Sketch For A Self Portrait

By Bernard Berenson

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Apr 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473381209

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PREFACE

Can any mortal portray himself with words, as perhaps he can with chalk or paint? The limner has something relatively definite before him as he looks into the glass and sees himself mirrored there. I doubt the representative accuracy of even such an image. But words! What can they do but apply this or that epithet, this or that descriptive, interpretative, evocative phrase; recount that anecdote, or that praiseworthy, or blameworthy deed? A gifted verbal artist may convey some coherent idea of a person he attempts to portray, but not likely an objective one.

No matter what your talent as an author, where are you to catch yourself en flagrant délit of being yourself, yours individually, privately, yet representative and consistent?

Be that as it may be, I for one am not sure just which of my so many selves, at different moments of my life, would represent me most faithfully. I can only attempt to offer glimpses into my present self or selves, those glimpses which in recent years have flashed more recurrently through my mind. Indeed the reader may notice that in this volume, as well as in the Diary which will follow it and in my book on Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts, there is a tendency for certain ideas, certain subjects, certain preoccupations to appear again and again as the wooden horses in a merry-go-round.

So I have tried to jot down some glimpses into that chaos and to dip into that stream of consciousness we are accustomed to call self. They are few, for most whirl or flow away. And those few are handed over freed from impurities as it were, and too deodorized by our invincible and irremediable self-regard, to have more value than that of meteoric flashes in a dark sky. Self-glimpses might be the best title for this book, or better still Self-dippings, if I could endure the combination of syllables. Glimpses into Self or Dippings into Self sounds awkward and affected. So unless my publisher hits upon a better title, let it be Sketch for a Self-portrait.

CASA AL DONO, VALLOMBROSA.

September 20th, 1945

PART ONE

1

OFTEN I feel like a cow with sagging udders lowing for calf or milkmaid to relieve her. Or like a plant that oozes ink instead of syrup or resin and craves to have it properly drawn off. Wherefore I enjoy companionship that draws one out to talk, and correspondents who stimulate one to write. To the well disposed there is nothing more effective for either satisfaction than blank paper. When one’s own mental state refuses to become creative, remains obstinately impotent, then the ink that is in me searches an outlet and finds it in letter-writing.

Thus on travel, although so busy sight-seeing and losing so much time in being carried from place to place, I find leisure for letters. There are no friends to draw me out in talk and no preoccupations with authorship to absorb me.

A pity that talk is not self-registering! Hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands of yards of paper would preserve my bright sayings, my provoking epithets, my wit, my wisdom, my learning—in short the outpourings of my heart and mind and spirit. I never got over the wonder I used to feel as a little boy that potatoes could fill a sack, water a pail, smoke a room, but words left every recipient empty no matter how much you talked into it. The more the pity, for I was born to talk and not to write and, worse still, to converse rather than to talk and then only with stimulating interlocutors. Oddly enough, these are not necessarily friends. They may be total strangers or the merest acquaintances. They must, however, have the eagerness, the curiosity, the responsiveness, to start my tongue wagging and, I must add unblushingly, wagging to a purpose. I am as easily put off as mediumistic performers by the presence of doubters. My audience must believe and accept, not necessarily what I say, but me as a talker worth their while.

Oftener than not, the most stimulating listeners would not be able to relate (or give account of) what I said, for the simple reason that they retained but the vaguest and most confused notion of what I was driving at, having enough brains to feel fascinated but not enough to understand. So we prefer the cosy comfort and lounging ease of talk with inferiors to the challenging and fatiguing society of superiors or even equals.

Mrs. Winthrop Chanler tells in her memoirs how marvellously Henry Adams talked to one of her daughters on a late evening, when the young woman and he were alone. When he stopped she looked up in ecstasy, transfigured. Do you know, my child, why I talked? I was confident you would not understand a word of what I was saying.

Henry Adams on that occasion had found an innocent ear; he had reached the stage when one no longer itches to communicate, impart and persuade, but still feels the need of a receiver for the soliloquy with which head and heart are bursting. I have not got so far. I delight in the glowing sympathy of the audience but I require it to participate and stimulate. I expect it to crank me up with inspiring questions when I seem to be running short, or even, as is more apt to be the case, with some idiotic remark that has a metaphysical lining or sting.

This kind of audience will not be recruited among hard-boiled, too grown-up adults. We shall find it rather among individuals, of whatever age or sex, who remain adolescent-minded to the end. Women not overburdened with family, or philanthropy, or politics. Men in diplomacy, in business and in professions that leave them some leisure of mind. Men and women, they must be sufficiently acquainted with things of the spirit as well as with things of the world, to crave not only to know more but also to understand better, to thirst for clarification not less than for information.

They will be women more often than men, for women do not compete in the same field. If the desire for possession does not intervene, men and women can be so much better friends than men with men and women with women, subject as we are to jealousy, envy, and spite that, sugar it over as you will, accompany even the most civilized competitiveness.

So my kind of person turns to women, surrounds himself with women, appeals to women, not in the first place and perhaps not at all for reasons of sex, no matter how deodorized, alembicated and transubstantiated, but for the one deciding reason that women, especially certain society women, are more receptive, more appreciative and consequently more stimulating. Let colleagues, equals and superiors jeer as they please, but when youth is well over, colleagues seldom draw each other out. They are more likely to freeze the tender shoots of each other’s tentativeness, suggestiveness and wistfulness with the hard frost of their logic and scholarship, the instruments of their instinctive pugnacity. They tend to inhibit rather than to encourage talk except as a hard competition in a verbal prize-fight.

To confess to preferring the society of the adolescent-minded may be to write oneself down as second- or even third-rate, compared with the stags who engage their tangled horns of learning in sublime and intellectual contest.

We second- and third-rate folk can find comfort in Socrates, in Plato and in many other thinkers, men of science and men of letters, who lived before or after the monastic period—a period with traditions that have left an impress upon universities until only the other day. They frequented the adolescent-minded by choice, and seldom the overmature. With the last they joined in controversy; in social intercourse perhaps never.

But present conditions crab and confine my social radiation to a minimum. Living among a people at war, as the citizen of a non-belligerent country with opposed sympathies, and residing in a town like Florence, renowned for its clamorous patriotism, it is quite natural that I see few Italians. Foreigners do not come. Dear English and American friends who used to stay are not to be expected. Not only that it is almost impossible to keep up correspondence with them. Even if letters do succeed in getting through, they have to pass censorship after censorship and one is reduced to the epistolary style of the humble and untutored who write that they are well and hope that you too are well. The ink that was in me used to flow out as from the rivers of Paradise to friends not only in America, but in England, in France, in Germania. Now that I cannot shed it, I suffer almost as from a physical stoppage. In normal times, when in my home and library and study, I write or am preoccupied with the idea of composing for print which takes up my pen to a great extent. But now anxieties, excitements, despondencies, speculations related to the war skim one’s energies to such a degree that there is little left over wherewith to concentrate on abstract and impersonal subjects.

And yet the itch to write is strong enough to make me uncomfortable when I pass a day sine linea—without putting down something in black and white.

2

A friend who is staying here came to my study yesterday evening for a confidential chat. Talking of her husband she told me he had not changed in his reactions, in his attitudes toward the world, toward society, toward the family, in twenty-two years. In short, and to use my own language, he was as grown-up twenty-two years ago as he has been since, as hard boiled. As this friend and her husband are both Neapolitans I heard myself say what a pity it was that adults could not liquefy like the blood of Saint Januarius.

In this instance there was a fraction of a second’s awareness in me of what I was going to say. Usually images, metaphors, comparisons, slip from my tongue before I become aware of what I am going to say.

If at my age the winged words still come to the lips it is not so with names. Names already on the tip of the tongue instead of passing the teeth dart back like lizards. I used to have a fair memory for names and even for words. I was particularly good at recalling every substantive connected with my job. Now the small fry glide away like minnows into the waters of Lethe. Yet in some mysterious way one’s wish does often get them back, when one’s will has given up trying.

Memory is curious, capricious, incalculable, inexplicable, like all other realities. What is it? Is it a thread? No, rather a nerve rivulet conveying what is left over of a vital experience from somewhere in the past to the present instant. The loss of memory begins with attenuating this flow until it almost stops. Thereupon this something that hitherto had a warmth, as if it were an extension, no matter how remote, of our blood-stream, ceases to be part of us, never to be reintegrated with ourselves, even if we do recapture it and save it for mere use. Strange things happen to me in my seventy-sixth year. So much of what only the other day seemed part and parcel of my mental furniture has faded and vanished before I have perceived it. Could I have retained it with a timely effort? I could not have believed that I would forget my Greek irregular verbs, the dates of the kings of England, the succession of our presidents, the rivers, the capitals, the boundaries of our individual states. I find I am forgetting them or have lost them already. Huge lumps of memory break away and melt into oblivion. Why? How? Is memory a tablet, a palimpsest, criss-crossed and written over and over, till no ground is visible through a tangle of inextricable confusion? Is that why we cease to retain easily and then not at all after a certain age, and why the tablet breaks off at the edges and cracks in the middle? Again, memory seems to act as if it consisted of a pile of photographic negatives. During our best years these negatives present themselves unbidden when wanted. Now they ignore my orders. What has happened? Have they failed in energy and readiness, have they faded, or is it my ego that can no longer command their obedience?

I wonder sometimes whether memory is not the core of one’s own feeling of identity. If a cut is made in the stream of memory, the part that flows away ceases to be us. If this or that is dipped up in buckets and recognized as having formerly been us, it now is no more us than the hair and nails or even meaner products of the body that we have shed. Life is short enough, yet few retain a memory continuous from their early childhood to the present minute. Most of us have but a shapeless sense of the past and few moments retain their vital contact with us, these few getting rarer and dimmer the nearer they retreat toward boyhood and childhood. When we succeed in calling up this or that episode of childhood, boyhood, youth, we are indifferent, feel no responsibility, no sense that it was ourselves that did or were done to.

Memory may be the core of the sense of one’s own personality, but this sense has much besides, many threads of various tissues and colours are wound round this core. Of this more at some other time perhaps. Just now I want to ask what becomes of immortality if memory is so fragile, so uncertain, so wavering, so feeble that it cannot successfully and