The Volcano Lover (45 page)

Most of the interior was lined by scaffolding spotted with shadowy figures of the five hundred local artisans, carpenters, plasterers, and masons whom William employed on round-the-clock shifts. Giggling nervously in his tense, high-pitched voice, cursing the slowness of the architect and the dilatoriness of the laborers, and then forgetting his annoyance and succumbing to a rapturous vision of what will be, William led his guests along the groined corridors and galleries lit with silver sconces, and up and down circular stairways which the Cavaliere's wife, only a month short of her confinement, gamely negotiated. The Cavaliere smiled to himself at the hooded figures with muscular bare arms holding large wax tapers to illuminate the way.

A cathedral of art, William explained to his guests, in which all the strong sensations our limited sensory organs crave will be amplified and all uplifting thoughts of which our slender spirit is capable will be awakened.

He showed them the Gallery, three hundred fifty feet long, which would hold his pictures. The Vaulted Library. And the Music Room, where he would make resound on his keyboard instruments all the music worth playing.

A few rooms, provisionally readied for inspection, were paneled and had peacock blue, purple, and scarlet hangings. But William seemed more and more worried that the company would not understand what they were seeing.

This is my Oratory, he said. They were to imagine it filled with golden candlesticks, enameled reliquaries, and vases, chalices, and monstrances studded with jewels. Its fan vault will be in burnished gold.

Here, you must imagine doors of violet velvet, covered with purple-and-gold embroidery, said William. And for this room, I call it the Sanctuary, windows with lattices like those of confessionals.

I am rather cold, murmured the Cavaliere.

And for each of the sixty fireplaces, William continued imperturbably, there will be gilded filigree baskets heaped with perfumed coal.

The dark, the cold, the flickering light from the torches—the Cavaliere was beginning to feel ill. His wife wished there were a chair or a prie-dieu for her heavy body. The hero's eyes were stinging from the smoke of the torches.

He showed them his Revelation Chamber, which would have a floor of polished jasper, where he would be buried.

He showed them what would be the Crimson Drawing Room, to be covered with crimson silk damask, and his Yellow Withdrawing Room, to be covered with yellow &c.

Last, he brought them to the immense room under the central tower.

The Octagon Hall. Here you must imagine the oak wainscot and stained glass in all the soaring arches, with a great central rose window, William said.

Look, exclaimed the Cavaliere's wife. It really is like a church.

I estimate the altitude to be nearly a hundred and thirty feet, said the hero.

You must use your imagination, continued William irritably. But, when completed, my Abbey will leave nothing to the imagination. It will
be
the imagination, given tangible form.

He wanted so much for them to admire it.

So in the end—for William was not unique among collectors, as he imagined—he was disappointed. He expected nothing from this minister's son, this wraith bulked out in an admiral's uniform, whose only interest, apart from the Cavaliere's wife, was in killing people. Neither did he expect anything from the hero's inamorata, who belonged to that deplorable race of people who are effusive about everything. But perhaps he had expected something from her husband, Catherine's husband, his fastidious elderly relation with the gaunt face and absent look. There was nothing. Nothing. I vowed when I was twenty that I would always remain a child, thought William to himself; and I must bear with having a child's vulnerability, a child's absurd desire to be understood.

He would never have house guests when work on the Abbey had gone far enough for him to inhabit it. It was not a cathedral but a temple, only for the initiated: those who shared his dreams and who, like him, had undergone great ordeals and disappointments.

It will turn out, however, that the future use of these grandiose monuments to sentimentality and self-regard invariably defies the pious restrictions of their builders. Judged by posterity to be enchanting, berserk exercises in bad taste, they are destined to be gawked at on the guided tour by generations of tourists, who reach over the velvet ropes when the guards are not watching to finger the megalomaniac's precious objects or silk hangings. But William's Abbey, the mighty forerunner of all the aesthete palaces of surfeit and synesthesia and indoor theatrics of the next two centuries (both those built and those evoked in novels), did not survive to suffer the Disneyesque fate of Ludwig II's Neuschwanstein and D'Annunzio's Vittoriale. Incompetently built, the Abbey was from the beginning a ruin in the making. And since this cathedral of art, with all its gaudy arenas for self-dramatization, was principally an excuse to build the tower, it seems right that the tower's fate be the fate of the building. The tower did not fall again for another twenty-five years, soon after Fonthill was sold, but when it did, the tumbling cloud of rotted stucco and mortar took much of the Abbey with it. And no one saw any reason not to tear the rest of it down.

*   *   *

Things decay, crash, vanish. Such is the law of the world, thought the Cavaliere. Wisdom of age. And those few deemed worth reconstructing or repairing will forever bear the marks of the violence done to them.

One February mid-afternoon in 1845, a young man of nineteen entered the British Museum, went directly to the unguarded room where the Portland Vase, one of the museum's most valuable and celebrated holdings since its deposit on loan by the Fourth Duke of Portland in 1810, was kept in a glass case, picked up what was later described as “a curiosity in sculpture,” and started beating the vase to death. The vase broke, fractured, shattered, was decreated. The young man whistled softly and sat down in front of the heap to admire his handiwork. Guards arrived at a run.

The constables were summoned and the young man was taken to the Bow Street Police Station, where he gave a false name and address; the director of the museum set out to break the unpleasant news to the duke; the curators went to their knees to gather up all the little pieces. Careful not to miss any!

The malefactor, discovered to be an Irish divinity student who had dropped out of Trinity College after a few weeks' study, was considerably less jaunty when brought before a magistrate. When asked to explain what had possessed him to commit this senseless act of vandalism, he said that he was drunk … or that he was suffering from a kind of nervous excitement, a continual fear of everything he saw … or that he heard voices telling him to do it … or that he envied the maker of the vase … or that he had found himself aroused by the figure of Thetis, recumbent, awaiting her bridegroom … or that he thought the vase's depiction of erotic longing a sacrilege, an offense to Christian morals … or that he couldn't stand to see such a beautiful thing be so admired while he was poor and lonely and unsuccessful. The usual reasons given for destroying objects of incalculable value, admired by everyone. These are always stories of a haunting. Self-defined outcasts and solitaries, almost always men, begin to be haunted by a supremely beautiful building, like the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, or by representations of a languorous female beauty, like Thetis on the Portland Vase or the
Rokeby Venus
of Velázquez, or of ideal, naked male beauty, like the
David
of Michelangelo—begin to be haunted, continue to be haunted, rise to a state of congested, fabulous misery, the inverse of the goal of nonstop ecstasy, and become convinced that they have a right to be relieved of this feeling. They must strike out, smash their way out of it. The ravishing object is there. The object is provoking them. The object is insolent. The object is, ah, worst of all, indifferent.

Torch a temple. Pulverize a vase. Slash a Venus. Smash a perfect ephebe's toes.

Then lapse back into a shame-ridden, baleful torpor: from now on, the malefactor is likely to be a danger only to himself. For this is not a crime one commits more than once. This form of obsession with an object, the obsession to destroy it, is monogamous. We know Mr. *** won't come back to the British Museum and take a thwack at the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin Marbles—nor is it likely that anyone else will either, for it appears there are no more than ten or fifteen works of art in the whole world that create obsessions (this recent estimate, probably low, by the Superintendent of Fine Arts in Florence, whose city has the honor to harbor two of these, Michelangelo's statue and Botticelli's
Birth of Venus
). The Portland Vase is not on the list.

No one can repair Mr. ***, whom the magistrate sentenced to a fine of three pounds or two months' hard labor. Having only ninepence in his pocket, he was taken to prison, and released a few days later when someone paid the fine. (His benefactor, it was rumored, was a clement aristocrat, none other than the Duke of Portland himself, who declared that he did not wish to appear to be persecuting a young man who might be mad.) But the vase, in one hundred and eighty-nine pieces on a table in the museum's basement, being examined with tweezers and loupe, was put back together by one intrepid, skillful employee and assistant in seven months.

Can something shattered, then expertly repaired, be the same, the same as it was? Yes, to the eye, yes, if one doesn't look too closely. No, to the mind.

Back inside its glass case, this new vase, neither replica nor original, was enough like its former incarnation that no visitors to the museum observed it had been broken and restored unless it was pointed out to them. A perfect job of reconstruction, for the time. Until time wears it out. Transparent glue yellows and bulges, making seamless joints visible. The jeopardous decision to attempt a better reconstruction of the vase was made in 1989. First, it had to be restored to its shattered condition. A team of experts immersed the vase in a desiccating solvent to soften the old adhesive, peeled off the one hundred and eighty-nine fragments one by one, washed each in a solution of warm water and non-ionic soap, and reassembled them with a new adhesive, which hardens naturally, and resin, which can be cured with ultraviolet light in thirty seconds. The work, checked by electron microscope and photographed at every stage, took nine months. The result is optimal. The vase will last forever, now. Well, at least another hundred years.

*   *   *

Some things can never be put back together again: someone's life, someone's reputation.

In the first weeks of January, the hero was made second in command of the Channel Fleet—he still had a moment more to linger under the shadow of official disapproval of his reprehensible conduct during the last two years—and given a new flagship. Gillray celebrated the hero's return to his hero's destiny with an etching entitled “Dido in Despair.” Dido is an unsightly mountain of a woman starting up from a bed, her gargantuan legs asprawl, her mammoth arms and meaty paws flung wide to a window that opens onto the sea and a squadron of departing warships.

Ah, where, & ah where, is my gallant Sailor gone?

He's gone to Fight the Frenchmen, for George upon the Throne,

He's gone to fight the Frenchmen, t'lose t'other Arm & Eye,

And left me here with old Antique, to lay me down & Cry.

And indeed, in a dusky corner of the bed, one can just make out the wizened head of a small, sleeping spouse.

There are a few people, such as the hero, whose lives and reputations are like the Portland Vase, already in a museum and too valuable to be allowed to disappear.

He is a warrior, the best that his bellicose country, about to become the greatest imperial power the world has ever known, has produced. Everyone admires him. The creation of his reputation has gone too far. It cannot be allowed to be destroyed.

But who cares about this fat vulgar woman and this emaciated weary old man. They can be destroyed. Society will not be the loser. Nothing important has been invested in them.

So, from now on, nothing they do will be right.

Disgrace, disgrace. Double disgrace.

And for the hero, soon, immortal glory.

Of course, the hero's reputation has a crack. Nothing can efface it. Not the great victory he won a few months later, the second of his three great victories, in which he broke Napoleon's control of the Baltic; not even the final, the supreme victory when, having ignored advice not to make himself a target by wearing all his stars and decorations on deck during battle, he was shattered by a musketball fired from the mizzentop of a nearby French warship. Everyone who relates the story of his life must take a position on the period of misconduct in the Mediterranean, if only in the form of declaring it not worth discussing. One has to maintain the right velocity of narration, as one has to keep the right distance from the dashed and rebuilt Portland Vase. Slow down, or move in for a closer scrutiny, and one cannot help but see it. Speed up, describe only what is essential—and it's gone.

*   *   *

And what to wear to disguise the reason for a sudden loss of weight, for that is the problem of the Cavaliere's wife two weeks after the hero sailed off for the Baltic. Luckily, it is early February and extremely cold. Answer: the voluminous clothes of the last months of pregnancy, but padded out a little, in the hope that, as layers are gradually discarded, the change in silhouette may appear the result of a remarkably effective crash diet.

And what to wear at night when, in the greatest secrecy, you convey your week-old daughter out of the house in Piccadilly and into a hackney carriage to Little Titchfield Street, where she must be left with a wet nurse until you can figure out how to reclaim the baby as another's offspring who has been committed to your care. Answer: a fur muff.