Culture Watch
In this issue:
BOOKS:Love him or hate him--and in his day people did both--but J. Pierpont Morgan cannot be ignored. Morgan: American Financier is the definitive biography of the man and his times.
A disturbing family novel, Blood Ties, pits generations against one another. The posthumous work by Jennifer Lash, the mother of actors Rafe and Joseph Fiennes, it has harrowing scenes and characters that stay with you long after reading.
The 1997 album Buena Vista Social Club re-discovered a group
of Cuban maestros and has spawned a mini-industry of recordings
and a fine documentary; those pesky baby boomers will put their
imprint on the next century, for good or ill, and Age Power presents
some of the possibilities.
Bank On This
Morgan: American Financier by Jean Strouse
(Random House; 796 pages)
Conversations and debates are already
heating up about who should be acclaimed the Man of the Century--our
century that is--and there's an impressive crowd of political leaders,
scientists, business gurus and evil-doers to select from.
If 19th century Americans had been able to cast their ballot
for the person who most influenced the past 100 years, they could
have chosen between Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, among
other luminaries, They probably would not have anointed J.
Pierpont Morgan, but as much as anyone else he shaped his
century and helped to mold the next. The America in which he was
born in 1837 was a sprawling collection of states and territories,
raw and vigorous, and with no central direction. That same year
it fell into one of the worst depressions in U.S. history. When
Morgan died, in 1913, the Civil War had been fought, the country
of farmers had become a nation of urban workers, swelling industries
had created millionaires and forever altered the landscape, and
the United States had seized the dominant place on the international
stage that it still occupies. Admired and reviled, respected
and feared, Morgan was the world's most powerful banker, a major
player in the nation's fortunes of that era. Yet amazingly enough,
he has not had a major, deeply researched biography devoted to him.
Now he has one, and it is worthy of its ferociously intelligent
and gifted subject. Drawing on a myriad of sources, from revealing
letters to dry financial reports, author Jean Strouse has brilliantly
re-constructed the life of the powerful financier and art collector.
To understand Morgan is to understand his
times. The grandson of a Boston preacher and an up-and-coming
Connecticut entrepreneur, young Morgan was schooled by his
business father, Junius Morgan, in the Yankee virtues. He carried
over into his adult life those notions of thrift, responsibility,
prudence and truthfulness. Character, Junius told his son, was of
primary importance. Junius intended his son for the banking
business, and while duty prevailed, it was apparent from the beginning
that young Pierpont had a gift for finance that exceeded his father's.
Junius oversaw his son's apprenticeship, matching him with older,
more experienced partners, and while Pierpont learned from them
he was quick to see that America was headed in new directions. He
soon stepped into the void created in a growing economy with no
central bank and a chaotic monetary system. Time and again, he was
called on to bail out a floundering government and stave off
national economic panic. He invested in Thomas Edison's newest marvel,
the electric light, and saw the need to consolidate firms, presiding
over mergers that had a healthy long life: Standard Oil, General
Electric and U.S. Steel.
Jean Strouse won the prestigious Bancroft Prize
for Alice James, the biography of the sister of William and
Henry James. (It has recently been re-issued in paperback) This
latest book should gain her more awards. With a masterful hand,
she guides the reader through the complexities of railroad quarrels
and consolidations and the so-called 'Morganization' of the roads
that brought some sense to the runaway competition and bankruptcies.
Class tensions ran high, and there were violent strikes and
demonstrations by workers and farmers. His peers in America and
Europe trusted and needed Morgan's expertise and willingness to
put his bank behind them when financial rescue was needed, but to
the workers he was the agent of the devil. An article in a workingman's
journal asked of the church-going Episcopalian Morgan: "When with
a gilt-edged prayer-book in his hand he wiggles himself into a more
comfortable position in his satin-lined pew...does he think of the
starving miners who are suffering through his efforts? ...When he
reads the lessons of charity and good will toward men, does he think
of the tyrannous system that reduces wages to the subsistence point?"
Whether Morgan ever thought about that--or the people who barely
made a living wage--is not known. Probably he didn't. His duty,
he felt, was to his country, and with that mind, he carried out
many of his major transactions. To his mind, he was doing his duty
to America. He would bear the risk of performing that duty, and
if there was a commission to be had, why then, he deserved it.
The Gilded Age in which Morgan was so amply content
was much like our own. Wealth beyond expectation enabled the newly
rich to have a lavish and self-consciously opulent life. Morgan
was no exception. He commissioned elaborate homes, filling them
with expensive furniture and costly art, had yachts built, and arranged
extensive and exotic travels for himself, his favorite daughter
Louisa and various friends. Morgan's marital situation paralleled
that of his parents, who lived apart for many years, though never
divorced. He had a brief youthful marriage to an ebullient and bright
woman who died tragically of tuberculosis within a year after
their wedding. His second marriage lasted, but he and his wife Fanny
occupied different spheres. His place was in Wall Street, hers was
in the home. She gained weight, suffered from headaches and depressions,
and grew uneasy about being the hostess of the great man.
Morgan openly spent time with a succession of lovelies, traveled
with them, lavished them with gifts, and society accepted it. Wealth
and position protected him. While Fanny was packed off for extensive
visits to Europe, Morgan would stay in America. They would almost
pass each other on the ocean, as she sailed back to the United States
and Morgan, with his entourage would steam to Europe. Despite an
inherited disease of rhinophyma, which left his nose swollen and
hideously purple, he was supremely attractive to women. Power, as
Henry Kissinger famously said, is a great aphrodisiac. People
who met Morgan were fascinated by his piercing gaze and fierce intelligence.
At dinner in his London residence, a woman once remarked, "What
a mass of interesting things are in this house.'' Commented a fellow
guest, "The most interesting thing in this house is the host.''
Inspired by his father, who was fascinated
by Europe's art, Morgan grew to be an avid collector. He spent a
great deal of time in Europe and made frequent trips to Egypt. On
his own, or through dealers, he purchased paintings, books, sculpture,
manuscripts and objets d'art of all kinds. Unlike some of his contemporaries,
who made sure their names were stamped on institutions they backed--Carnegie
Hall and Rockefeller Center, come to mind--Morgan was more circumspect.
The list of his philanthropies is long. He gave generously to New
York City's Metropolitan Museum, where much of his acquisitions
are on view, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan
Opera, the original Madison Square Garden, the American Academy
and Harvard and Columbia universities. He never insisted that
his name be branded on any of them. In later life, he had a private
library designed for him near his Manhattan home on East 36th Street,
and, as the Morgan Library and open to the public, it is the only
cultural institution that bears his name. Like Strouse's superior
biography, it illuminates for us today the unique connection between
money and art, between the appreciation of power and the love of
the beautiful that J.P. Morgan represents.
Broken Bonds
Blood Ties by Jennifer Lash
(Bloomsbury; 375 pages)
The writer Jennifer Lash did not live
long enough to enjoy the fame of her two sons, actors Rafe
and Joseph Fiennes. She died of cancer in 1993, and her last
novel, Blood Ties, was still unpublished. Since completing
the manuscript in 1989, she had tried, without success, to convince
a publisher to take it on. Rafe Fiennes, through his connections,
helped get the book into print two years ago, and with their sister
Sophie, a documentary film maker, the two brothers have been
actively promoting this new paperback edition. It is a fine family
tribute to an unusual woman and mother. Lash, who endured a lonely
and abusive childhood, suffered through breakdowns as a young art
student and after marrying photographer Mark Fiennes struggled to
carry on with her painting and writing and at the same time
to imbue her six children with her love of nature and all God's
creatures, and instill in them a devotion to the magic spell that
words can cast.
Lash's interests, and her own difficulties,
thread through this sometimes troubling and ultimately rewarding
book. The novel is circular, beginning with a portrayal of
an old woman named Violet Farr reflecting on a lost past and clutching
in her hand a crumpled piece of paper from a child's notebook and
the dry bones of a bird. Near the book's end, we see Violet again
with the note and the bird's sad remains, and by then we have come
to understand their significance and the bitter and horrifying story
behind them. Violet, an impulsive and independent girl, had made
all the wrong choices in her life. She married a weak man, and took
charge of running their substantial farm in Ireland. Only from the
mountains and fields around her and from her beloved dog does she
find strength and completeness.
By and by, she and her husband have
a child, a boy named Lumsden. Neglected by both parents, he grows
to be a mean-spirited, selfish young man, and when he is forced to leave
Ireland because of a nasty incident with two children, Violet is glad to
see the back of him. The despised Lumsden carelessly fathers a baby by
a barmaid, and the hapless little boy, named Spencer, eventually ends up
in his unloving grandmother's home. The child's strange and silent nature
offends her and, after a gruesome death of an animal, she brutally sends
him away. In London, he descends from institutional care to living
on the streets until he is taken in by the family of a kind young woman.
Through her, Spencer is awakened to love, but at the moment when he experiences
the fullness of freedom and hope, there is a fatal accident. Receiving
the news, Violet, as Lash writes, "felt simply the great weight of flesh
and age. Stagnant days stretching ahead into the gray struggle of winter
months.'' Her pride and sense of her own rightness have finally been
assaulted, and the memory of what has happened is past enduring.
The author turns a last, bright light on that
darkness, closing her book with a short and remarkable passage of
redemption. Throughout, Lash looks with scorn on the British
class system with all its snobbery and petty humiliations, and in
a Dickensian vein, contrasts the goodness of nature
and simple folk with the heartlessness of the city and its unfeeling
strivers. While Blood Ties often seems overheated and
hallucinatory, like a waking vision by someone restless with fever,
Lash writes truthfully and with compelling urgency about the pain
inflicted from generation to generation
Film and Music:
Buena Vista Social Club Directed by Wim Wenders
Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer
(WEA/Nonesuch/Atlantic)
First produced as an album by Ry Cooder in 1997, Buena Vista Social Club awakened the world to the imaginative creations of an almost forgotten group of musicians. The Cuban virtuosos of that first outing can now be seen in a loving and delightful documentary of the same name. With so much popular music today churned out for commercial purposes, it is heartening to see and listen to these musicians--stars all of them--who play for the love of it. The footage shot in Havana has the mostly elderly men--there's only one women--speak simply about their lives in music. On the streets along the sea, in shabby apartments and in once glorious buildings of pre-Castro Cuba, they tell modestly of wanting to learn to play the bass, the piano, or just to make up songs. There's plenty of irresistible music to hear, and the movie audience can't help but share in the joy of these veteran players, who are going strong in their 70s and 80s. The film culminates with a visit to New York City and we discover the wonders of the place through their eyes. They are there for an appearance at Carnegie Hall, and when they play the last set, you want to stand up and cheer.
Outstanding among the group of musicians in the first album, and in the documentary, is the singer Ibrahim Ferrer. He has such a gentle presence and perfect rhythmic knowledge that he can slip a song's words under and above a big orchestral sound. Everything he sings is done with meaning, and even if you don't understand Spanish, the emotion is universal.
Books:
Age Power by Ken Dychtwald
(Putnam; 320 pages)
Just try to get away from those baby boomers. They are everywhere, and they're not going away, they are just getting older. The new book by Ken Dychtwald, subtitled "How the 21st Century Will Be Ruled By the New Old,'' spells out how the boomers are once more going to make their mark. They did it when they were youngsters, with pop culture and pop tastes, and they'll do it again when they pass into -ha! -geezerhood. But watch out, because there's danger ahead, and Dychtwald alerts us to some of the coming dilemmas. Life will be longer, but will it be healthier? Will the health-care system ever catch up to the need to pay for preventive measures? These about-to-pass-the-Big-Five-Oh-mark weren't big savers. What will that mean to the economy? Dychtwald's wake-up call should arouse readers to the pleasures and pitfalls of the coming "gerontocracy.'' He has found role models in some currently older folk, like Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, whom he dubs heroes of aging, writing that "maturity has never had so many high-spirited, motivated men and women who, with their deeds and actions, are clearing a new and more hopeful path to our future.'' He's speaking about us, so let's take a bow and then get back to the business of thriving after the age of 50.
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