Houdon and the American Collective Memory

Recently my family and I embarked on a spring vacation road trip that included spending time in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. The trip was, partly by intention and partly by accident, a kind of civic education tour. One persistent memory for me has become the artistry of Jean-Antoine Houdon, the French neoclassical sculptor.

Houdon (born at Versailles, March 20, 1741 – died in Paris, July 15, 1828) excelled at portraying with classical realism the great figures of his day. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art I encountered his bust of Benjamin Franklin, which stands at the center of small rotunda gallery. Franklin did not sit for Houdon, who apparently drew on memories of having seen the American statesman at various times when Franklin was representing the fledgling United States in France from 1776 to 1785. A 1778 marble version of the bust can be viewed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Houdon exhibited a terra cotta version at the French Royal Academy Salon in 1779. (A 1778 terra cotta bust of Franklin can also be seen at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.)

Houdon actually met Franklin in 1783. The Philadelphia marble bust dates from 1785 and is the most detailed. It has become the iconic portrait in the round of the American statesman. At eye level one can almost imagine standing before the great man himself.

Houdon’s plaster bust of George Washington stands in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Franklin invited Houdon to visit the United States, specifically so that Washington could sit for the artist. However, in the National Gallery the more remarkable images may well be two busts of the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, whose ideas helped shape the thinking of many of America’s founders. Voltaire was a favorite model for Houdon. The two marble busts in the National Gallery show Voltaire with and without a perruque (wig) but both with a wry smile, consistent with Voltaire’s fame for his wit.

At Monticello visitors can see Houdon’s bust of Thomas Jefferson, a terra cotta-patinated plaster on a marble plinth. Jefferson met Houdon while the former was minister to France from 1785 to 1789. Before leaving France at the outbreak of the French Revolution, Jefferson acquired ten or twelve terra cotta-patinated plaster busts of figures such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Voltaire for Monticello. Jefferson also sat for Houdon himself and brought back several plaster versions of his own bust to give to friends.

Houdon worked from life, portraying the noteworthy figures of his day with extraordinary skill and accuracy, thus giving future generations the images that form the American collective memory of its founding generation. What a marvelous gift these images are for today and for the future.

No. 1 Connection to Indiana

I had to chuckle when I read the latest in Alexander McCall Smith’s popular and thoroughly delightful series of gentle mysteries featuring the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana. Not only did the novel’s various little problems, twists, and turns offer the usual good fun but there also was an Indiana connection of a surprising and unusual sort.

Like the earlier novels, this 2012 one, titled The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, featured the familiar cast of characters: founder and principal detective at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, the redoubtable Precious Ramotswe; her assistant—oops, associate—Grace Makutsi; Mma Ramotswe’s husband and proprietor of the Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors garage, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni; Mma Makutsi’s new husband and proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Store, Mr. Phuti Radiphuti; and others well known to readers of the series. But there was a new character—and a special one at that.

Since the beginning Mma Ramotswe and her associate have been guided in their efforts at detection by a book titled The Principles of Private Detection, which is full of pity sayings and sound advice. Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi can quote sections of the book verbatim with easy familiarity. Now, who should appear in Tlokweng Road but the author himself, a modest, unassuming man, Clovis Andersen. Needless to say, Andersen is treated like a visiting dignitary, though he is anything but; and Mma Makutsi is particularly star-struck.

Andersen, it transpires, is from Muncie, Indiana, and even went to college in Bloomington. Were I to suspend my disbelief, I might well wonder where the fictional student Andersen walked and lived. Did he frequent the same coffee shops where I am prone to read mysteries over an afternoon cup of brew? For those who have not yet read this latest offering in the popular series, I won’t say more about Clovis Andersen, as to do so might spoil the fun. And this book is fun, as is the entire series.

St. Nick Redux

It’s that time of year again—a time for newbies and hucksters to reinvent Christmas, repurpose, reuse, refresh. The rest of us, I suspect, may be content merely to revisit some version of Christmas past.

One version that is a particular favorite is the one given life in Clement C. Moore’s poem, known variously as “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” and simply “The Night Before Christmas.” Clement Clarke Moore (right, July 15, 1779 – July 10, 1863) must be given credit for shaping our modern-day Santa Claus, his basic physical appearance and character, white beard and jelly belly and all that. However, like Shakespeare, Moore’s authorship has been called into question. Some have suggested that the real author could be Henry Livingston, Jr., a distant relative of Moore’s wife. I’ll leave that debate for scholars to argue. The fact of the poem—originally published anonymously in 1823—is sufficient for the season.

St. Nicholas, “a right jolly old elf,” offered at the time a counter-character to the then-popular image of a venerated saint—Father Christmas in Britain or Sinterklaas in Holland—who traditionally turned up on St. Nicholas Day, usually December 6 (though December 19 in most Orthodox countries). Across Europe that day is still reserved for children, and St. Nicholas is a bringer of gifts. Our Santa Claus starts with this tradition. Moore reinvented the holy father as the tubby, magical fellow who cruises around the world in a flying sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer—we know their names: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen. Donder (sometimes Dunder or Donner) and Blitzen (or Blixem) are a nod to the Dutch words for “thunder” and “lightning.” (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer didn’t appear until 1939.)

Since the mid-1800s Moore’s St. Nick has shaped our modern Christmas mythology. Naturally, this version also has been a frequent subject of parody, reinvention, and reiteration. The poem was crafted as a silent movie in 1905 and inspired Tim Burton’s 1993 animated film, The Nightmare Before Christmas. Singer Perry Como recorded a spoken version in 1953, although the poem had been set to music in 1942 and has since been recorded by various artists, including Dave Seville, who included it in a 1963 album, Christmas with The Chipmunks, Volume 2.

All that aside, the poem is still fun to read in its original version, preferably to a child. Or record it and send it to all the grandchildren. Or find Basil Rathbone’s 1939 recording. Or Perry Como’s. Or Jack Palance’s in 2001. You get the picture.

Time for Shakespeare

It seems to be obligatory to set Shakespeare’s plays in some period other than Shakespeare’s own. I don’t object to this strategy; it’s been going on for decades if not centuries. But I do occasionally find the results of juxtaposing the playwright’s poetic 16th-century cadences with modern settings curious, though often curiously compelling.

Recently the Indiana University production of Richard III set the action in the ambience of competing motorcycle gangs. (One thinks immediately of West Side Story, the Leonard Bernstein musical that retells Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet through rival street gangs.) In this case the choice seemed cued by some analytical remarks by author Josephine Tey, helpfully included in the program notes:

For thirty years, over this green uncrowded land, the Wars of the Roses had been fought. But it had been more of a blood feud than a war. A Montague and Capulet affair; of no great concern to the average Englishman…. It was a small concentrated war; almost a private party.

Biker leathers with clan emblems and embroidered roses—now universally called Tudor roses—fit the notion of internecine strife, white rose versus red rose. A modernist and timely touch was the addition of “fact-checking,” a nod to the current presidential election season in which the usual political falsities are revealed by various fact-checking organizations. In this instance a television screen flashed periodic historical corrections that played against Shakespeare’s Tudor-slanted take on events. Shakespeare’s histories, in particular those of times and figures most immediate to his own era, were propagandistic, designed to conform to the views of Elizabeth I, who, like her father Henry VIII, was not a monarch to be crossed without mortal peril.

All in all, I found the biker motif added rather than detracted from the essence of the play. The darkness worked for this dark, brutal, bloody drama in a way similar, but in stark contrast, to the IU production of The Taming of the Shrew this past July. That staging set Shakespeare’s boisterous romantic comedy in a South Beach, Florida, sort of place, which also worked well: a light-hearted play set in a light-filled locale.

Gore Vidal's Box Set

Vidal at 23, photographed by

Carl Van Vechten in 1948

When Gore Vidal died in July at age 86, I belatedly discovered that he had written three mystery novels in the early 1950s, under the penname Edgar Box. An inveterate mystery reader, I take particular delight in discovering mystery novels written by persons best known for other pursuits. (A favorite example is striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, who penned two mysteries in the early 1940s, the first titled, appropriately, The G-String Murders.)

Gore Vidal, aka Edgar Box, cranked out three mysteries in quick succession: Death in the Fifth Position (1952), Death Before Bedtime (1953), and Death Likes It Hot (1954). They were reissued in a single volume, titled Three By Box, in 1978. All three feature a reporter-cum-p.r. man, Peter Sargeant, as the amateur detective. Sargeant is a suave, if sometimes bumbling, sexual swordsman, almost a comic James Bond without the trappings of spydom. (Fleming’s 007, however, did not debut until Casino Royale in 1953.)

Despite its heterosexual hero, the first of Vidal/Box’s trio is an unabashedly gay—in both old and new senses of that word—romp along the lines of Oscar Wilde meets Raymond Chandler. The novel is a delicious foreshadowing of later flamboyant works, such as the outrageous Myra Breckinridge (1968), the movie version of which provided a final screen vehicle for the inimitable but often imitated Mae West, and the surreal and irreverent Live From Golgotha (1992).

Death in the Fifth Position is a surprising novel for the early Fifties for its frank, often gay, sexuality. But the treatment is not so surprising for Vidal, who had published The City and the Pillar in 1948. That novel offered a coming-of-age story about a young man coming to terms, healthily, with his homosexuality. Thus it flouted convention, which at the time regarded gay as synonymous with immoral, and so caused a scandal. The City and the Pillar was only Vidal’s third novel, and one can imagine an editor, on receiving the manuscript of Death in the Fifth Position a couple of years later, counseling the author to adopt a pseudonym for the latter book’s publication. I don’t know whether that happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Of course, it could equally be the case of a “serious” writer not wanting to be associated with something as déclassé as a mystery novel.

By contrast, the second of the trio, Death Before Bedtime, is sadly pedestrian. It is a serviceable mystery but lacks punch and pizzazz. The third, Death Likes It Hot, regains some sparkle, rather like a second wind along about midnight after an evening of hard partying. But it doesn’t measure up to the first mystery either, and I’m inclined to think that Vidal must have felt as though, after this third effort, he had gotten mystery writing out of his system. Box was laid to rest.

Still, the three novels are entertaining and, as mysteries go, intriguing. They are worth taking up, though no one could be faulted for stopping after the first one.