The Privilege, page 9
“You clearly don’t know anything about art, Mr. Antonelli,” he sniffed. “You can’t limit art by some narrow definition.”
“But of course you can. In fact, you must,” objected Giuseppe Gambarini. “The same thing happened to music as happened to art: the madness of the twentieth century. What Picasso and some others started in painting, Arnold Schoenberg tried to start in music with his tone deaf orchestration.”
One of the other guests, Lucas Fairweather, who prided himself on his ability to do several things at once, had never stopped eating while he listened to what the others round the table were saying. Bending over his plate, he watched with bank teller eyes as the conversation moved back and forth.
“You both miss the point,” he said, wiping his mouth as he sat back. “Art, music, everything is a function of time and place. The art of Rembrandt, DaVinci, the music of Bach, Beethoven, what they did reflected a particular culture, a particular place in history. You cannot understand art, or music, or anything else unless you understand history and what it means.”
Gambarini raised an eyebrow. In his early sixties, he had the cheerful cynicism that comes with age and deep intelligence. The world was full of fools, none of them less forgivable than the ones who thought they knew more than others did.
“You are suggesting, then, that Mozart’s music cannot be understood on its own, that you have to know when and where he was born?”
Long before Fairweather became the president of the University of California he had taught classes to undergraduates. He smiled at Gambarini the way he must have smiled at them, forgiving them the understandable ignorance he was there to correct. Gambarini’s dark eyes glowed with amusement.
“You can certainly appreciate what you are hearing. I think there is no question about that. But understand it? - No, I don’t think you can. You have to see the development, how it changes over time.”
“And has it changed for the better, or for the worse?” asked Tangerine, with a look that, for a moment, seemed to render him speechless.
“Better? Worse?” he mumbled.
“Yes,” she insisted. “This development you were talking about. Is it a good thing? Is post-modern impressionism, for example, an improvement on Rembrandt, or DaVinci; is Schoenberg….No, let’s leave him out of it. Let’s bring this development up to the present day. Is heavy metal, is rap music, an improvement - is it better - than Beethoven or Mozart?”
“Those are value judgments. Everyone has to decide questions like that for themselves,” he said, with the pious certainty of a lifetime of academic achievement.
“That is exactly right,” agreed Rupert Kramer, anxious to throw his weight into the balance. “Everything is question of interpretation. No two people are going to see the same thing the same way.’
“Or prefer the same music, or the same art - is that what you are trying to say?” inquired Tangerine, with a brilliant smile that had him nodding his agreement before he knew what he had been asked. “Everyone decides for himself, and if more people like rap music than Mozart, that is what they should hear; and if more people like pornography than pictures Rembrandt painted, that is what the museum of modern art should hang on its walls.”
“I’ve been to the museum,” interjected Craven’s wife, Isabel, who had been sitting quietly when she was not helping in the kitchen. “That’s pretty much what they do.”
“Art,” replied Kramer, looking down his nose, “is free expression; it is what the artist creates.”
“Art,” said Guiseppe Gambarini, “ and by that I meant all the arts, including music and poetry - literature - as well, was not thought of as creative until about five hundred years ago. The Greeks, the Romans, everyone until the beginning of modernity with the Renaissance starting the end of the 15th century, thought that art was imitation. They were called the ‘imitative arts,’ the attempt to copy nature, to show in various forms the essence of what something really was. Music - the only thing about which I can presume to speak with any authority - followed the ordered rules of harmony; painting and sculpture tried to portray in close detail the form, the figure, of a human being, or what with your own unassisted vision you saw in the natural world around you. When someone painted a tree, it was supposed to look like a tree; everyone who looked at it knew what it was. If no two people could agree what it was, the artists was considered a failure. Music, for its part, had to correspond to the harmony within a well-ordered soul. And harmony, I need hardly add, can never be the kind of noise whose only purpose is to inflame the disordered, not to say violent, passions of the crowd.”
“Doesn’t that show how much progress we have made?” argued Fairweather. “We’ve gotten rid of all those restrictions. We aren’t bound by an pre-determined rules. We’re free to experiment, to explore new ways of expression.”
“Progress? Toward what?” asked Gasperini. “What we have done, what modernity is all about, is the rejection of nature, nature as having an order of its own. What does nature mean today, what has it meant since Machiavelli and Hobbes, Descartes and Bacon, started us on this modern project in which we give the law to nature and not the other way round. What has modern science done except to lower the horizon, make everyone believe that comfortable self-preservation is the only worthwhile goal for human beings? We have lost all sense of what human excellence really means. There is nothing we look up to, nothing that inspires great effort and sacrifice, nothing worth great risk. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, a university education, at least in Europe, meant a classical education, the study of the great works of the human mind read in their original Greek and Latin. The purpose of a classical education was not just to make men, and women, too, learned, but to teach them how to live. They read Plutarch and learned how the greatest men in history lived their lives. You head a world famous university, Mr. Fairweather. How many of your students know Greek or Latin? How many of them study Plutarch, or any other ancient writer, even in translation?”
Fairweather glanced around the table, certain everyone would agree that the comments of this Italian musician, while no doubt interesting, had no relevance to the requirements of the modern world and a modern education.
“The university still teaches classes in Greek and Latin; we still have a classics department. There isn’t much demand; students are more interested in what will help them prepare for the kind of jobs they are going to have, than spending their time studying what, I think you’ll have to admit, have at best a kind of curiosity value.”
“I should have thought the encouragement of curiosity was the main function of a university,” remarked Giuseppe Gambarini’s extraordinary wife. “What is the point of being young, if you’re always thinking about how you’re going to get ahead in the world?” Her lips trembled with silent laughter, as she added, “When I was a girl in school, I never thought about that kind of thing. There were only two things that had an interest for me: old books … and young men.”
“I can imagine,” said her husband, with a droll expression on a face that had become more handsome, and more distinguished, as he grew older.
Observing the way the two of them carried on - the teasing, charming, marvelously seductive by-play, no matter what was going on around them - I exchanged a glance with Tangerine, knowing that we both hoped we were watching our own future. And then, suddenly, I caught the significance of Fairweather’s last remark.
“The demand. You still teach Greek and Latin, and there is still a classics department, but there isn’t much demand. Mr. Gambarini described the European university of the l9th century in terms of what it saw as the purpose of a university education; what you describe has no purpose at all - it’s whatever anyone who enrolls wants it to be. If I follow what you’re saying, the modern university, like modern art and modern music, is whatever anyone wants it to be?”
He would not go quite that far. Logic was one thing; the privilege of his position was another. He was the president of a world famous institution; it had to be something more than the creature of the moment, driven by nothing more important than the demands of the workplace for trained personnel.
“There is a core curriculum. There are requirements that every student has to satisfy,” he protested, in a thin, condescending voice.
“Unless you’re there on an athletic scholarship,” interjected Albert Craven, who seemed irritated. That was strange by itself: he almost never lost his temper, especially when he was presiding over a dinner table discussion in his own home. ‘We have, at Berkeley, the school I attended, the school from which I graduated, become such a slave to the need to have a winning football team that we don’t require anything from our so-called student athletes except that they can play. That is the only requirement for admission. Isn’t that right, Lucas? Isn’t that what we have now become - a university that would rather win a national championship than the Nobel prize for chemistry or physics?”
Now I understood. Albert was on the board of trustees, but I did not know about this unresolved issue or how strongly he felt about it. Fairweather’s face reddened, but only slightly. He had not made his way through the academic bureaucracy without learning how to become a master of the bland assurance that this, like every dispute, was based on a misunderstanding.
“Athletics is an important part of college life,” he insisted. He might have been a high school principle talking to the boys. “It provides a chance at a higher education for some who might not otherwise ever have that chance, and it gives the entire student body something to rally around.”
“Which is the reason we pay the football coach a couple million a year; the reason we pay assistant coaches, some of them barely able to graduate from college themselves, hundreds of thousands. No, Lucas, this isn’t something that can be ignored. This is a total disgrace!”
“It’s what everyone wants,” replied the president of the university, with a cold smile that had, in his experience, brought an end to any further discussion.
Albert Craven was too polite to object. If I had any virtues, politeness was not one of them, but even if it had been, Albert was the last person I would let go undefended. The dinner dishes had been cleared away and coffee had been served. Stirring milk and sugar into my cup, I started to laugh.
“If you ever commit murder, Mr. Fairweather, I hope you’ll let me represent you.”
He stared at me, incredulous that I, or anyone, could even think such a thing possible.
“I have to confess,” I went on, looking down the table at him, “it’s a defense I had not thought of before: a defendant who can claim that he murdered because - how did you put it? - ‘Its what everyone wants.’ It’s really quite ingenious, and it is perfectly connected with what all of you - almost all of you,” I added, glancing at Giuseppe Gambarini - “were saying tonight: Everything is a matter of perspective, how someone happens to see a work of art, or hear a piece of music. There is no better or worse; everyone is entitled to their own opinion. This even includes what it means to be educated. Should the university teach this course or that, should it admit students who could not graduate from high school because they can play football?- everyone’s opinion is as good as everyone else’s opinion, which leads inevitably to the consequence that the only measure, the only means of deciding anything, is to let the majority decide. So, good - kill someone and if a majority think the victim deserved to die, the killer goes free. Think how much time and money that will save. No more trials, no more costly lawyers.”
Lucas Fairweather was shocked. Art, music, education, that was one thing; but murder, the taking of a human life? No one could argue that that could ever be thought the right thing to do.
“There are no standards - everything is permitted - when it is nothing more serious than the human mind or the human spirit, but when it comes to what happens to the human body, when it is a question about human life and not human degradation, then we suddenly forget everything you think we should believe and act as if there is, and can be, only one known standard? Let me tell you something, President Fairweather. I have been doing this a long time. A murder trial is serious business. Murder is serious business. We used to have lynch mobs who would break into jails so they could hang someone accused of a murder they thought needed instant punishment. We don’t do that anymore. What we do instead is convict people on television before the trial has even started, and then riot in the streets when the jury - the only people who have actually heard all the evidence - doesn’t return the verdict they want. This is what happens when you teach a generation, more than one, to think that the only standard is whatever at any given moment they happen to want. It’s what happens when the only thing you think worth teaching is what everything thinks they already know!”
To my astonishment, everyone except Fairweather seemed to agree. It may have been nothing more than the normal inconsistency of the way we live, this refusal to follow out to their ultimate conclusions the basic premises of our own assumptions, that Rupert Kramer was suddenly so eager to express his own disappointment at the way a verdict in a murder trial had been received.
“The Friedrich trial,” he reminded everyone. “You got Justin Friedrich off. The jury found him not guilty of the murder of his wife, Allison. They were both friends of mine. Allison was on my board. She chaired the fund raising committee. I could not believe it when she was killed.”
He had been looking right at me, but now he lowered his eyes, embarrassed by what he was about to admit.
“I thought he was guilty; I thought he must have done it. Don’t misunderstand. I never thought of Justin as violent; I never would have thought him capable of murder. But when he was arrested, when he was accused, when he was put on trial…, then, yes, I’m afraid I assumed he must have done it, murdered Allison.”
He looked at me now as if he had misjudged me, which meant that I had misjudged him. I had not thought him capable of changing his mind.
“If it had not been for you, Mr. Antonelli - he would have been convicted for a murder he did not commit, which doesn’t mean he isn’t paying a price for what happened.”
I thought I knew what he meant, but I was not sure, and I did not want to guess. Albert Craven did not have to guess: he knew.
“No one wants anything to do with him,” he explained, as everyone turned to him, waiting to hear more. “He’s innocent, no one doubts that, but his wife was murdered, and he was accused, and that makes people ill at ease. No one want to get too close. That would have been true in any case, but after everything that came out during the trial - the way they lived, their disregard for all the normal decencies - he’s become a social pariah, an outcast. People will still talk to him if they run into him at a restaurant or a social event, but he doesn’t get invited anywhere - I mean, anywhere he used to like to go. With all the money he has, there are still people….”
“He’s made a very generous contribution to the museum,” Kramer was quick to point out. “And he had the decency to make it in Allison’s name. We’re naming a wing in the museum after her. But, innocent or not, his life will never be what it was before.”
“Perhaps it will be better,” suggested Giuseppe Gambarini. “Now that he’s on his own, free from false friends, he may begin to take himself seriously.”
No one, it seemed, had considered that possibility, nor the one Tangerine now offered.
“Whoever killed Allison Friedrich wanted her husband to go through a trial. Do you think,” she asked me in front of everyone, “that this was part of the reason: to destroy his life?”
I remembered - I would never forget - the look on the face of James Michael Redfield as he sat with us that night and without apology told us everything, or almost everything, that had been behind Allison Friedrich’s murder. I gave the only answer I could.
“I really can’t say what the killer really wanted.’
“That was well done,” said Tangerine, an hour later, as we were walking to the car. “‘I really can’t say.’ I don’t know why I asked you that. It just came out.”
“I think you’re right. It would fit. When you destroy someone’s life, you do more than that: you tell a story to an audience, another example of the corruption you insist is everywhere.”
She took my arm as we walked down the quiet well-lit street. The air was cool and clean and the sweet smell of an April night was everywhere.
“Tell me who you liked, and who you didn’t,” laughed Tangerine, and before I could say anything started with a list of her own. “I’ll leave that awful Fairweather - strange, isn’t it, how some people fit their name so perfectly? - he’s not on the list. He’s in that category called: ‘didn’t like and don’t remember’ - Don’t want to remember, with that empty-minded smugness of his. Leave off Albert and Isabel because we know them already. That leaves….Well, that’s fairly easy, isn’t it? I’m in love with the Gambarini’s - both of them. We’re invited, by the way.”
“Invited? To what, when?”’
“Their place, next week. But about Rupert - I knew him a little when I was married. Everyone knew him. Everyone with money likes to collect art. They’re all rich, but not rich enough to buy Old Masters or any of the great Impressionists like Monet or Cezanne. They buy post-impressionist art because it is much more affordable, especially, as most of them do, when they buy the work of someone who isn’t all that well-known. They’ve seen how well others have done when they bought, years ago, Jaspers, or Michael Cooper, or any of the other famous ones before they were famous. Rupert is who they go to when they have a question about who they should buy and how much they should pay.”
We had reached the car, two blocks down the street from Albert Craven’s pastel painted house.
“And your list, how is it different from mine?”
