Sunrise with Seamonsters (45 page)

Dryden read out Sackville's winning impromptu. It was not a poem. It went as follows: "
I promise to pay Mr John Dryden five hundred pounds on demand. Signed, Dorset.
"

Patrons usually have the last word. Is there a better example of this than Washington D.C.? The visible art and sculpture in the city are almost completely the result of patronage. The patronage from the beginning was intended to create culture. We were sensitive about being a new nation, and Europe was not kind to our feelings. In 1820, the
Edinburgh Review
commented, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?" That quotation is given in Lillian Miller's
Patrons and Patriotism; The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860.
Prof. Miller describes how our economic nationalists were often at the same time cultural nationalists—we had a country, and money, and commerce, but no art. So nationalism, and money, produced patrons. Of course, art had its detractors. John Adams held the view that "the arts had been from the dawn of history the product of despotism and superstition and so should be avoided in the new republic". And Ben Franklin wrote that all things had their season: "To America, one schoolmaster is worth a dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael."

Within thirty years of his saying that, Franklin's portrait was painted for all to see, by Constantino Brumidi, an exiled Italian artist who received patronage for twenty-five years in Washington, and whose fat cherubs were ridiculed by the downright tastes of Washingtonians from the moment the paint was dry. Franklin was enshrined by Brumidi with Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci and William Brewster, as representing "The Four Forces of Civilization". Franklin was History. Brewster, the Pilgrim Father, was Religion. These are in the President's Room of the Capitol Extension. Brumidi received $8 a day for his painting in the 1850's and towards the end of the decade this was raised to $10.

His patron was the United States government, but the man responsible for hiring him was Captain Montgomery C. Meigs, a professional soldier and engineer. Meigs was pleased with Brumidi's work. Prof. Miller wrote, "As an investment, the captain believed it was in the long run a cheaper substitute for wallpaper or whitewash." But Brumidi had many critics, notably the America artists who had been overlooked when the Italian was hired. And was this Italianate farrago of garlands and flying cherubs really
American
art? That it was the result of patronage there is no doubt.

Thomas Crawford's fresco on the Senate Pediment of the Capitol Building was similarly contentious. He was American—he also had been hired by Meigs, as a free-lance sculptor. His fresco was Grecian, and ponderously—and even racially—symbolic. It represented (this was his commission, the patron's order) "The advancement of the white race and the decadence of the Indians." It was later retitled as "The Progress of American Civilization". Now, I suppose, it is simply, "That pediment up there." Crawford had been asked to submit designs and to avoid any obscure symbolism—the prerogative of the patron. In the center of the group is "a majestic goddess," America; on her left is "the march of civilization" from the Indian to the pioneer; on the right are figures symbolizing activities of successful Americans ("the triumphant white race," Prof. Miller says)—mechanic, merchant, soldier, and so forth.

Crawford's work was generally unpopular. It was seen as unrealistic, offensive to the Indian character, it falsified history; and Senator Sam Houston ridiculed it as stiff, badly observed and untruthful. The figure of Liberty on the Capitol Dome was also ridiculed by Crawford's patrons, who hated the un-Indian shoes and the Liberty Cap. Houston was a senator. He could do no more than make his fellow senators laugh as he jeered. But Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War, one of the higher patrons. He actually redesigned the headgear and gave Liberty (or "Armed Freedom" as it was first called) a plumed helmet. Crawford obeyed his patrons' command.

Like Hiram Powers, who did the statues of Jefferson and Franklin,
Thomas Crawford was already at the time of his commission an accomplished sculptor. His work may have been news to Sam Houston, but his reputation was established. The most withering critic of patronage, Samuel Johnson, would not have been surprised by Washington's treatment of her hired artists. As Johnson wrote to the Earl of Chesterfield, "Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?" (In his
Dictionary
he defined
patron
thus: "Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is repaid with flattery.")

During the period that these sculptors and painters were being heavily patronized in Washington, no one was encumbering American writers with much help. Just before Captain Meigs began hiring artists and commissioning busts and pictures, Edgar Allan Poe died (1849)—his work was done; and Brumidi was still cleaning his brushes and preparing his palette when
Moby Dick
appeared in 1851;
Uncle Tom's Cabin
came out the next year,
The Scarlet Letter
in 1850,
Walden
in 1854 and Emerson's
English Traits
in 1856. Sam Clemens in 1857 had just become a riverboat pilot and was saying "Mark Twain" for the first time, as a command.

Perhaps these American writers had heeded Emerson's call ten years earlier to be self-reliant. None I have mentioned had patrons, though in 1852 Hawthorne wrote the campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, idealizing his old friend and Bowdoin College classmate. For this, Hawthorne was on the receiving end of a piece of political patronage. As soon as he was elected president, Pierce made Hawthorne American Consul in Liverpool. In a sense, they proved what Dr Johnson had told Boswell about merit. "I never knew a man of merit neglected," he said. "It was generally by his own fault that he failed of success. A man may hide his head in a hole: he may go into the country, and publish a book now and then, which nobody reads, and then complain he is neglected. There is no reason why any person should exert himself for a man who has written a good book: he has not written it for any individual. I may as well make a present to the postman who brings me a letter. When patronage was limited, an author expected to find a Maecenas, and complained if he did not find one. Why should he complain? This Maecenas has others as good as he, or others who have got the start of him."

It would have been ironic if Harriet Beecher Stowe had received a government grant to write
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Jefferson Davis became Pierce's Secretary of War the year after it appeared, and the novel did much to hasten his new appointment in the Confederacy. He might have remarked, as the generous French statesman did in the Dr Johnson story, "
J'ai fait dix mécontents et un ingrat
," which can be roughly translated in
Henry Ford's dictum, "Give the average man something, and you make an enemy of him."

Patrons are by no means a recent growth in America, and they have not always been so concerned with the arts. Ben Whitaker argues in his study
The Foundations
that the first Foundation in the United States was probably the Magdalen Society, which was started in Philadelphia in 1800, "to ameliorate the distressed condition of those unhappy females who have been seduced from the paths of virtue, and are desirous of returning to a life of rectitude." Apparently, there was a shortage of candidates; it was eventually reorganized into a foundation to assist schoolchildren.

Whitaker is comprehensive in his treatment of foundations and lists among others, "the Robbins Fund of Chicago with its assets of $8. The James Dean Fund ... to provide for the 'delivery to the Boston Light Vessel of one copy of each of the principal Sunday newspapers published in Boston'. A Horses' Christmas Dinner Trust"—in Kansas—"The Benefit Shoe Foundation provides for people with one foot. A foundation in Latin America is devoted to the deportation of foreign bull-fighters. A Science Fiction Foundation has recently been started in Britain, where the Scientology Foundation is already active, and the Osborne Foundation now offers to pray for you for £2 a month... not long ago a United States Flag Foundation brought a lawsuit against a New York artist whom it accused of showing a lack of respect for the Stars and Stripes"—though the artist may well have had a Guggenheim to do it—"Recently"—this was in 1974—"in the Philippines, President Marcos announced that he is donating all his worldly possessions to the Marcos Foundation as an example of self-sacrifice to his people; and the Search Foundation dispatched its seventh expedition to find Noah's Ark." We also have a Lollipop Foundation and two foundations to preserve prairie chickens. But prairie chickens are no laughing matter, nor is other desert fauna. In 1980, the Guggenheim Foundation awarded one of its Fellowships to a man in order to assist his study, "The social ecology of free-ranging coyotes."

This is a far cry from Brumidi's per diem of $8, and even further from Dr Johnson's having to find subscribers to his dictionary, and so cross about Lord Chesterfield's cold shoulder that he rewrote his imitation of Juvenal,

Yet think what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the
Patron
, and the jail.

Mr Whitaker is very good on the paradoxes of philanthropy, and on the numerous motives that impel the philanthropoid to give his money away. There is the religious emphasis—alms-giving, which may have evolved from the tradition "of making a sacrifice to propitiate fate or hostile
spirits, together with a more material fear of the malevolence of the poor." There is tax deduction, but this is recent—no deduction was allowed for charitable gifts prior to 1917. There is simple kindness; and complicated kindness, motivated by a mixture of idealism, pride, and the wish to be loved. "At least ninety per cent of all existing foundations today," Mr Whitaker remarks, "perpetuate the donor's name"—not only Ford, Carnegie and Kennedy, but also, as we have seen, Gertrude Clarke Whittal, and not only all recent presidents but members of their cabinets—the John Volpe; and Maurice Stans Foundations are but two of very many. There is the selfish motive, to which Will Kellogg, the cereal tycoon, admitted: "I get a kick out of it (giving to children). Therefore I am a selfish person and no philanthropist." There is real malice. Mr Whitaker cites the case of the American who "established the fund to help French peasants to dress up as matadors or hula dancers, to prove his thesis that there is no degradation to which French people will not stoop for money." There is also the straightforwardness of James Buchanan Duke, who founded the Duke Endowment. He said, "People ought to be healthy. If they ain't healthy they can't work, and if they don't work they ain't healthy. And if they can't work there ain't no profit in them." From such down-to-earth sentiments came the great institution we know as Duke Medical School and pioneering scholarship in the field of extra-sensory perception and parapsychology, and what we laymen call ghosts.

One of the subtlest and most paradoxical points Mr Whitaker makes in
The Foundations
regards patronage between enemies, or gift-giving out of suspicion. It is the hectoring of one group upon another's uneasy conscience, the sort of eleemosynary blackmail that frequently creates an even greater suspicion between the races in the United States. In this connection, Mr Whitaker quotes Levi-Strauss's
Elementary Structures of Kinship.
Small nomadic groups of Nambikwara Indians in the Brazilian jungle

are in constant fear of each other and avoid each other. But at the same time they desire contact... and from being arrayed against each other they pass immediately to gifts; gifts are given, but silently, without bargaining, without any expression of satisfaction or complaint, and without any apparent connexion between what is offered and what is obtained.

That "constant fear" and wary, circumspect behavior, that sense of mutual suspicion, puts me in mind of an escaped convict suddenly confronting a child in a foggy, marshy graveyard, and the following dialogue:

"You know what a file is?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you know what wittles is?"

"Yes, sir."

After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a greater sense of helplessness and danger.

"You get me a file." He tilted me again. "And you get me wittles." He tilted me again. "You bring 'em both to me." He tilted me again. "Or I'll have your heart and liver out." He tilted me again.

And so begins the relationship between patron and recipient in what is certainly the greatest novel about patronage, Dickens's
Great Expectations.
The complex motives of both giver and receiver have never been more cunningly delineated than in the surprises and plot-shifts of this novel. George Orwell called it "an attack on patronage," but if it were as simple as that one would only need to list its abuses. Dickens was at pains to demonstrate the paradoxes.

After one has read the novel, one quickly sees how, like Pip, one has misapprehended the source of his funds, and it is possible to feel a sympathetic sense of victimization. Certainly, Pip is a snob, but we have seen his humble origins, and we understand how glad he is to receive the grant of money that liberates him from the blacksmith shop apprenticeship and the pretensions of his provincial town. The story is of Pip's rise and fall, and his rise again. As a child, he is summoned to the house of Miss Havisham and commanded to play with the girl, Estella. Miss Havisham urges Estella to break his heart; Miss Havisham is reputedly wealthy. Pip longs to be rich himself and he believes that his ambiguous welcome at Miss Havisham's will ultimately make his fortune. He also longs to be a gentleman, as he tells the kindly Biddy—Biddy is also an orphan, "Mr Wopsle's great-aunt's granddaughter"; Pip is not sure of the relationship to Wopsle, but very early in the novel he notices that she is rather unkempt, unwashed and even slovenly. He unburdens himself in this way: