The Reality of Winter

Brandywine River, November 2014

The day after Thanksgiving last year I had reason to meet some friends up in Wilmington, Delaware, and I decided to drive up a bit early so I would have time to see the paintings of Andrew Wyeth at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Wyeth has marked the various stages of my life in America. I saw my first Wyeth in 1979, though only in reproduction. I’d just graduated from the University of Edinburgh, and was traveling around the US in an attempt to understand the country where I had spent the first six years of my life. In the bookstore of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, a picture on the front of a book caught my eye was – a simple window of a clapboard house with a glimpse of red geraniums on the far windowsill. I loved the framing of the window within a window and the mere suggestion of red in the darkness and clutter within. I bought the book as a present for my mother, an artist herself.

Geraniums by Andrew Wyeth

When I first moved to Washington in 1987, the National Gallery of Art was exhibiting Wyeth’s controversial Helga paintings, over 240 paintings and drawings of a single model, Wyeth’s Chadd’s Ford neighbor, Helga Testorf. It was said that Wyeth had kept these modelling sessions secret from his wife for 15 years, and the frankly erotic charge given off by the many nudes fueled rumors that Helga was more than just his model. But as I wandered around the exhibit, I was as taken by the settings of the paintings as by Helga’s powerful female form – the splintered paint on the weathered houses, the silvered bark of the naked trees, and the glossy transparency of the river water. 

Cape Coat Helga by Andrew Wyeth

Last November as I drove up Route 52 through the Brandywine Valley towards Chadds Ford, there were lines of snow in the folds of the stark empty fields, and I realized I was looking at a quintessential Wyeth landscape - spare, uncompromising, without illusions. Wyeth once said: “I love Pennsylvania in the winter. It’s not pretty...The Brandywine’s sort of ugly, looking like what George Washington must have felt when he camped at Valley Forge. Tough living.” 

John Updike also loved the country of south-eastern Pennsylvania. He grew up on a farm in Shillington near Reading, and as a writer he was “full of a Pennsylvania thing I wanted to say.” The result was, among others, the wonderful Olinger stories and the four Rabbit books, two of which won Pulitzer prizes. He and Wyeth were linked by a sensibility as well as a landscape.

Winter was Wyeth’s favorite season. “I love the bleakness of winter and snow and get a thrill out of the chill... My winter scenes differ from those of other artists in that they’re not romantic. No! They capture that marvelous, lonely bleakness – the quiet, the chill reality of winter.”

It was in that season that he died - in his own bed in Chadds Ford on January 16, 2009. In the novel, The Centaur, Updike seems to have prefigured the painter’s last view from his bedroom window: 

“A few frost-ferns had sprouted from the lower corners of the upper panes. The early sun lay tan on the stubble of the big field across the dirt road. The road was pink. The bare trees took white on their sun side; a curious ruddiness was caught in their twigs. Everything looked frozen; the two strands of telephone wire looked locked into place in the sky’s blue ice. It was January...”

Remarkably, John Updike died a mere 11 days after Wyeth, on January 27. Coincidence? I think not. 

Kuerners Farm House, Chadds Ford by Andrew Wyeth

Life and Death in Mrs Dalloway

 “But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton’s face as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence...”

In this passage from her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf casts ahead (she was only 42) to a time when the share of life would have dwindled to a narrow slice. Rereading it in my own middle age, I see much more clearly than I did in my youth that Mrs Dalloway is a book about the purpose of our lives and the encroachment of death.

“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”

I remember very clearly the moment when I knew I wouldn’t live forever. Lying on the couch reading, as much at peace as I ever was during my turbulent first marriage, it suddenly hit me I was already on the downslide to being 40 years old. My youth had gone – not in terms of my looks, which at that moment didn’t matter at all, but in terms of the number of years I had left to live. These moments are now an eddying stream of moments, as they are for Mrs Dalloway on the day she ventures out to buy the flowers for her party.

“Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.” 

For those of us in middle age, time passes inexorably, however we may lean back against it, marked by the tolling of bells. “Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First, a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

Acknowledging, as we must, the fleeting nature of our existence, we tend to want our lives to have a purpose – whether to lead multitudes, right wrongs, or create a masterpiece – something significant to mark our passing between the cradle and the grave, to leave a handprint on the earth. Clarissa Dalloway frets about her own lack of purpose, fearing that her life has been frivolous, spent only in throwing parties and bringing people together for brief moments of pleasure. But then it occurs to her maybe that was precisely her gift, what she had been born to do.

“It was an offering; to combine; to create; but to whom? An offering for the sake of offering perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled the Armenians and the Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”

So Mrs Dalloway gives her party. Doors are taken off their hinges, and Chinese lanterns are hung in the fragrant June garden. Rumpelmayer’s men bring the confiseries, while Mrs Walker, the cook, labors in the kitchen among “the plates, saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding basins.” Lucy the maid runs into the drawing room to smooth a cover and straighten a chair. Gentlemen wait in the hall while ladies take their cloaks off in the room along the passage where Mrs Barnett (“old Ellen Barnet who had been with the family for forty years”) pins up their hair and helps Lady Lovejoy who is having “some trouble with her underbodice.” Bending and straightening himself at the drawing room door, Mr. Wilkins (“hired for parties”) announces the guests as they arrive, and Clarissa, in "ear-rings and a silver-green mermaid's dress" greets them all with the same effusive phrases, even the Prime Minister, “this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society” who withdraws into a little room with old Lady Bruton. The rooms are packed and the noise is tremendous, and yet Clarissa has been feeling in her bones that her party is going to be a failure, the parts not cohering into a natural flow. And then a yellow curtain covered with birds of Paradise billows at the open window and it seems "as if there were a flight of wings into the room, right out, and then sucked back.” As it bellies out again, Clarissa sees a guest beat it back with his hand and go right on talking, and she knows all will be well. “So it wasn’t a failure after all! It was going to be all right now – her party. It had begun. It had started.” 

The Endless Finales of Things

Emerald Isle, North Carolina, November 9, 2014

Song of Sunset by Walt Whitman

Splendor of ended day, floating and filling me!

Hour prophetic—hour resuming the past!

Inflating my throat—you, divine average!

You, Earth and Life, till the last ray gleams, I sing.
 

Open mouth of my Soul, uttering gladness,

Eyes of my Soul, seeing perfection,

Natural life of me, faithfully praising things;

Corroborating forever the triumph of things.
 

Illustrious every one!

Illustrious what we name space—sphere of unnumber’d spirits;

Illustrious the mystery of motion, in all beings, even the tiniest insect;

Illustrious the attribute of speech—the senses—the body;

Illustrious the passing light! Illustrious the pale reflection on the new moon in the

 Western sky!

Illustrious whatever I see, or hear, or touch, to the last.
 

Good in all,

In the satisfaction and aplomb of animals,

In the annual return of the seasons,

In the hilarity of youth,

In the strength and flush of manhood,

In the grandeur and exquisiteness of old age,

In the superb vistas of Death.
 

Wonderful to depart;

Wonderful to be here!

The heart, to jet the all-alike and innocent blood!

To breathe the air, how delicious!

To speak! to walk! to seize something by the hand!

To prepare for sleep, for bed—to look on my rose-color’d flesh;

To be conscious of my body, so satisfied, so large;

To be this incredible God I am;

To have gone forth among other Gods—these men and women I love.

Wonderful how I celebrate you and myself!

How my thoughts play subtly at the spectacles around!

How the clouds pass silently overhead!

How the earth darts on and on! and how the sun, moon, stars, dart on and on!

How the water sports and sings! (Surely it is alive!)

How the trees rise and stand up—with strong trunks—with branches and leaves!

(Surely there is something more in each of the tree—some living Soul.)

O amazement of things! even the least particle!

O spirituality of things!

O strain musical, flowing through ages and continents—now reaching me and America!

I take your strong chords—I intersperse them, and cheerfully pass them forward.
 

I too carol the sun, usher’d, or at noon, or, as now, setting,

I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth, and of all the growths of the earth,

I too have felt the resistless call of myself.

As I sail’d down the Mississippi,

As I wander’d over the prairies,

As I have lived—As I have look’d through my windows, my eyes,

As I went forth in the morning—As I beheld the light breaking in the east;

As I bathed on the beach of the Eastern Sea, and again on the beach of the Western Sea;

As I roam’d the streets of inland Chicago—whatever streets I have roam’d;

Or cities, or silent woods, or peace, or even amid the sights of war;

Wherever I have been, I have charged myself with contentment and triumph.
 

I sing the Equalities, modern or old,

I sing the endless finales of things;

I say Nature continues—Glory continues;

I praise with electric voice;

For I do not see one imperfection in the universe;

And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe.

O setting sun! though the time has come,

I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration.