Chasing Beauty
I just finished reading Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra. Here’s the short version—wow!
Here’s the slightly longer version: Beautiful prose. Rich with insights. Wonderful storytelling. Not necessarily in that order
I did not go into Chasing Beauty cold. Natalie and I became deadline buddies and fast friends in the months in which she finished Chasing Beauty and I finished The Dragon From Chicago. For many months, perhaps as much as a year, we spoke one or twice a week about our trials and our triumphs. We touched base via text and email more often than that.[1] I got to hear her thoughts on the craft of writing in general and aspects of Gardner’s life in particular. Moreover, I interviewed her twice for the Women’s History Month series here in the Margins, in 2021 and 2024. Those conversations gave me enormous respect for Natalie’s intelligence and wisdom,[2] as a writer and otherwise. But nothing could have prepared me just how good Chasing Beauty is.
The obvious approach would have been to simply write the story of the woman who created the Gardner museum. And Dykstra tells that story. But the museum is the crescendo to which she builds. In some ways, the book could just as readily be titled The Education of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Before Gardner could build the museum that now bears her name, she had to build what I think of as the museum in her head. With Dykstra as our guide, we watch Gardner work her way through grief and friendship. We travel with Gardner, both as she visits the larger world[3] and on her personal intellectual and aesthetic journeys through books and art, and music and art, and, philosophy (or perhaps more accurately, ideas) and art, and, well, art. We share what Dykstra describes as “Isabella’s on-going romance with objects” and her “greediness for experience.” We are swept along in the wake of a woman who was larger than life, and yet Dykstra also gives us moments in which to pause and enjoy a telling detail.
Over and over as I read I was stopped by sentences that were beautiful in its clarity, images that delighted me, or a telling piece of context that opened up Gardner’s story in time and space.
All the thumbs up!
[1] Did we grumble and bemoan our fates? Yes we did. Did we reminded each other how lucky we were to have these opportunities? Yes we did, though not as often as we grumbled.
[2] Not the same thing. in my opinion.
[3] Her time in Egypt and Japan caught my imagination in particular.
Another Book That Sat on the To-Be-Read Shelves for Far too Long: Fast-Talking Dames
Fast-Talking Dames by Maria DiBattista is both a study of and homage to the fast-talking heroines of Hollywood comedies in the 1930s and 1940s. Like me, DiBattista discovered the women she writes about in her early teens, when she watched old movies after school and late at night. Like me, she saw them as a model to aspire to: classy, smart, smart-mouthed, witty (not quite the same thing as smart-mouthed, in my opinion), bold, and able to meet their male counterparts on equal terms, or even a bit ahead of them, in any given moment.
Some of the fun of Fast-Talking Dames, at least for this reader, is the skill with with DiBattista evokes the essence of movies I’ve watched many times, deepening my understanding of them with one-liner characterizations that any of her fast-talking dames would have been happy to deliver. For instance, discussing the rapid fire dialogue of His Girl Friday, arguably the fastest talking film in the genre, she describes Rosalind Russell as delivering her lines with “the assuredness of a large woman who knows she is taking up room and is enjoying the space allotted to her. “ Bingo![1]
DiBattista lays out common tropes on these comedies: madcap heiresses, spunky working girls[2] , blonde bombshells, and what she describes as “female Pygmalions” who educate and transform their male counterparts. She examines the careers of the queens of the genre—Katherine Hepburn,[3] Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Barbara Stanwyck, Ginger Rogers—as well as some of their lesser-known sisters.[4] All of which make for an engaging read for those of us who are fans of movies of this period
But DiBattista does not stop there. She also follows some fascinating scholarly paths that place her fast-talking dames in a larger context. She looks at them in the context of the long-standing and misogynistic discourse against mulier loquax (the talkative woman), which has its roots in classical Greece and has never gone completely away. She considers their place in the lineage of clever women in stage plays, ranging from Shakespeare through Noel Coward. She contrasts them to the the laconic heroes of Westerns produced in much the same period.[5] And she ends with the gradual dissapearance of the fast-talking dame as movies returned to more traditional values in the post-war era.
I came away from Fast-Talking Dames with a deeper understanding of and respect for a genre I have long loved, and a substantial list of movies I want to watch. If you’re an old movie buff or a fan of smart (or smart-mouthed) broads, this one’s for you.
[1] If you’ll allow me one more: Discussing the “jubilant partnership” of Myrna Loy and William Powell, she states “there is nothing more optically exquisite in movie comedy than watching Myrna Loy, arching her brows, take in Powell’s droll manner with the bemused and appreciative air of a connoisseur.” Indeed.
[2] The spiritual ancestors of Mary Rogers in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, who was a more attainable model for many of us.
[3] In the course of looking at Katherine Hepburn, she convinced me to give Bringing Up Baby another try, if only because of the layers of meaning inherent in the title. Over the years I’ve shifted from finding the movie hysterically funny to finding it irritating. Possibly another viewing will shift it back.
[4] I wanted a word that was the female equivalent of brethren here, but didn’t find one that was quite right. Sorority and sisterhood have overtones that didn’t fit. And the actual equivalent, sistren, while popular in the late medieval period, fell out of use several centuries ago. Oh well. It was a pleasant little rabbit hole to spend sometime in.
[5] A contrast that at least some of her dames are well aware of. As one of them puts it, “I know that type—ungrammatical but strong.”
Uncle Sam Wants You: The Man Behind the Poster
Illustrator James Montgomery Flagg (1877-1960) keeps popping up in places where I don’t expect him. Each time I have to look him up, because I don’t remember who he is. Each time he looks a little more interesting.
Most recently I stumbled across him on HathiTrust. I had given into the temptation to search for the name of the person I am researching—which is fun and easy—instead of squeezing out a few more sentences on a book proposal about her—which on that particular day was neither fun nor easy. There on the search list was book titled The Well-Knowns as seen by James Montgomery Flagg. Published in 1914, it is a collection of caricatures drawn by Flagg of famous people, including She Who Will Not Be Named, in some cases with a sharp-penned caption.[1]
Since I was in HathiTrust anyway, I did a quick search on Flagg. Whereas before I had gone “ho-hum” each time I looked him up, this time I was hooked.
The piece James Montgomery Flagg is best known for is the World War I recruiting poster in which a stern Uncle Sam looks out at the viewer and proclaims “I Want You for U.S. Army.” But that poster was simply one moment in a successful and varied career.
“Monty,”as he was called, started early. His first published work appeared when he was twelve: a page of comical drawings in the popular children’s magazine St. Nicholas.[2] By his teens he was already working as regular freelance contributor for well known weekly magazines.
Flagg studied at the Art Students League[3] in New York for several years and then went on to study in London and Paris. Once back in the United States, his career as an illustrator took off.[4] He was facile and hard-working, producing an illustration a day in his studio on West 67th Street. His work appeared most often in the comic magazine Life, but he was also published in many other magazines, including Colliers, Cosmopolitan, Judge (another popular comic magazine), McClure’s, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post. He drew cartoons, including a series with a tramp character named Nervy Nat that ran in Judge magazine.[5] He illustrated serialized novels and short stories, most notably P. .G. Wodehouse’s “ Jeeves” stories, which appeared in Colliers. He produced magazine covers. He also illustrated popular books, including an early satirical novel by Edna Ferber, and created a series of posters with the combined title Girls You Know, featuring leading actresses of the time, as a promotion for short, silent films produced by Thomas Edison’s film company.[6]
In addition to illustrating the works of others, Flagg was also a writer:
- He created a series of illustrated books, with titles like Tomfoolery, Why They Married, and, my personal favorite, If: A Guide to Bad Manners. These books combined satirical rhymes on social issues with closely observed caricatures.
- After illustrating a number of popular romantic novels, he wrote a romance story of his own, The Adventures of Kitty Cobb, which told the story of a young woman making a life for herself in the big city. (Personally, I would say it is a gentle parody of the more serious, more romantic novels he illustrated.) It was serialized over twenty-five weeks in major newspapers across the United States before being collected into what would now be described as a graphic novel.[7] The serial was so popular that advertisers used her name to promote their products.[8] He followed Kitty Cobb’s success two years later with another illustrated serial titled A Girl You Know.
- His experiences with the Edison Studios led him to write several dozen silent movie scripts, including one for a movie in 1914 based on the Adventures of Kitty Cobb, in which Flagg played a cameo role as himself in the opening scene. A contemporary reviewer in Motion Picture News described him as sitting “at his drawing table executing a sketch of the heroine at his usual mile a minute clip.”
When the United States entered World War I, Flagg was one of the illustrators who joined Charles Dana Gibson in his unofficial propaganda agency, the Division of Pictorial Publicity. Over the course of the war, Flagg created forty-six war posters for the United States government, the best known of which is the famous image of Uncle Same declaring “I Want You.” The image first appeared on the cover of the popular illustrated news magazine Leslie’s Weekly in 1916 over the caption “What Are You Doing for Preparedness?” It was inspired by an earlier poster by Alfred Leete featuring the British general Lord Kitchener in a similar pose. Flagg based Uncle Sam on his own face in this and other posters, reportedly because he didn’t want to bother with finding a model. If you look at them side by side, the resemblance is pretty obvious.
After Pearl Harbor, Flagg once again devoted his talents to the war effort, creating posters aimed at recruiting soldiers and war workers and selling war bonds. The government also resurrected the Uncle Sam poster: why mess with a good thing?
When the war was over, Flagg, like other illustrators, found there was less demand for his work as magazines began to replace pen and ink drawings with color photographs. He pivoted to painting portraits until his eyes failed him shortly before his death at 83.
[1] I only recognized the names of about half of them, and even fewer of their faces. Such is the fleeting nature of fame.
[2] This occurred at least ten years before the magazine established the St. Nicholas League, a department that published the best work submitted by its young readers. E.B. White would later claim that “The fierce desire to write and paint that burns in our land today, the incredible amount of writing and painting that still goes on in the face of heavy odds, are directly traceable to St Nicholas.” A number of well known writers, including Bennet Cerf , William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E.B. White himself , were publsihed for the first time when they won a St. Nicholas League competition.
[3] If you think the Art Students League sounds familiar, that’s because it has shown up in several previous posts dealing with American illustrators. The school is hard to avoid if you are interested in 20th century American artists.
[4] He also received commissions for serious portraits, thanks to his wife, wealthy socialite Nellie McCormick, who happily pulled strings on his behalf until her untimely death in 1923, at the age of 56. She was eleven years older than Flagg and some of the sources snicker about the age and social differences between them. One claims “she appeared less wife than patron.” But Flagg seems to have been devastated by her death. This is what he had to say about her , and their relationship, in his autobiography: “Here was the beautiful woman who had turned down a number of rich suitors to marry a poor but promising artist who was madly in love with her…. Nellie was a St. Louis socialite and knew all the richest people in all the big cities; up to then a realm of society entirely beyond my knowledge.”
[5] The character was popular enough to appear in several Broadway revues, two live silent films, and an animated short in 1916.
[6] I only have my sources’ word for it that the women pictured were well-known actresses. I didn’t recognize any of them. See note one above.
[7] Available in HathiTrust if you want to take a peek.
[8] Whether they made arrangements with Flagg to use the Kitty Cobb brand is not clear.