At the end of one of this morning’s nightmares, I awoke from being chased through a littered stable yard by a riderless, untackled thoroughbred horse. I believe that chasing people down is something that horses do only in nightmares. The dream was probably brought on in part by the warm, humid weather, itself almost as alarming as a nightmare, considering the date. Also, I was malingering. I had stayed up late (reading Donna Leon), and I was sleeping in late. The urgency of the horse dream has passed, but its hopelessness persists: I feel old and powerless this morning, and likely only to feel moreso. Staying up late and being unable to get up bright and early the next morning have taken the place, as vices that lead straight to remorse, of drinking too much and hangovers. I suppose that there’s an improvement there somewhere, but I don’t much feel it this morning, which, of course, it barely is.

Why is Jean Zimmerman’s book about Edith Minturn and Newton Phelps Stokes so sad? Is is because she dies at the end, having been kept housebound by strokes for five years? We all die in the end. Is it because he lingered on alone, relatively impecunious, for seven further years, dying in 1944? Why would that be sad, exactly? Would it be because he missed his wife (which he presumably did), or would it be because the work that had preoccupied him for nearly twenty years, the massive Iconography of Manhattan Island, was achieved to rather quiet acclaim? Is it because his adopted daughter, Helen, doesn’t seem, in Zimmerman’s telling, to have “been there” for him and his wife during their declining years? Is this sadness to be imputed to the Phelps Stokeses themselves, or is it something that the author must share with the reader? When you’re made to feel sad by a story, you do want to know why.

I can put my hands on two reasons why Love, Fiercely left me feeling gloomy. First, there was the Stokeses’ profligacy. Like the last Medici bankers and their agents, the Stokeses got much better at spending money than at making it, and when papa Anson Phelps Stokes died, the upper crust was horrified to find out how small his estate was. What ought to have been twenty million amounted to a mere one. In the Crash, Newton Phelps Stokes’s financial investments were immediately devalued, but it was the slow leakage of value from his extensive real-estate holdings that made him a little bit poorer every year for the rest of his life. He had, it is true, spent a fortune on the Iconography, but it was always more the commitment in time that upset his wife.

And that’s the other reason: we know that Edith was upset about his obsession with the Iconography because he told his friends that she was, and Zimmerman takes this at face value. But we never actually hear it from Edith. We never hear anything from Edith. We read other people’s letters, but never hers. She is never quoted. Her hands-on philanthropy is attested to — she was a leader of the kindergarten movement, and she seems to have taught immigrant women how to sew, in a school set up at St George’s. She smiled for the camera every now and then, and of course she allowed herself to be painted and sculpted — it’s because of one painting, particularly, that we’re reading about her and her husband. But if Edith Minturn had a voice, Zimmerman has not captured it, and her muteness is like a wound. It is like The Portrait of a Lady all over again, with different details but the same suffocation. Only, this time, it really happened.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2012 at 11:02 am.