The Fires of Spring (34 page)

If the Case had never occurred, David would certainly have retained a most sentimental picture of Dedham as a cultural haven far removed from the ugly strains of Philadelphia. But the Assy Nude showed him that all places and all people are pretty much alike and that the time comes in each personal or institutional history when honor is the ultimate guide to action.

Young Mr. Thorpe was a Harvard man, almost a fop, trained at the Fogg Museum. When Dedham hired him as the college’s first art instructor, he was considered quite a catch, for he came of an excellent Boston family and had been a Rhodes Scholar, as well. It was felt that if anyone could safely teach art in a Quaker school, Mr. Thorpe was the man.

But the honeymoon ended when he started his classes. He was an avowed and utter modernist. That was the year Philadelphia was fighting to keep the Johnson Collection in the city, and Mr. Thorpe was quoted in the papers as having said that “the collection was little more than a bunch of junk in the first place, and that the money Philadelphia proposed spending to house it could much better be spent on a couple of good Van Goghs.”

One of the Philadelphia papers carried a reproduction of two pictures: an old saint and a bunch of messy sunflowers by Van Gogh, whom no one had heard of. The caption was straight to the point: Anyone with good sense could see that the saint was great art and the other … Well, you name it!

The Dedham faculty was embarrassed, especially the head
of science. “It’s undignified!” he insisted. “Why does that damned fool have to stir up trouble?” The Board of Managers requested that Mr. Thorpe attend to teaching his classes. One gentle lady said that everyone knew the Johnson pictures were great art. “They look old and nice, just like Raphaels.”

Probably the whole affair would have ended there had not another newspaper got hold of one of Mr. Thorpe’s examinations. When the questions were printed, they created quite a stir. David remembered them well. They were the first simple-answer questions he had seen, and he was much impressed by them.
“You are at a swanky dinner. Your hostess says, ‘This morning the art gallery delivered my Picasso.’ You reply airily: (1) I adore his chiaroscuro; (2) No man gets distance behind cattle better than he; (3) I’m mad about his blue period; (4) It’s a pity we haven’t any really fine frescoes in America.”

The questions were held up to ridicule, whereupon Mr. Thorpe interviewed the press. He said: “Ninety per cent of art appreciation is social gush, indulged in to impress one’s friends. If that’s the case, the best thing I can do is to make sure the gush is accurate. Don’t you honestly admit that Philadelphia wants the Johnson Collection only because the paintings are old? Obviously there are twenty artists in the city right now who can paint better than most of those dead old fuddies.”

The interview aroused a storm. It was held to violate the gag rule imposed by the Board. Mr. Thorpe was reprimanded and ordered not to mention the Johnson Collection again. And he was to stop giving preposterous examinations. From then on his questions had a proper academic quality: “Compare Perugino’s use of space with Claude Lorrain’s.”

Yet not even the gag rule quenched his ebullient nature, and David formed the habit of dropping in to hear his lectures. He could remember many things Mr. Thorpe said: “No student in this college can possibly see his world unless he has studied Cezanne and Manet.” “Some time when you are older and have forgotten poetry you will see a Vermeer, and your tight little hearts will explode.” “Rembrandt is like a wintry storm, stirring up the universe, but Frans Hals is sunshine bursting into a fish market.”

Under Mr. Thorpe’s guidance David went to New York to see the Bache and Frick collections. For the first time he saw the magisterial masterpieces of painting, and he was quietly ashamed that he had ever thought the Johnson Collection
superb. Then Mr. Thorpe took him to the Barnes gallery, and the glory of French modernism exploded about him! At his first sight of Matisse and Renoir and Van Gogh and Gauguin he knew that here was a world he was meant to inhabit. The colors were his, and the frenzied shapes, and he said, “If I could paint, I’d paint that way.” He wrote a letter to the papers, defending Mr. Thorpe’s attack on the Johnson Collection. “Essentially second rate,” he said. But when he next stopped by the old house and saw the many trivial paintings—valued because they were ancient—he had to admit with peculiar shock that the three he had come to love were not trivial, and they were not second rate: the Cima and the Van Eyck and the Rembrandt beeves. He looked at them and thought how sad it was that learning consisted of acquiring new understandings with which to kill old pleasures. He had loved the soft sentiment of Thomas Hardy, but Doc Chisholm had killed that. He had liked the old paintings of the Johnson Collection, but Cezanne destroyed such nonsense. As he learned Mahler, Schubert died; and Emily Dickinson made Omar Khayyam seem wordy. “Why can’t a man learn just one set of things …” he mused. But then a nun entered the museum with a horde of noisy children. They stormed about the place and made reverie impossible. David was about to leave when he saw a young boy standing on one foot, daring the Cima to please him. “That’s a fine picture,” David said. The boy looked up and then stared again at the little picture. David could see that the drunken satyrs and the fairy quality of the picture were beginning to win the boy. “It’s a wonderful picture,” he said. “It’s a masterpiece!” But the little barbarian was not going to surrender that day. Before David could finish extolling the Cima, the boy moved on.

So even though Mr. Thorpe destroyed something much to be cherished, David continued to visit the art class, for he sensed that destruction and the brushing away of false loyalties is the only true education. He was in class the day hell broke loose. The prissy young instructor was showing slides of modern pictures. “What do you make of this?” he asked. “It’s a late Picasso, and frankly I don’t make much of it either. Now this one. Oh, yes! This has an amusing story.”

He permitted the Modigliani to rest on the screen for some minutes. It showed a large nude clutching a towel. Some students began to snicker, for the girl displayed a perfectly immense bottom. “It was the title of this pictured that misled
me,” Mr. Thorpe said in quiet, clipped tones. “Unfortunately, I knew no French at the time and when I saw the title,
Nu Assis
, I naturally thought it meant the nude with the imposing
derrière
.”

There was a moment of silence. Mr. Thorpe coughed. Some French students began to chuckle and David whispered, “What? What?”

“Don’t you get it?” a girl majoring in French explained. “The Assy Nude.” A boy in back started to laugh outright and soon the room was rollicking with pleasure; and all the while the statuesque Modigliani, with the pinched eyes and vast rump, stared from the screen.

By noon the campus buzzed with Mr. Thorpe’s latest quip. By evening the faculty had heard of the young instructor’s continued insolence, and by noon next day Mr. Thorpe was called to an executive meeting. David never knew what occurred at that acrimonious debate or what kind of ultimatum was delivered; but when the meeting ended Mr. Thorpe was fired. Then, in the strange manner that colleges adopt to protect academic freedom, the condemned man was given a hearty breakfast: he was permitted to meet his classes for the last time.

The hall was crowded and he spoke simply, as if he had much to say. “Art appreciation is silly rot,” he insisted. “Art has meaning not when it is appreciated but when it is sucked into the heart of your living. Fifteen years from now you’ll all have your own homes. Then you’ll find that the noisome trash in the Johnson Collection has no meaning for you. You’ll decorate with bright, live pictures. Cezannes, Renoirs, Van Goghs. You watch! Or a really good Rembrandt or Vermeer. But I think you’ll find it’s the moderns who speak to you. You study novels so that you can understand human principles. You study poetry so you won’t be ashamed of yourself when you’re alone. And you study art so that you can see the world. Without it you can see nothing.

After Mr. Thorpe had left Dedham, David often remembered that last phrase, and it was true. Until he studied Cezanne he had never seen a tree. With profound shock he realized that of himself he was nothing. It was only when he studied with Miss Chaloner that he perceived how the world could be organized. Until Klim taught him to read Balzac he had no conception of the manner in which people subtly or brutally interact upon one another. By his friends he had been taught to understand music and art and logic and sportsmanship
and even the rudiments of honesty. He had been a formless thing until the affectionate interest of others had made him into a sentient being. Mr. Thorpe had taught him to see.

David was therefore disgusted almost to the point of nausea when he discovered that this brilliant teacher had been fired principally because the head of science had insisted that “Thorpe’s a bad influence on the college. Brings it into disrepute.” David railed about this to Joe Vaux, who was now deep in economic theory, and the wiry Bostonian laughed. “You certainly aren’t defending a Harvard man, are you? Don’t you see that the faculty is just like the students? Porterfield and that pimply-faced kid were different, so the students threw eggs at them. I knew Thorpe wouldn’t last a year at Dedham the minute I saw he wore his handkerchief up his coat sleeve. The faculty couldn’t tolerate that.” He paused and grinned sardonically at David, adding, “But seriously, the big point was that Thorpe was willing to stand on principles.”

The word
honor
was never used in the Thorpe case; but as David remembered Thorpe,
that
was the significant word, and the young instructor’s closing message rung about the Dedham campus for a long time: “If I had been willing to shut up and stifle my beliefs, turn my back on what the world knows, I could have been your teacher for a long time to come. You can be sure that the old men in politics or religion or art or even education will always hate to the death young men with new ideas. That’s why, if you’re young, you’ve got to fight so desperately for what you know to be true, because it won’t be long before you’re one of the old ones. Then all you can do is hate.”

It was during the Christmas season of David’s senior year that Klementi Kol finally came home and caught the lovers. Actually, the incident was trivial. Klim was supposed to be in Cleveland arranging for a spring festival, but the local backers withdrew and he returned to Philadelphia. When he reached his apartment, Mona was dressing for a dance and David was sitting in a chair, looking at her portrait.

When she saw Klementi, she instinctively slammed the bedroom door closed. The sound alarmed David and he sprang from his chair and cried, “Mona!” Then he saw the tall conductor. Klementi had a fawn topcoat which he carefully placed on the arm of the lounge. Mona’s handkerchief
was there. Klementi looked at it and then at David. There was a long pause during which David tried to speak but could say nothing.

Shortly Mona appeared in a silvery gown which Klim had bought her. “Hello!” she cried merrily. “David’s taking me to a dance at his college. Pretty?” She spun in a tight circle and the stiff dress twirled out from her slim legs. Kol sat down in a chair.

Mona shoved David from the apartment and whispered, “You wait downstairs.” Before he had left the hallway, David heard Mona talking very rapidly to the musician. In a few moments she joined David. “Klim’s a dear,” she said. “He understands.”

“What did you tell him?” David asked.

“You never have to tell men like Klim much. They understand.” She would say no more, but grabbed David’s arm and whispered, “Mmmmm. Prom night!”

She was the sensation of the evening. There could be no doubt of that. The young men of Dedham clustered about her, and David was visibly proud of the way the stags cut into her dances. She was overcome by the pleasure of such a night. “I’ve never been to college before,” she confided, and she held her head back like a spirited young animal so that everyone could see the joy she was experiencing. “Boys in college look so clean!” she laughed. “Why do people have to grow old?”

At intermission David led her to a corner of the solarium overlooking the eighteenth green. Outside the snow lay deep. A few couples, bundled in fur, made galosh-tracks through the drifts, the tracks converging now and then into trampled circles where the young lovers had kissed. Mona clasped David’s hand and whispered, “It’s come! Like I said!”

“What?” David asked.

“I have a part in a movie. Yes!”

The news seemed so appropriate to the fairy-tale quality of a formal dance with golden slippers and silver dresses that David caught her in his arms and kissed her. Some men who had been staring at Mona started to cheer and David heard those taunts which make a young man’s heart happy at a college dance: “Who is she? Spill it, Harper. A movie queen?” And David grinned, thinking: “Oh, boy! If you only knew!”

But when the eager dancers whisked Mona away, David discovered that some of the bloom of that tantalizing night had been brushed away by a newcomer. It was Marcia Paxson,
who appeared after intermission with a tall young Quaker boy. She was straight and strong in a blue silk dress that did not cling to her body as Mona’s did above the waist. She stood by the door with one shoulder raised higher than the other, watching the minor sensation Mona was creating. When she saw David she peremptorily left her escort and greeted her friend.

“Isn’t that Sousa’s singer?” she asked.

“Yes,” David said with an unsuccessful attempt to hide his pleasure.

“She’s the best dancer here,” Marcia said, getting David off balance. “In a flashy way, that is.” She heard David draw in his breath and then she added, “Do you suppose her hair is natural? It couldn’t be.” Then she patted David on the arm as might a condescending aunt. “I must run along now,” she said, and when she left the evening was somehow changed, as she had meant it to be.

And on the train back to Philadelphia David caught himself looking at Mona’s hair. Then he thought of Klim and asked, “Did Klim guess about us, Mona?”