Both A Portrait in Two Parts Hardback - 2004

Excerpt

Chapter 1

Although Dr. Rupert C. Barneby was apparently the most accomplished legume taxonomist since Bentham, and had prepared himself since childhood to that end, his work was a subject that I as a nonscientist could not readily discuss. This did not disappoint him. It was enough in 1975 that I came along as the partner of his new friend, Frank Polach. Frank and I had arrived in New York the year before, when we both were thirty, and Frank had begun work soon after as a plant information officer at the New York Botanical Garden. There, bearing an unrecognizable leaf sent by some anxious gardener, he approached the celebrated elder figure who was known, instantly and by everyone, it seems, as Rupert. The leaf was identified, and now Frank and I were on our way to the Botanical Garden where we had been invited to Rupert's for dinner so that I too might be presented for inspection. A visiting botanist will reach the garden today, I suppose, by cab from the airport or by car from the suburbs. I wonder how to convey the impact, on a provincial newcomer, of this dinner excursion that began, by contrast, with descent to the IND local at Twenty-third Street, change to the D train, and exit fifty minutes later to street-level air on Bedford Park Boulevard in the unfamiliar Bronx. Down the hill and across the railroad tracks stood the Mosholu Gate to the Botanical Garden beyond. Frank had told me that the garden once was part of the Lorillard estate; never, despite his description, could I have foreseen the freedom of ground and sky, the splendid if threatened optimism of the Museum Building, the acres of primeval hemlock (the woolly adelgid had not begun its destruction), or the precipitous river gorge we had to cross in order to arrive at the side door of Pierre Lorillard's old stone stable, its ground floor occupied by the garden security headquarters, its loft by Rupert Barneby. Here, at the head of the narrow stairs, we were welcomed to a room that fit beneath its pitched roof like the nave of a small Gothic chapel, stone walls exposed, deep casement windows encrusted with grime. On the floors were antique Bijar rugs, on the walls an oil by Miró, two drawings by Jackson Pollock, foxed prints of Astragalus (the legume genus, aSTRAGGalus, as we were later to learn, that was Rupert's lifelong taxonomic passion), and, lined up wherever there was an available shelf or ledge, the books that included rare floras, first-edition poetry, travel guides in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese. It was hard to believe, while seated at a refectory table on eighteenth-century Portuguese chairs, when served a gentle curry on hand-painted Spode, or while smoking after dinner the smuggled cigars, that we were destined ever to get back on the subway. Instead we soaked up the gossip, delivered in an English accent that was both unassuming and lyrically at odds with the occasional squawk from the two-way radio downstairs: firsthand gossip about Auden and Isherwood, Peggy Guggenheim and Marcel Duchamp (figures as otherwise legendary to me as Bentham and Hooker, George Forrest, or Redouté may be to botanists), and gossip, too, about a figure whose name we did not recognize but whose portrait, in the lightly Surrealist manner of a vanished era, hung in the bedroom-our host's own partner of forty-eight years, the late Dwight Ripley.

My reaction to that evening was not original: greedy to learn and at the same time bristling with pride so as not to be influenced. The aesthetics of Surrealism, the habits of a discipline so foreign as taxonomy, had little, I thought, to offer me. Besides, like every other potential mentor, the sixty-three-year-old Rupert Barneby was inconsistent. He warned us, perhaps that very evening, against making "a deep plan" for our lives; if you have a deep plan, he said, you set yourselves up for disaster. It was advice that seemed congruent with his personality. Years later we discovered a description of Rupert in the diaries of Judith Malina, actress and founder of the avant-garde Living Theatre, who knew him in his forties. "Rupert, the gentle one," she wrote, "submits to fate, seems to be part of an eternal process, like the bud, blossom and withering of one of his plants." And yet this gentle one, at the very moment he was warning us to avoid deep plans, was himself finishing work on "Daleae Imagines," the illustrated revision of the genus Dalea that had occupied him then for at least ten years. Was this no plan? At a memorial tribute that would be held at the garden in 2001, after Rupert died, we heard Gwilym Lewis, from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, emphasize that Rupert's published output could be calculated at one new page of taxonomic text every third day for fifty-nine consecutive years. Perhaps the deepest plan of all had been the one that inspired his "Atlas of North American Astragalus," published in 1964 and still the standard in its field, an achievement that was not ten but twenty years in the making, had a long foreground before that, and continued to claim his interest thereafter. Clearly Rupert did have lessons to teach, though he did so by such unexpected example that what I chiefly value from our early years with him is surprise: surprise when this thoroughly achieved figure insisted on being as alive in the present as we were, when he reached across time, nationality, and (let's face it) social class to provide a sudden moral poke. How could I forget the day I was feeling so justly sorry for myself, and he asked what was wrong? Oh nothing, I said, just my life is over. And Rupert's response, so swift it nearly felled me, was, "How dare you say that to me!"

Only later did I fully grasp that Frank and I had come to dinner not two years after Rupert's own partner, he of the portrait, had died. The story of their partnered lives, the way those lives blended productively into the worlds of botany and art, cannot truly be told without a look back to their beginnings. Rupert had been born at Trewyn (he pronounced it treWIN), a brooding pile of a country house built in the late seventeenth century on still more ancient foundations at the foot of the Black Mountains, just barely across the border from England, in Wales. It was here in the uplands, along Offa's Dyke, around the ruins of Llanthony Priory, that he discovered as a boy his affinity for the forms and identities of plants. Frank and I were to see this special area one rainy October 6 after pitching and sliding our rental car up a lane so deep we could not see where we were until, cresting the hill, we came perilously close to the back door of Trewyn itself. This was not a polite arrival. Certainly it astonished the owner, the Lady Telford, who in her yellow slicker climbed down from the bulldozer she had rented for the day and offered to show us inside; she could scarcely believe that word of the bed-and-breakfast she intended to open had reached so soon across the Atlantic. Shamelessly I exploited the misunderstanding, and a few minutes later we were standing in the upstairs room (it's behind the second-floor front window at far left) where Rupert Charles Barneby was born. Rupert too was astonished when he learned of our visit. We had been there, uncannily, on his birthday. Whether he was delighted or appalled by our effrontery I couldn't tell, but he studied raptly the brochure we brought him: Trewyn Court, Bed & Breakfast. "It was never a court!" he said indignantly. In 1911, the year he was born, Trewyn comprised several thousand acres; he remembered riding with his mother in a carriage at Christmas to deliver presents in the village. In New York he devised traditions of his own. Each year a Christmas poinsettia would appear, delivered personally by Rupert to the lobby of our building. He never announced himself on these occasions but went on his way, dispensing gifts, perhaps, to his other villagers.

The young Rupert did not live continuously at Trewyn. During World War I his mother, born Louisa Geraldine Ingham, was so fearful of being left alone in the country that his father, Philip Bartholomew Barneby, rented something even more substantial to house his family while he was away: Ludlow Castle. All of it. Rupert's earliest botanical memory, which will explain perhaps his fondness for yellow, was of a cowslip in the Ludlow Castle moat. Not far to the southeast stood Saltmarshe Castle, the crenellated and dramatic, not to say melodramatic residence in Herefordshire of his grandfather William Barneby. And east of that, near Bromyard, was the historic family seat of Lower Brockhampton, a crooked, half-timbered manor house built in the fourteenth century, preserved and now opened to visitors by the National Trust. Rupert had two older brothers, Edmund and Tom, and a younger sister, Geraldine. When he was nine, the fourteen-year-old Edmund was killed in a riding accident at Trewyn; his mother again grew fearful of the country, and the family retreated to Wilcroft, a second Georgian landmark they maintained near Hereford in the village of Bartestree. Budd Myers, a friend who knew Rupert during the 1960s, once heard that he was secretly a Plantagenet, in a direct though illegitimate line from Richard, Duke of York. Surely this was a tale for gullible Americans. So, being Americans, Frank and I looked in Burke's Landed Gentry, where the original Barneby is identified, suggestively, as among York's retinue and as treasurer in 1461 to York's legitimate son, Edward IV. We were not surprised to learn that Rupert had a family coat of arms. On the shield are lions, rampant, and below is the motto VIRTUTE NON VI.

Like his father before him, Rupert was sent to an exclusive, or, as the English call it, a "public" school. His father had attended Eton; Rupert followed his brother Tom to Harrow. Unlike father or brother, he soon was sent home again. At Harrow the fourteen-year-old Rupert Barneby had met the sixteen-year-old Dwight Ripley, and the result was a sudden boyhood romance. Ripley, whose full name was Harry Dwight Dillon Ripley, was an only child born in London in 1908. His Anglo-Irish mother was an actress whose name Rupert couldn't remember (it was Alice Louise), and his American father, Harry, was a grandson of Sidney Dillon-one of those organizers of the Union Pacific Railroad who can be seen, waiting to drive the golden spike, in a famous photograph that was taken at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. And there was the rub. Harrow was alarmed, not because a schoolboy crush was unusual, but because young Ripley was not English. The elder Ripley had died from the effects of alcoholism when Dwight was only four; his fortune, which included two American trust funds in addition to his Sussex estate, the Spinney, had been willed in part to his widow and in part, as he came of age, to Dwight. The relatives in America refused to release the funds. Dwight's mother litigated her claim unsuccessfully in London and then, with Dwight in tow, successfully in New York. There she entered so wholeheartedly into the available nightlife that on one occasion she misplaced her son. The ensuing three-day search by police ended only when friends called to ask why she had not retrieved the boy she left in their apartment. She died, also broken by alcohol, a few years after returning to England. Dwight's upbringing was supervised thereafter by his solicitor, and by the time he reached Harrow he was rich, precocious, and eccentric. At the Spinney he had built already a rock garden and an alpine house of his own, and his Harrow School notebooks are filled with lists of desired plants, in Latin. This was Rupert's first and perhaps last encounter with a contemporary whose Latin was better than his own. Rupert at times proudly recalled the childhood self-reliance he himself had shown in the Woolhope Club, an association of amateur naturalists in Herefordshire whose officers challenged the taxonomic determinations in his herbarium and were proved, by the twelve-year-old Rupert, to be wrong. But his botanical independence met its match in his new friend's horticultural independence. At nine years of age Dwight grew a garden at the Spinney that was nothing but parsleys; now he was making plans for a "Contrary Garden," in which the species would be chosen for flower colors that were not as advertised. It was inevitable, or at least predictable, that when Barneby senior returned his son to school the two boys would resume, where they left off, the progress of their affair.

From Harrow, Rupert went in 1929 to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read not botany but modern languages. His father thought it unsuitable for a man to study flowers, and intended his son to be a diplomat. Dwight had gone the year before to Oxford, and he too studied languages. During his final year there, in 1931, the prestigious firm of Elkin Mathews & Marrot published Dwight's collection of thirty-one poems, called simply Poems. (Mathews was the first publisher of Yeats, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.) Of the thirty-one poems, only one is in English. Eventually Dwight was fluent in fifteen languages, and able to read and write in perhaps thirty. The library at the New York Botanical Garden has the manuscript of his Etymological Dictionary of Vernacular Plant Names, the massive multilingual project he had nearly completed before he died. I have a copy of his Poems. When Rupert mailed it, he enclosed for me a delicate explanation of Dwight's aesthetics, but there is not much that needs explaining about the book's dedication: Ruperto Barneby, poetae dilectissimo, the poet's most beloved. Rupert completed his own curriculum at Cambridge in 1932 and persuaded his father to send him to the university at Grenoble, in France, for further training in languages. He did not explain to his father that Dwight was already there. The two young men spent a memorable year learning, carousing, and also botanizing to the south, where Dwight filled the endpapers of H. Stuart Thompson's Flowering Plants of the Riviera with lists of species destined for the gardens back at the Spinney. By now those gardens were regarded as "theirs." I do not know how long Barneby senior waited, once the pair had returned to England, to deliver the ultimatum that Rupert described to us so vividly. Philip Barneby would not meet his son at the Spinney, nor would he allow him home. He summoned him to Hyde Park instead. Relinquish the attachment, he said, and come home as before. Otherwise never return. It would be romantic to think it was love for Dwight alone, but more likely it was a combination of love, his future in botany, and his native personality that motivated Rupert Barneby to give fate no second thought. He never saw his father again.

Media reviews

"A fascinating account of the lives of two eccentric English botanists who played a hiterto unrecorded role in the vibrant New York art scene of the 1950s.”
--John Ashbery

“Their modesty and my lack of perception kept me from realizing how extraordinary Dwight and Rupert were. Both brings them to life, as botanists and artists, with great charm and wit and intelligence. At last they can be appreciated.”
--Grace Hartigan