The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story

2 PREPARATIONS

The Yukaghir people of northeastern Siberia, seeing a camera for the first time, called it ‘the three-legged device that draws a man’s shadow to stone.’ The three legs were the tripod, and the shadow drawn to stone was the image inscribed onto the glass-plate negative.

Drawing Shadows to Stone, Laurel Kendall

Room Five in the two-star Hôtel Quercy struck the visual equivalent of perfect pitch. The walls were white; so were the gauze curtains and quilted cotton bedspread. A chestnut armoire, in which I knew I would find two square pillows cased in starched linen, sat on Empire legs in the corner, a full-length mirror dividing its two doors. Simple wooden tables flanked both sides of the bed, and a third, set with two chairs and a flowered cloth, was placed beneath the full-length, open window. The bathroom had all the appropriate fixtures including a white marble baptismal font of a sink, and a small wooden table for toiletries.

Two stars release hotel rooms from the need for incidentals, and that was fine: sensibility, simplicity, and forethought were on view without distraction. There was no telephone or television, nothing betrayed a date. It could have been any decade of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, or even the nineteenth.

Several months earlier I had woken in a similar room after arriving in France and driving from the airport, and not known if I’d slept for an hour – if it was 8:20 p.m. – or if I’d slept off my jetlag for thirteen hours and it was 8:20 a.m. Thick yellow sunlight had slanted through the curtains: marginal sunlight, but I had no clue from which margin of the day, morning or evening, it shone. For two or three minutes I had been helpless, acutely baffled, until I’d turned on the television and found the evening news.

A time traveller might have the same problem in Room Five of the Hôtel Quercy. It was one of the best places in France, in addition to Romanesque churches, in which to conjure Lucy and Kingsley Porter.

Called at 8. We strolled about town, having leisurely put on pressed [and clean] clothes … Natalina makes this hurried travelling almost luxurious.

Without Lucy’s journal I probably would not have envisioned Natalina, her Italian maid, ironing their summer linens. Despite having to make do with provincial hotels (‘the hotels … are abominable’, wrote Kingsley to Bernard Berenson, ‘but the sculptures are worth putting up with anything’), the Porters travelled in style. Berenson’s biographer describes them in Paris at the end of the First World War: ‘a well-to-do, well-educated couple of no particular idiosyncrasies apart from their obsession for some curious sculpture.’ In appearance they were opposites. Kingsley had the tall, slim, slightly awkward frame of a runner who doesn’t run – he was in fact an intrepid walker and swimmer – matched by gentle, blond good looks. Lucy was short and a little stocky, her face broad and candid, with high cheekbones and a square jaw; her husband’s, by contrast, was long and thin, an oval of smooth, sloping angles. In photographs she looked directly into the camera. He tilted his head and sought the horizon, always slouching apologetically for his height.

Both were from wealthy families that split their time between Connecticut and New York City. As affluent young men do in Connecticut, Kingsley had gone to Yale University; as affluent young women do, Lucy had attended Miss Porter’s School for Girls. After graduation, Kingsley wasted no time in becoming an academic wunderkind, publishing his first book on medieval architecture in 1909, at the age of 25. It immediately seized his peers by both the imagination and intellect – a twin reaction he’d inspire for the rest of his life. Kingsley was an art historian who thought of himself as an archaeologist. When other scholars went to the library he went into the field, took comparative photographs, sought out primary documents, and drew his dates accordingly, rejecting prevailing notions about architectural development. His work was consequently perceived as both rigorous and romantic. First at Yale, where he was an assistant professor, then especially at Harvard, he was surrounded by admirers who considered him ‘a valued exotic’. As one former student wrote: ‘His scholarship offered a paradoxical blend of solidity with a penchant for living dangerously.’

How much Kingsley believed and perpetuated his own myth is uncertain; it’s doubtful he considered being chauffeured around the back roads of southwestern France with his wife and her maid a hazardous undertaking. Yet in some ways he did see his fieldwork as a scholarly extension of the big-game hunting he’d pursued in Newfoundland as a teenager. Early in 1920 he wrote to Berenson about his great project, photographing and comparing Romanesque sculpture on the pilgrimage roads of France and Spain, in hopes of discovering a relational lineage of development. ‘I am delighted with some of the things that have turned up from the Burgundian photographs we made last summer. There are so many things I want to find out about that the excitement of the chase perhaps lends an interest not purely aesthetic …’

Fuelled by adventure, romance, and a kind of moral pragmatism in equal parts – a scrupulous, verging on puritanical, need to set eyes on his subjects before he wrote about them – scholarship, for Kingsley, could never be a strictly indoor pursuit. After Yale and a two-year stint at the Columbia University School of Architecture in New York, he moved to Europe to study on his own. It wasn’t what was meant to have happened; his mother, one of the first students to study at Vassar, had intended him to join his brother Louis’ law firm. But in the summer of 1904 Kingsley visited Coutances, in Normandy, and beheld the cathedral that had recently captured the attention of Henry Adams, another gentleman-scholar from New England. Of the cathedral Adams had written in his book on Romanesque and Gothic architecture, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, which would be published the following year: ‘Nothing about it is stereotyped or conventional, – not even the conventionality.’ The same might be said of Kingsley.

Adams thought that the Coutances cathedral epitomized the Normans’ masculine, martial culture. ‘The meaning of the central tower cannot be mistaken,’ he wrote; ‘it is as military as the ‘‘Chanson de Roland’’; it is the man-at arms himself … the mere seat of the central tower astride of the church, so firm, so fixed, so serious, so defiant, is Norman …’ For Kingsley it became the place where the present cracked open and he glimpsed his future. He’d been standing in front of the cathedral when suddenly, he recalled, ‘shined a light round him’, and it was as if he’d fallen into a trance. When he awoke, he later told Lucy, he knew he would never be a lawyer.

Like his rival, the Frenchman Émile Mâle, Kingsley felt he had been called to the study of medieval art – a vocation announced by epiphany rather than mere choice or happy accident. ‘Only romantic personalities,’ wrote Janice Mann in a study of their rivalry, ‘would imagine themselves so singled out by fate.’ It was the passion of this conviction that made Kingsley a memorable teacher. Students who later in life couldn’t tell a cornice from a corbel could not forget the intensity of his love for the subject, which lay like bedrock under his surface shyness and affability. They remained a little star-struck, even years later. ‘His intransigent idealism, his extreme sensitiveness, his incorruptible magnanimity and high-mindedness, even his prodigious capacity for work, have something Shelleyan about them,’ wrote one. Others were moved to even loftier comparisons:

It was … in the manner in which he transmitted to others the results of his own studies and of his perfectly rounded character, making an indissoluble unit of his research, his instruction, and his friendship, that he attained an Hellenic integration of all aspects of his personality.

One of the reasons for Kingsley’s immense popularity was that Lucy channelled his generosity into a weekly schedule. Both Porters became famous at Harvard for their ‘Sunday Afternoons at Home’, when they would open their house to students who flocked there to converse, look at photographs, and be fed. One undergraduate later wrote of Kingsley and his Sundays: ‘I value the memory of hours spent with him in his study and photography collection from 1925 to 1930 beyond any other recollection of the university.’ Lucy had hit upon the idea of Sunday parties to protect her husband, who otherwise would have had students round every night. She was, one of them later recalled, the unflagging guardian of Kingsley’s ‘never robust health’.

That Kingsley felt the same way about his students as they did about him is evident from the dedication he made in his 1931 study, Crosses and Culture of Ireland. ‘To My Teachers’, wrote Kingsley, ‘– My Harvard Students’.

On 1 June 1912, Kingsley married Lucy Bryant Wallace in her parents’ home in New York City, when he was 29 and she 35. During their courtship, initiated by his loan to her of some photographs of Italian architecture, he portrayed himself to her as precisely the reserved romantic his peers made him out to be. Shortly after their engagement he’d made the mistake of perching himself on the arm of another woman’s chair at a tea given by Lucy’s family. By the time he reached home he was eaten up with guilt, and immediately wrote her to apologize. ‘I am afraid you have in hand a wild and wayward nature that has so seldom thought of conventions and forms that it never considers until afterwards that one’s thoughts are judged by purely external actions.’ In the same letter he reminded her, ‘as you know darling social tact is the one thing more than any other that I haven’t’.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, Kingsley’s was a waywardness strictly controlled (so strictly it was perhaps only apparent to himself, though he tried hard in his letters to impress this ‘wild side’ upon Lucy). When she complained that a visit from his relatives had been ‘the most formal kind of call’ he explained to her: ‘My family are all so mannered and stiff; the only way to treat them is to rather break through the ice wall with which they surround themselves. I know because I am just like them.’ Later in life he expanded on the theme to Berenson. Kingsley wrote that it was a part of his ‘Puritanism’ never to show his feelings, a characteristic he loathed, and tried hard to rectify in letters. In many ways, art history – his brand of it, practised in the field – offered a means by which to reconcile his self-perceived ‘wildness’ with his inherited propriety. Roving about the European countryside on his own terms (universities and publishers gave him so much free reign he felt guilty) was never anything less than a respectable vocation. Yet it simultaneously renounced the ‘very formal, very quiet, very refined, in perfect taste, and deadly dull’ world of tennis and dinner parties in which he had grown up.

Kingsley’s second fortuitous discovery was Lucy Wallace: a wealthy, respectable woman with whom he could have a comfortable and respectable marriage and yet, from the first, share his inner nature. While propriety laid its claims on her as well, Lucy’s natural spontaneity reduced the distance between her public and private selves, just as Kingsley’s habit of reflection increased the space between his. The letters they exchanged during the six months of their engagement, beginning on 12 December 1911, are revelatory. Kingsley’s were neat, even-lined, long and analytical; Lucy’s dashed at top speed in impossible scrawl on tiny blue note cards (when she ran out of space she borrowed the old technique of turning the cards on their sides and writing on the perpendicular, between her previous lines). She made no bones about how she felt: ‘Just the tiniest note in the world to carry the biggest amount of love to the finest and most loveable man.’

When Kingsley went to a conference in Pittsburgh shortly after their engagement, she chafed under her sister Ruth’s watchful eye and literally counted the hours until he returned to New York, unembarrassed that she was 35 and carrying on like a teenager. ‘Sweet adorable Kingsley (I just can’t be proper anymore) are you never coming back to me?’ Further down she added, ‘I must wait forty-four hours before you can hold me in your arms again. That would or should solicit tears from a stone (Lucky Ruth does not censure this note!).’ The day before, she promised him that she was getting fat and rosy and lonesome in his absence. This she later amended, insisting ‘I’m not getting fat and rosy. I’m only getting lonesomer and lonesomer and LONESOMER.’

For Lucy, such declarations must have been the equivalent of going out on an emotional limb, for until she met Kingsley she practised a degree of independence unusual for women of her time and, especially, class. She worked as a schoolteacher – by choice, certainly not financial necessity – teaching elementary students at a private school in New York City. In one of her letters she tried to tease Kingsley into coming along to help her hunt for subjects and predicates during a grammar lesson. That she continued teaching, possibly against her parents’ wishes, certainly against her friends’ – one was scandalized that she kept it up after her engagement – suggests that Lucy, too, chafed against the world into which she was born. ‘I never leaned so willingly on anything’, she wrote to Kingsley before their wedding, ‘as I did on your protective care. And can it be I am to have that always, Kingsley, dear?’

After their marriage and honeymoon at Lake George, in New York State – snapshots show Lucy looking uncharacteristically demure, holding a parasol, and Kingsley surprisingly jaunty – the Porters were inseparable, moving always as a pair. When, in 1918, Kingsley was appointed by the French Ministry of Fine Arts to a panel of experts charged with assessing war-damaged medieval monuments (the only foreigner so honoured), Lucy went along and took photographs and made notes. The Porters were based in Paris, where they would remain until the autumn of 1919. It infuriated Lucy to be attending luncheons in the same city where Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau were simultaneously redrawing the world map for the Treaty of Versailles and to be without adequate news sources.

‘I stumble in my groping ignorance,’ she wrote in frustration. ‘I can’t feel it is fair for the ‘‘Little Powers’’ to have only 5 representatives together against two for each of the 5 powers.’ Paris at the time was still very much a city in recovery. Even for the very wealthy a lukewarm bath was reason for celebration; mail delivery was sporadic at best. And Lucy’s French was still a work-in-progress. In February 1919 she wrote of attending a lunch party with one of Kingsley’s colleagues and his family: kind people who were none the less not of the same social class as the Porters. It was the first time Lucy had been able to speak French with abandon in Paris, a feat for which she later berated herself in her journal. ‘I was ashamed’, she wrote, ‘that my fluency came from a superior feeling socially.’

Curt reflection was a trademark of Lucy’s journal writing, no matter what the subject. She recorded and commented; she didn’t dwell. A rare theme – Lucy was too eclectic to be repetitive – was that of her and Kingsley’s desire for privacy in an unrelentingly social environment. ‘I suppose a tea once in awhile brushes up one’s manners,’ she conceded.

About Paris Lucy avoided generalizations, preferring the sharp, focused observations of a photographer. ‘A thin whiteness over the city’; or, on walking past Notre-Dame in mid February: ‘It was closed but I studied the south portal. The frozen spray of ice from the mouth of each gargoyle showed which way the wind had blown on the first cold day. On my return home a warm shower of family letters.’

In March 1919 the Porters gratefully exchanged city for countryside (‘Glad to leave Paris,’ commented Lucy) so that Kingsley could begin researching Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads in earnest. They would remain travelling, despite a few hiatuses, until Kingsley took up his post at Harvard in the autumn of 1921.

‘How many young dead we meet,’ wrote Lucy as they struck out east of the capital, ‘– always they are before us.’

I was equally glad to trade the congestion of Toulouse for the small towns of the Rouergue. The city’s wealth of sun-faded brick, with its southern promises of warmth, long naps, and lingering meals, was compromised by the edgy graphics of its thriving shops, not to mention its labyrinthine system of one-way streets. I was drawn to the shops, but my heart belonged to the brick’s promises, which no urban hub could ever keep. When I’m in the city I always long for the country; in the country the city never enters my mind.

Upon arrival in Toulouse I’d risen from the Capitale Métro station straight into a 200,000-strong student demonstration protesting against recent successes of the French far Right. Like a piece of foreign flotsam I’d been swept into the human tide, whereupon I immediately began marching, dragging my wheelie suitcase in an erratic path behind me. I was pleased to make a show against encroaching fascism, but the deep-throated chant of the crowd touched a nerve. That noise, like thunder, suggested a latent storm and made me fearful. Although the marchers remained calm – many leashed dogs participated – I’d been almost teary with relief to glimpse my hotel on a quiet side street.

I’d had a similar experience while visiting Toulouse’s great basilica, St Sernin (short for Saturninus), the largest Romanesque church in Europe, consecrated in 1096. The interior had been peaceful enough. Visiting in the 1880s, Henry James remarked: ‘What makes it so extraordinary is the seriousness of the interior … As a general thing, I favor little the fashion of attributing moral qualities to buildings; I shirk from talking about tender cornices and sincere campanili, but one feels that one can scarce get on without imputing some sort of morality to St. Sernin.’

He was right – James usually was – although the painted plaster walls that he, as well as Lucy and Kingsley, had seen have since been stripped down to masonry and pale brick. To my mind the dependability he attributed to the basilica (I felt it too) came from the fact that here brick and stone kept their promises of tranquillity and peace, as they could not in the surrounding streets. The long rhythms of the eleven-bay nave, barrel arched above, repeated the assurance of serenity.

In the time I’d slipped into St Sernin, however, early on a Saturday morning, and returned again to daylight, a massive ‘antiques’ market had gathered around the church, pressing in on it the way hungry children surround a tourist. The pilgrimage church’s quintet of radiating chapels, blooming in semi-circles at its eastern end, now radiated a makeshift architecture of their own: folding tables strewn with disorganized cast-offs, two aisles deep. This wide flounce of price-tagged junk actually extended all the way around the church.

‘Watch for pickpockets,’ shouted an elderly British tourist, inches from her husband’s ear. I took my rucksack off my back and wore it on my chest.

No one so much as glanced up at St Sernin; we were all hypnotized by the pretty rubbish of the century just passed. Mass-produced African sculptures; broken Portuguese pottery; detective paperbacks in French and English; used cassette tapes; a collection of doorknobs. There was even a white cast-iron kitchen sink. I had a friend who used to joke whenever he bought some bauble or other that he was part bower bird, a species inclined to build its nest out of glittery, shiny scraps. This was a bower bird’s dream-come-true.

I tried, but even with binoculars I couldn’t get close enough to the south portal to make out a capital of Adam and Eve’s expulsion; had I not carried Lucy’s photograph, I would never have glimpsed the pair’s rather proud demeanour – curious in the circumstances – caught in Lucy’s sunlit image, or their giant hands haughtily covering private parts.

After an African gentleman tried to buy my binoculars I gave up on the church and attempted to strike a bargain with one of the antique dealers over a copper kettle. From her journal I knew that Lucy had set off on a restorative walk in a city not too far from here, but instead had been lured into a shop selling copper utensils (‘ended by buying 21 articles for the kitchen’), so I was hoping for a nice convergence. But the woman wouldn’t budge.

The Musée Joseph Vaylet in Espalion, in the Rouergue, is St Sernin’s Saturday market enclosed, dusted, hushed, and (loosely) curated. I preferred it by far. It costs next to nothing to enter and is staffed by an elderly couple who take advantage of the time on their hands by shelling peas. Joseph Vaylet was a Rouergat worthy who fought in the First World War and lived until 1982. In the course of his long life he amassed a staggering collection of objects: a military horn used in the French army until 1840, the trumpet of which is shaped like a toothed serpent; a grape-picker’s basket designed to be worn on the head; a glass baby bottle with a glass nipple; gas masks from the Second World War, both military and civilian; a seventeenth-century gourd used for holding spirits; a photo from the Fête des Druides, 1937; a red sandstone sink; a bone from a plesiosaurus – the accompanying drawing shows a long-necked reptile like a brontosaurus, with fins – who lived on the causses for five million years, when they formed the bottom of the sea. None of these objects are for sale, of course, but it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see a fine Saturday market in the making.