ELIZABETH HARDWICK
consulted far too much; you had a belated feeling you were seeing
the matinee of a play that had been running for eight decades. And
even the guests staying at his house approached him with caution,
fearing to be taken in by an ancient "tourist attraction." Sometimes
one of Berenson's guests would take the night off and come to our
apartment in Florence where we would drink too much or talk too
much and the guest would return to his host, much too late, defi–
antly clanging the bell to have the gates of the villa opened. When
I thought about Berenson, his young profile of sixty-five years
before would come back to my memory, mistily mixing with the
reality of his famous, white-haired, aged elegance, his spare and
poetical look, his assurance and his suppressed turbulence. His tur–
bulence and disorderly emotic,ns were not suppressed, I believed, for
psychic hygiene so much as for reasons of practicality, as a waitress
would suppress dirty fingernails. In Berenson's beauty there was the
refinement, the discipline, the masculinity of a little jockey and
some of that profession's mixture of the fiercely driving tempera–
ment with the capacity for enjoying a judicious repose. He under–
stood that the proud, small person, believing in art and comfort,
must have singular powers and unrelenting watchfulness. Indulg–
ence feminizes; perfection and beauty, without restraint, provoke
the unconscious, fatten and soften the will.
At the real beginning of his adult life, Berenson made the pro–
found decision, accepted the necessity for dislocation, and decided
to live abroad, in Italy. The fact that Italy was his profession, his
art, does not remove the fact of his exile from interest. Ruskin and
others pursued the art of Italy without expatriation. It was not a
wandering, exiled scholar that Berenson became; he became a sort
of foreign prince, a character in a fairy tale with all his properties
and drama neatly laid out around him, symbolically ordered. And,
indeed, who would dream of severing Berenson and Italy? Where
can he be imagined? In Boston?
On
Fifth Avenue or established on
Long Island? He united himself with his residence in the way a
nobleman is united with his title and yet, like the nobleman again,
it was not altogether convincing as the final existential truth of
his
life. The depth of the sense of alienation in one so consciously and
