PARTISAN REVIEW
The Berenson house very beautiful and quietly massed with treas–
ures, but almost too exquisite to walk in. It is like a private chapel
raised to the connoisseur's ideal experience, where every corridor and
corner has been worked to make a new altarpiece, and where the
smallest detail reveals the mind of a man who has the means to reject
all intrusions of mere necessity. He has shaped the whole with an in–
flexible exactness of taste that is just a little chilling. Curiously, its
greatest effect is not so much
to
lead you to its pictures as to shame you
into a fresh realization of how awkward, soiled, and generally no-account
life can seem compared with art. In the dim light of the shaded corridors
those Sienese giants gaze past you, lost in their own dream of time and
interred in an oily gloss-their faces tortured with thought and good–
ness, and somehow
away,
bearing your praise and awe with equal
indifference. What golden and mysterious fish!
I noticed how jumpy Stein became when we stopped too long
before some pictures. Of course, showing his friend Berenson's house
must have been a bore; he had been in and out of the place for years,
and comes almost daily now to work in the library. Yet I -was a little
surprised, knowing of his life-long concern with painting, to hear him
confess that it was not the work of art that mattered to him so much
as the mind of the painter. He is very much preoccupied with all sorts
of psychological questions and told us that he had just (at seventy-five)
finished psychoanalyzing himself. The devouring interest of his life was
to discover why men lie. This is something that evidently touches him
very deeply. While he had been showing us pictures and rooms with
a certain irritation, and made affectionate, mocking little digs at Beren–
son's expense (their rivalry is famous), he suddenly, in Berenson's study,
went off into a long discourse about psychology and the need for scien–
tific exactness in determining character. He spoke with a kind of uneasy
intensity, as
if
he had been held in on this topic for a very long time,
and wanted our understanding with or without our "approval." It was
of the greatest importance to him, this practice of lying; it would be a
key to all sorts of crucial questions, if only he could get his hands on
the solution; it was, you might say, at the center of human ambiguity.
As he went on he would look up at us every so often, pull irritably at
his hearing aid, and grumble: "What? What? You think what? I can't
hear you!" riding impatiently over us and his deafness for standing in
his way, and rearing up against our passing comments with a loud cry,
very moving in an old man, which seemed to come straight from the
heart: "It's important! It's the big thing! No one looks these facts in
the face! Animals can't lie and human beings lie all the time!"
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