Saturday 30th November, 2019 (15:24)
…Let us begin our new edition by returning once more to the cottage on Georgetown Island, where, serenaded by Stravinsky and the rhythmic rattle of a shared portable typewriter, Frederick Buechner and James Merrill spent that final adolescent summer of 1948 striving to produce their first published works. Looking back fifty-one years hence, Buechner remembers ‘The Georgetown summer’ as ‘a great success’, and yet, somewhat wistfully,
the last time Jimmy and I had nothing to do but enjoy each other’s company and take things as they came, before the world closed in on us and we went our separate ways to make something of ourselves as best we could with only the haziest notion in either of our cases as to what those somethings were to be.[1]
A Long Day’s Dying (1950) also proved to be ‘a great success’. Within two years of the summer that birthed it, Buechner had become a popular topic among the nation’s literati, especially in his hometown. The glittering residue of this conversation is visible across the inside cover of the novel’s early editions. New York’s finest journals — Newsweek, The Saturday Review, and the New York Times Book Review — competed to praise and probe this strange new novel and its impossibly young author. So too, did the city’s leading virtuosos and artisans, from Karl Van Vechten to Leonard Bernstein. Indeed, the latter confessed himself to have ‘rarely been so moved by a perception’ — ‘Mr. Buechner’, he goes on, ‘shows a remarkable insight into one of the least easily expressible tragedies of modern man; the basic incapacity of persons really to communicate with one another’. From her home in the Village, Isabel Bolton declared the novel an ‘amazing’ achievement for ‘so young a man’, a view echoed by Pearl Kazan, who judged Buechner to be possessed of ‘a maturity of dramatic and moral feeling’. Malcolm Lowry — a frequent fixture on the city’s literary scene — credits the fledgeling author with ‘a subtle gift for creating unusual but solid characters and an atmosphere of excitement which is not dependent on physical violence’.
This essay represents a continuation of the piece with which we began our last issue, since its focus is on another moment in A Long Day’s Dying, and intriguing encounter that begins with an ostensibly simple sentence, ‘Bone found himself in the chapel’.[2] Frustrated by a paralysing inability to confess his love to Elizabeth Poor, Tristram Bone — that well-dressed, well-fed son of Old New York, majestic in frame and noble in bearing — mutely leaves her side, and wanders into the twilit sanctuary. There he finds a ‘dim richness’, permeated by the ‘indistinct benedictions of an organ’, and the tinctured light of the afternoon sun, rendered ‘bright blue, cinnamon, and green’ by the ‘lancet window, whereon a prophet bore a scroll with Ecce Virgo’.[3] Approaching a saint, Bone is drawn out of himself for a moment, and, moved by his surroundings, he raises a hand and places it into that of the statue. Coming to himself, he hurriedly attempts to withdraw, only to realise that his hand is stuck. Following a frantic struggle in which the statue is almost toppled, Bone eventually manages to extricate himself, falling to his knees at the base of the pedestal:
It was as if he floated, belly upwards and exposed to the cold ocean wind, and if he prayed it was to sink back into submarine safety, the hidden and wise, where he could move once more with fluid speed and ponderous grace.[4]
For all its metaphysical resonances, this striking moment is made even more curious by its setting. To the uninitiated, or to those 1950s readers who had not been to New York City or read of its various sites, while the action of the scene might seem unusual there is apparently little of note concerning the location. Chapels are the sorts of places one would expect things like this to happen. Let us be clear, though, the ‘monastery’ (a word used to describe this place by the characters nine times throughout the novel) is not a monastery at all, but it is in fact a museum, the MET Cloisters. Nor is the ‘chapel’ in which Bone encounters his saint a real chapel; rather, it is the “Gothic Chapel”, an exhibition space within the museum, ‘intended primarily as a setting for stained glass and large sculptures’.[5] The ‘lancet window’ described by Buechner (which can still be seen today) is the stained-glass depiction of the Prophet Isaiah and Mary Magdalen, sourced from the Abbey of Evron in Normandy.[6] In his hand, the prophet holds a scroll that falls away to his feet upon which is written the words ‘Ecce Virgo’: “Behold, a Virgin…”.
Located on the banks of the Hudson River on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the Cloisters is an arresting sight. From the outside, its imposing mass of gentle grey stone resembles a French monastery — Saint-Hilaire, Sénanque, or the Abbaye Saint-Michel de Gaillac — on the inside even more so, with its collection of chapels, gardens, and cloistered walkways. These interior features, from the rooms themselves to the objects they contain, are all carefully labelled: the Cuxa Cloister, taken from a Pyrenean ninth-century abbey, Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa;[7] the Langon Chapel, constructed from stonework removed from the twelfth-century church of Notre-Dame-de-Bourg, near Bordeaux;[8] or the Pontaut Chapter House, transported from the Abbaye Notre-Dame-de-Pontaut, a Cistercian monastery built in Gascony by the Benedictines between 1115-1151.[9] Every space is appointed with the appropriate objects — altars, crucifixes, tombs — each with its own history and place of origin discreetly displayed nearby.
The stories of how these elements found their way to New York City are many and varied. Some, including the individual cloisters themselves, were bought by John D. Rockefeller Jr. from George Grey Barnard, a sculptor who collected medieval masonry, transported it across the Atlantic, and temporarily displayed it in his own museum. Other elements, whether rooms or objects, were subsequently hunted down across Europe, judged to be worthy of the project, dismantled, removed, and incorporated into their new setting.[10] The story of how they were housed — too long to re-tell in full here — is similarly fascinating. There are the broader aspirations of Rockefeller himself, such as his concern that the building should complement Fort Tryon Park (and his ornate Gothic church located on its southern border) and his desire that it should evoke his beloved Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, England. And there are the myriad fascinating technicalities pursued by his expert foremen, who worked tirelessly to ensure that their ‘architectural composition’ successfully ‘steered a satisfying middle course between a building style at odds with the period of art represented and an overbearing medieval replica that would have submerged the original objects’.[11] Indeed, the notes taken by architect Charles Collens reveal his determination to produce a building that was seamlessly fused with the medieval objects within: it should have ‘no large rooms’; ‘the windows should be comparatively small windows in order to obtain a subdued light’;[12] ‘the shape of the room and the character of the ceiling, the general fenestration, and the doorways’ – all ‘must be in agreement’ with the exhibit.[13] Indeed, such was his commitment to ‘agreement’ between building and exhibit that Collens considered purchasing ‘several medieval European ruins’, and shipping them to New York, not for reassembly and display, but merely to be used as raw building materials:[14]
In all this discussion the premise was that the materials and the way they were handled were different in the twelfth century than in the twentieth. That modern stone lacked some undefined, unreproducible spirituality of the period was the one point on which all museum officials seemed to agree.[15]
In the end, they settled for something more local, but only because it closely ‘resembled the stone found in southern France’,[16] and so it was that, as I emerged from the bare American elms in Fort Tryon Park on a bright, cold, late-November day in 2019, the building that slowly revealed itself to view was composed of warm grey Connecticut stone. [17]
As an Englishman, I found this visit to be a curious, even bewildering, experience. My recollections of childhood are populated with memories of haring around the grounds of ruined monasteries, castles, and abbeys, or exploring the sacred silence of medieval cathedrals and village churches. To observe New Yorkers using the Cloisters in similar fashion was profoundly strange. Did they not know that this place is not real? To begin to ask this inordinately complex question is to be interrupted by the counter-thought that there is of course a sense in which the Cloisters is “real”. Though much of its stone was sourced from nearby, and though the building as a whole was designed by twentieth-century architects and assembled by twentieth-century labourers, the Cloisters is partially composed from a selection of genuine medieval buildings and architectural features. If it is not real, it is certainly not fake. Still, as I wandered with the crowd from room to room, exhibit to exhibit, my questions persisted. Why were my fellow visitors respectful in some spaces but talkative in others —why did they restrain their children in the chapels and let them run free in the hallways? Why did they treat this recently resettled assortment of foreign buildings as though it were their local ruin, this secular space as though it were sacred? In his May 1938 New Yorker article, titled ‘Pax in Urbe’, Lewis Mumford writes that the Cloisters is ‘full of authentic disharmonies’.[18] Warming to his theme, the critic offers the following characterisation: ‘At a distance, The Cloisters looks not like the excellent museum that it is but like a transplanted building, picked up by the jinn and whisked through the sky – not so much an honest relic as a wish.’[19] Perhaps, in agreement with Mumford, New Yorkers are aware of the cognitive dissonances that Rockefeller’s Xanadu inspires. How, then, are they able to engage with it in the manner that they do?
Buechner’s own interest in this question is reflected in his decision to situate Bone’s oddly spiritual encounter with a statue in this setting. Eschewing Trinity Wall Street, St. Paul’s on Broadway, St. Patrick’s in midtown, St. John the Divine in Morningside, or the neighboring Riverside Church (also built by Rockefeller, and also designed by Collens), Buechner chooses the Cloisters. In a similar spirit, the young author also disdains the Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim, and the MET, and countless other potential locations that show forth the living and mercurial human soul of New York City, and its far-flung ancestry. It had to be here, in this place where the old sacred and new secular meet in an uneasy marriage that, despite its careful construction, enshrines dissonance rather than resonance. From their interactions with it, Buechner’s characters — Bone, Elizabeth, and Morley — seem interested in the same questions. Their conversation on the way up to the site reveals their sense of its contested liminality:
“You’re taking us to the Cloisters?” offered Elizabeth.
“To get the last word on the Middle Ages.” Bone concluded.
“But exactly! And also,” [Motley] paused long enough for them to pass through the revolving door onto the street before continuing, “to spend an afternoon with you two clever ones, of course. You should have brought [your pet monkey], Tristram. A monkey in a monastery—only think of it!”[20]
These are complex and conflicting expectations. Bone’s phrasing, ‘to get the last word’, is suggestive of an educational visit, yet it also implies more of an immersive experience than a trip to a well-organised, well-stocked museum. To visit this museum, he seems to be saying, is to experience with ultimacy a time beyond one’s own. Motley shares something of this attitude, though, crucially, the make-believe interaction he envisages is more playful than profound.
There is a broader museological question here, concerning how we ought to interact with “period rooms”. Pioneered by Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Royal Prussian Museums from 1906-1920, this type of exhibit sought to situate objects from the same period in relation to one another: paintings above fireplaces, rugs beneath chandeliers, armchairs beside cabinets — all from the same place and time. The central aim of Bode’s museological innovation, writes Xavier-Pol Tilliette, was to ‘suggest to the visitor the particular atmosphere of the particular time in art history.’[21] At its most complex, it was believed that the sophisticated visitor might imbibe something of the mood and conditions out of which the art was formed. Such a display would encourage the suspension of disbelief, and the imaginative experience of what it would have been like to live in such an age. The period room, a subsequent development, was an advancement upon this idea: a record of how one’s ancestors lived, but also an opportunity to observe and imaginatively experience their lives – to feel a sense of one’s heritage.
It was Wilhelm Valentiner, a student of Bode, who transplanted this idea to the United States, particularly the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan, where he was appointed curator of the department of decorative arts in 1907. The Cloisters — no mere period room, but a period complex (in more ways than one) — represents the apogee of this type of thinking. Indeed, Tilliette offers the following conclusion:
Bode’s museological influence at the Metropolitan Museum is unquestionable, and it marked the museum for many years: The Cloisters, opened in 1938, a project for which Valentiner was an advisor, can be seen as a further realization of Bode’s ideals in the United States.[22]
To the long list of contemporaneous cultural discourses that Buechner’s first novel touches upon, then, we can add twentieth-century museology. Readers of what was to follow from the author, however, will wonder if this is as deep as it goes. That Buechner seems to be taking advantage of a strange new type of setting and playing with its implications appears to be certain. But is there something more going on? Specifically, is there some latent spiritual instinct here, briefly surfacing before its time?
At the museum’s grand opening on Wednesday May 11, 1938, John D. Rockefeller expressed his aspirations for its exhibits in the following way:
if those who come under the influence of this place go out to face life with new courage and restored faith because of the peace, the calm, the loveliness of what they have found here; if the many who thirst for beauty are refreshed and gladdened as they drink deeply from this well of beauty, then those who have builded here will not have built in vain.[23]
Lying beneath these words is a nineteenth-century presupposition that it is not doctrine but beauty — which is to be found everywhere and in all systems of thought and religion — that is fundamentally transformative to the human soul.[24] Nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, those great temples to beauty and the human spirit, were themselves largely the product of this belief: that the study of culture, ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere’, would transform the world, and, in the words of Matthew Arnold, that great nineteenth-century transatlantic apostle of “Culture”, ‘make’ all humanity ‘live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light’.[25] So, is Tristram Bone’s experience intended by Buechner to be expressive of this kind of thinking? On entering a museum, Bone is transported by its beauty, and led entranced into a kind of transformative experience. Then again, the nature of the experience is hardly gladdening, refreshing, or restorative. A relic of an apparently dead religious past, placed here by curators for its artistic qualities rather than its theological vitality, refuses to allow itself to be recontextualised beyond its original meaning. On feeling the approach of aesthetic appreciation, somehow, it takes hold of the searching hand and, for a moment, refuses to let go. Is this the museum doing what it was meant to do? Or is it the sacred refusing to allow itself to be secularised? Is this a marvellous utterance of that modern tragedy noted by Bernstein, the basic incapacity of persons to communicate with one another, swelling beyond the plight of individuals to encompass epochs, civilisations, and religions — all of which ultimately fail to meet despite the best efforts of Collens et al, resulting in an embarrassing encounter that feels violent without being so? Or is it the young Frederick Buechner, full of laughter and the summer sun, merely puncturing the ego of his first great character by having him cause a scene during a moment of self aggrandisement? These fiendish questions require lengthier treatment and so I shall end here, at the beginning of our new edition, by observing that the author whose work invites them is worthy of our continued, serious attention. I hope you’ll agree, and I hope you’ll continue to join us here at Buechner Review, as we delve deeper into the work of our namesake this year.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thank you for reading The Buechner Review. If you would like to receive future articles in your email inbox you can sign up here.
Works cited:
[1] Frederick Buechner, The Eyes of the Heart: a memoir of the lost and found (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p.34.
[2] Frederick Buechner, A Long Day’s Dying (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), p.23.
[3] Ibid, p.23.
[4] Ibid, p.26.
[5] Bonnie Young, A Walk through The Cloisters (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979), p.76.
[6] Ibid, p.76.
[7] Ibid, p.47.
[8] Ibid, p.31.
[9] Ibid, p.40.
[10] For a full account see: Rebecca Leuchak, ‘“The Old World for the New”: developing the design for The Cloisters’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, vol.23 (1988), pp.257-77.
[11] Ibid, p.273-4.
[12] Charles Collens, 'General Explanation of Preliminary Layout #1', Apr. 29, 1931, MMA Archives, quoted in: Leuchak (1988), p.263.
[13] Ibid, p.263.
[14] Ibid, p.262.
[15] Ibid, p.262.
[16] Ibid, p.260.
[17] Ibid, p.260.
[18] Lewis Mumford, ‘Pax in Urbe’, Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford’s writings on New York (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), p.213.
[19] Ibid, p.213.
[20] Buechner (1950), p.14-5.
[21] Xavier Pol Tilliette, 'Between Museumsinsel and Manhattan: Wilhelm R. Valentiner, ambassador and agent of Wilhelm von Bode at the Metropolitan Museum, 1908-1914', Andrea Meyer and Benedicte Savoy (eds), The Museum is Open: towards a transnational history of museums, 1750-1940 (Berlin: De Gruyter), p.194.
[22] Ibid, p.204.
[23] New York Times (Wednesday, May 11, 1938).
[24] For an example of this kind of thinking, see Matthew Arnold’s 1869 work, Culture and Anarchy, in which he argues for the recontextualisation of “religion” into a subcategory of “Culture”: ‘[R]eligion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself,—religion, that voice of the deepest human experience,—does not only enjoin and sanction the aim which is the great aim of culture, the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail; but also, in determining generally in what human perfection consists, religion comes to a conclusion identical with that which culture,—culture seeking the determination of this question through all the voices of human experience which have been heard upon it, of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion, in order to give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution,—likewise reaches. Religion says: The kingdom of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality. It places it in the ever-increasing efficacy and in the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature.’ p.47.
[25] Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 [1869]), p.70.
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