Lost, Stolen or Shredded Read online

  LOST, STOLEN or SHREDDED

  ALSO BY RICK GEKOSKI

  Staying Up: A Fan behind the Scenes in the Premiership

  Tolkien’s Gown: Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books

  Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoir

  LOST, STOLEN or SHREDDED

  Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature

  RICK GEKOSKI

  Published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

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  Copyright © Rick Gekoski, 2013

  10 9 87 6 5 4 3 21

  Extract from ‘Sage Homme’ by Ezra Pound, from Selected Letters 1907–1941 of Ezra Pound, copyright ©1950 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., and © Estate of Ezra Pound and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

  Extract from ‘Aubade’ © Estate of Philip Larkin and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

  Extract from ‘How to Win the Next Election’ © Estate of Philip Larkin and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

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  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 84668 491 3

  eISBN 978 1 84765 932 3

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  For Steve Broome

  Contents

  Foreword

  1. Has Anyone Seen the Mona Lisa?

  2. Possession and Dispossession in New Zealand: The Theft of the Urewera Mural

  3. ‘Half-Witted’: Graham Sutherland’s Portrait of Winston Churchill

  4. A Ghost Story: James Joyce’s Et Tu, Healy

  5. Do It Yourself: The Oath of a Freeman

  6. Auto da Fé: The Burning of the Memoirs of Lord Byron

  7. A Matter of Life and Death: The Diaries of Philip Larkin

  8. Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Trial in Israel

  9. The Archive of the Penetralium of Mystery

  10. Death by Water: The Great Omar

  11. Lost to the World: The Library of Guido Adler

  12. Lumps of Coal: The Destruction of the Library at Herculaneum

  13. So Many Vases: The Cradle of Civilisation

  14. The Savaging of Africa: The Sacking of the Lost Kingdom of Benin

  15. Born to Blush Unseen: The Lost Buildings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Foreword

  He collected absences. For him they were more intense, vibrant and real than the presences that they shadowed. And this one – he’d just heard the news of the most audacious art theft of his time – was astonishing, quite enough to merit a change of travel plans. And so he and his friend Max departed from Milan and headed for Paris, the scene of the crime.

  On a day early in September 1911 they arrived at the Louvre that little bit late to join the queue, heightening the anticipation. When they eventually entered the Salon Carré, they approached the spot where the Mona Lisa had been displayed for generations. The crowd – all of whom had come on the same pilgrimage – pushed forward, and the little man, jostled, could hardly see. Taking his friend by the shoulder, Max pushed to the very front. Other onlookers paused to deposit flowers on the floor beneath, with notes of remembrance tied in silk ribbons.

  He stood in front of the wall, those obsidian eyes staring, rapt. The painting was gone. That’s why he was there. It had been stolen a week before, and the Museum had only just reopened to the public. The crowd had come expressly to see where it used to be, and now wasn’t.

  For Franz Kafka, the absent Mona Lisa was in the process of joining the internal collection that he called his ‘invisible curiosities’: sights, monuments and works of art that he had missed seeing. The phrase, like many of Kafka’s aperçus, is both puzzling and provocative. It occurs several times in his writing, often in the context of thinking about the movies. Max Brod refers to the idea (it is unclear which of them first used it) in describing a scene in a film in which a young woman is travelling quickly in a taxi at night in Munich: ‘We see, of all edifices, only the first floor, since the car’s big visor blocks our view. Fantastic imaginings of the height of the palaces and churches.’

  Kafka, musing on the scene and imaginatively engaged by what is not seen, expanded the image, as the ‘driver calls out the names of the invisible sights’. What fascinates him is that something significant is out there, moving by too quickly to apprehend, as in a few seconds’ exposure in a film.

  Travelling on hissing tires, in the back of a taxi on a rainy night, a cityscape partially revealed as it whizzes by, might be taken as a metaphor for the human journey. A concentrated act of attention, peering out the window, can only frustrate, with its suggestions of larger hidden presences. What is imperfectly revealed is a shadowy simulacrum of what is most assuredly out there, if only one had the light, the time and the right vantage point from which to see it.

  There is a similarity between this image and that of Plato’s allegory of the caves, in which a fully realised world casts its shadow on the wall, and is taken to be all that there is. In Kafka’s reframing of the metaphor, though, there is a doubly troubling centre: again there is the blurred approximation of the real, but in the taxi image the onlooker is aware of his estrangement from that fleeting world, whereas in Plato’s the shadows are taken to be all that there is.

  So: are we all tootling about in taxis, craning our necks at the unlit streets? Not at all; you don’t always take a cab. What we have here – which is so typical of Kafka – is a suggestive moment which seems to have some general application, but also resists it. There are plenty of experiences in which we walk the streets in the presence of the familiar: buildings, people, landscapes, seen in clear light. Kafka, though, is more imaginatively engaged by the barely apprehended, suggestive, lost. There is, after all, something wearying, predictable and banal, about knowing things.

  This fascination with what is shimmeringly and incompletely present haunts Kafka’s imagination and pervades his work. He is the perfect onlooker for an absent presence, not for the Mona Lisa itself but for where it used to be. She had been stolen, or perhaps one should say kidnapped? But why such a crowd? More people had come to see where the Mona Lisa used to be than had attended when it was hanging in its accustomed place. What were they looking at, and for? Because all they saw was a shadowy band of grime on the wall that marked the outlines of the missing picture, and which seemed in itself to frame the possibilities of new imagining. Could the assembled throng – they knew the image, most of them – project it into that seemingly empty space? For the moment it almost made artists of them.

  I have invoked the figure of Franz Kafka, queuing excitedly to add to his catalogue of absences, not because there is something surreal – something Kafkaesque – in his pursuit, but because he is, for on
ce, typical. There is nothing eccentric in his obsession with absent objects and lost opportunities. Kafka stands, here, both for myself and, I hope, for my reader. We are all curious about our invisible curiosities.

  Lost, Stolen or Shredded consists of a series of chapters broadly based on stories of lost works of art and literature, where ‘lost’ means, as Humpty Dumpty remarked firmly about his choice of a word, ‘just what I choose it to mean’. They can be read individually, for it is not my aim to write generally about the nature of loss, or to give some potted history of works of art that have been lost. No fun in that.

  When a wilful destruction of a work is contemplated, knotty moral problems may attend the act. Was Philip Larkin’s secretary right to shred his diaries, shortly before his death? Or Byron’s executors to burn his Memoirs? Was Max Brod right to reject Kafka’s final instruction to burn all of his unpublished manuscripts?

  For me, the stories of Byron, Larkin and Kafka are connected to each other, mutually illuminate, force distinction and discrimination, both confuse and illustrate, lead inevitably to philosophical, moral and psychological reflection. Stories of loss attach to each other like stray atoms, coagulate and grow into something more complex and more compelling than single entities.

  If you want to understand the attachment engendered by works of art, you would do better to read Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, or Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, than a treatise on the subject. We often learn more from a compelling story than from whole volumes of sociology or art history. Stories are more entertaining, more instructive, and more memorable. They stick in the mind, and to each other: they make a world.

  These stories are chosen because they are part of my own internal museum of loss. In recounting them I am, inevitably, also writing about myself. All writing, admittedly, is a form of autobiography, however impersonal and ‘objective’ it may seem. The way in which we see and value things, put them together, express their meanings and relations, inevitably reveals something of the mind and voice of the observer, whether they be a novelist or a mathematician. Wordsworth observes that the world as we encounter it is something that we ‘half perceive and half create’, and I have felt it necessary in writing these chapters, which are part essay and part memoir, to reveal and to interrogate both elements of this process. What is out there? Why, and how, do I care?

  In the course of the forthcoming chapters I occasionally seem to find myself on both sides of a question, apparently unable or unwilling to choose, so complex and intractable are the questions. There’s danger in this, to be sure. It seems to offer a soft option, to absolve one from thinking sufficiently hard about a topic finally to come down on one side or the other.

  Is it regrettable that cultural objects are forcibly appropriated from their native soil and transported to foreign museums? Yes. Is it a boon and a delight that we can visit those museums and learn about other civilisations? Certainly.

  Can it be right to destroy an important work of art, as Winston Churchill’s wife burned a portrait of him by Graham Sutherland? It seems a vile precedent, which gives credibility to the enemies of culture such as the Maoists, with their wholesale conflagration of centuries of Chinese art, architecture and literature. And yet there are instances – is this one? – in which such vandalism seems justifiable.

  It’s easy enough to scrape away at such tensions, smooth them over, force the recalcitrant material into easier shapes. That is just what I have tried to avoid. Anyone who is not perplexed by the complex issues surrounding the loss of works of art hasn’t thought about them sufficiently.

  There is a phrase in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that is apposite here. Trying desperately to understand the full implications of what has happened to him on his appalling trip down the Congo, the narrator muses that ‘the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze’. Though this has caused one commentator to accuse the author of ‘making a virtue out of not knowing what he means’, I’m on Conrad’s side on this one. I distrust people who emphatically know what they mean.

  I rather like that haziness, with its suggestion that when we seek to understand our most complex ‘episodes’ it is only by craning our necks, squinting our eyes, trying to make out what is imperfectly before us. Like Kafka and Max Brod in that night-time taxi ride, trying to perceive what is only partially knowable. When we are faced with ultimate questions and intractable mysteries, meaning is often imperfectly apprehended, guessed at rather than mastered, tantalisingly ungraspable: a glow that brings out a haze.

  It’s a most elusive metaphor, dangerous in its way, a counsel to accept ambiguity and clearly to honour unclarity: to provide a sense of the world, of its muddle and unseen presences, that is accurate and moving, provocative, real.

  1

  Has Anyone Seen the Mona Lisa?

  When I attended Huntington High School, in Long Island, in the late 1950s we had a neighbour, who lived five houses down to the right if you faced our (identical) house, named Mr Andrews. He was distinguished and rather pompous, with a fruity modulated voice – perhaps he was English, or wished to be? – always formally dressed and with immaculately cut, wavy grey hair, which he wore rather longer than most gentlemen of the time, presumably as a sign of his artistic nature. Recently retired from the law, he now spent much of his time painting in oils. He was, he regularly affirmed, extremely good at it, particularly at making copies of famous paintings. So good, in fact, that apparently ‘the best curators at the Met’ were unable, on the basis of visual evidence alone, to distinguish an Andrews from a Da Vinci: his version of the Mona Lisa, he chortled, had fooled them entirely.

  I didn’t believe him, but there was something so audacious in the claim that a tiny sliver of doubt remained in my mind. I looked carefully at his copy of the picture, which hung over his brick fireplace, like my parents’ (palpable) reproduction of Renoir’s The Boating Party. It looked pretty good to me. I was fifteen at the time, and I’d grown up on such reproductions.

  When I was a boy, I loved going to museum shops. In the galleries themselves I would rush about, seeking a picture or image that I wanted to take home. In the shop afterwards I would systematically go through the available reproductions to see if I could find my favourite to put on my bedroom wall. At six I wanted a soft-focus Rembrandt image of a seated woman – my mother never sat still, and was certainly not soft-focus – but it was soon replaced by an Alexander Calder print in orange and blue, and that a year or two later by a perky Miró. I could not bear the idea that my pictures should hang (as it were) side by side: Miró replaced Calder, he didn’t join him. This process continued for a surprisingly long time, as if just one image were quite sufficient by way of self-definition. In my dorm at Penn I had a poster of that Picasso dove, and a few years later my rather spare room in Merton College, Oxford, had a blue-period Picasso nude as its only adornment. I didn’t give up this habit until I had to, when renting my first flat gave me such wall space that it demanded filling. It was rather fun, spreading things out, putting things together.

  It was only in my thirties that I began to abjure copies in favour of originals. My parents’ The Boating Party looked pretty much real, aside from the fact that it wasn’t. You could fill a room with similarly good reproductions of the finest paintings, and I have no doubt that they would look terrific to an ignorant eye. But such reproductions were, I began to feel, vulgar and undesirable.

  Mr Andrews’s Mona Lisa image was certainly intended, in a playful manner, to deceive, but it was not a forgery, simply a copy. The forger Mark Hofmann, whose copies of Mormon letters and the Oath of a Freeman were presented as ‘discoveries’, intended to profit through his capacity to deceive the experts, whereas Mr Andrews’s modest home industry was a harmless hobby, and his capacity to fool all those curators was merely a source of pride and amusement to him, not a source of income. No doubt the inflation of his self-worth was a by-product of t
he process, even more irritating to his wife and children, I suspect, than to us neighbours. Or maybe they were proud of him? After all, Mr Andrews was in a long tradition of copyists of Da Vinci’s masterpiece, dating back to the time of Leonardo’s production of the picture in the early sixteenth century.

  Who stole the Mona Lisa? Clue: look at the four iron pegs.

  A strikingly fine copy of the Mona Lisa has been owned by Madrid’s Prado Museum since it opened in 1819, which can pretty reliably be described as contemporary to the real thing, likely enough to have emanated from one of the assistants at the Master’s own studios. It is painted on a small walnut panel, an expensive material which had been used by Leonardo for several paintings, including The Lady with an Ermine (1490) and St John the Baptist (1516), and it may well have been commissioned by a wealthy buyer frustrated by his inability to get Leonardo to sell the real thing.

  There are apparently dozens of copies of the picture dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though no one knows how many of these were simply acts of homage (which was common at the time) and how many were intended to pass profitably as the Mona Lisa itself: the essential difference between a copy and a fake. Most of these surviving versions are distinctly inferior to the real thing and unlikely ever to be confused with it, even by a fifteen-year-old. But for so many copies to have been produced so quickly after the original composition seems odd – can they all have worked from the King of France’s original? – and suggests, at least, that there was more than one version to copy.

  The Prado version, if it did emanate from Leonardo’s workshop, may well have served as a second model. Ironically, that copy, though certainly distinguishable from the real thing to an expert eye, is a work of great beauty which is more accessible than Leonardo’s own picture, having recently undergone two years of restoration, which have cleared layers of black paint overlay to reveal details of the background that are now obscure in the original. Leonardo’s picture has never been restored by the Louvre, because the many layers of cracked varnish make it too risky a process with such a fragile surface.