinkable to the highly refined French and the Europeans who vacationed there. The Murphys, with their long forays and picnics at La Garoupe, were so consumed with fun, frivolity and friends, that inhibited spectators on either side of the merrymaking marauders soon took notice, adopting the practice as their very own. In no time, the new art of sunbathing on the previously restricted beach, became the epitome of fashionable chic, making its way into the most prominent of circles.

In those glorious days on the beach at Antibes, it was the Murphys’ friend Scott Fitzgerald who described the couple best:

 

“There is Sara, her face “hard and lovely and pitiful,” her bathing suit “pulled off her shoulders” and her brown back gleaming under her rope of pearls, “making out a list of things from a book open in the sand.” And there is Gerald, her husband, tall and lean in his striped maillot and a knitted cap, gravely taking the seaweed from the beach as if performing “some esoteric burlesque,” to the delight of the little audience of friends they have gathered around them.

On the “bright tan prayer rug of the beach,” they and their friends swim, sunbathe, drink sherry and nibble crackers, trade jokes about the people with strange names listed in the “News of Americans” in the Paris Herald: “Mrs. Evelyn Oyster” and “Mr. S. Flesh.” Their very presence is “an act of creation”; to be included in their world is, Fitzgerald says, “a remarkable experience.”

 

As history would, in time, reveal, Fitzgerald wasn’t literally portraying the Murphys, of course, he was writing a novel, called Tender is the Night, about a psychiatrist named Dick Diver and his wife, Nicole. In the novel, the woman with the pearls is recovering from a breakdown brought on by incest, and the man with the rake ends up losing his wife, his position, everything he most cares about. Things not known to have happened to Gerald and Sara Murphy, but to the tragic Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Art imitating life, many would say.

Yet the magic of that golden couple prevails to this day. Just as the Murphys served as symbols of the great theme of the Lost Generation in literature, with Fitzgerald modeling the fictionalized world of Dick and Nicole Diver after them, so, too, did their idealized images sear the imagination in photography with this iconic photograph taken by George Hoyningen-Hueve in 1930, posing his assistant, Horst P. Horst and a model, mistaken by many over the years to be the Murphys themselves.

Fittingly, some may say, the photographer, Hoyningen-Heuve, whimsically entitled the photo, “The Divers.”

 

Gerald and Sara Murphy on La Garoupe beach, Antibes, 1926.
Gerald and Sara Murphy dancing on the beach of East Hampton, 1915.
Excerpt: Everybody Was So Young, Amanda Vaill, Houghton Mifflin
Divers (Horst with Model, Paris), George Hoyningen-Huene, 1930

 

Were one in the market for something airy and light, this skyward retreat from the teeming masses that are so annoyingly evident these days, might be just the thing. The aforementioned lilliputian manor in Windsor, a penthouse with a rooftop terrace, promises to fortify, placate and soothe the troubled brow. Priced for the recession at a modest £1.6m, it has all the amenities:

LOOKS The contemporary riverside penthouses in Royal Windsor Quay have spectacular covered roof terraces with majestic views of the Thames, Windsor Castle, Eton College and the Berkshire countryside.

CHARM The modern living space, which has luxurious dark oak flooring, polished porcelain, Italian marble, and granite and steel surfaces, opens through a glazed partition onto the stunning terrace.

ESSENTIALS The Windsor area is home to a high concentration of Michelin-starred restaurants, including Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck in Bray.

What could be more appropriate to the discriminating aesthete? On a splendid midsummer’s night, following a round of libations on the terrace, one could literally float down to the streets like that other celestial creature, Mary Poppins, to join friends at the awaiting table at Fat Duck for a repast of snail porridge, liquorice-poached salmon and a finish of a plump taffety tart of caramelized apple, fennel, rose and candied Lemon. It is almost certain that a time “half mad with hilarity” as Lady Diana Manners might say, would ensue.

 

Telegraph: Properties (Savills, 01344 295 375, www.savills.co.uk)