Deep in the Heart

ELISABET NEY--Jon Fortune and Jean Burton--Knopf ($3).

Eccentrics, if handled with tenderness and humor, make glorious copy for a biographer. They are encumbered with outsize versions of human desires and disillusionments. One of the best living purveyors of eccentrics is Jean Burton of Berkeley, Calif. She proved it in her biography of her bristling collateral ancestor Richard and his devoted wife (Sir Richard Burton's Wife--TIME, June 23, 1941), proves it again (with Texan Jan Fortune) in a study of Elisabet Ney.

Elisabet was a grandniece of that intrepid Marshal of Napoleon who led a premature charge at Waterloo and who was known as the Bravest of the Brave. Elisabet herself never did anything but charge, always prematurely. If she was not brave it is because that virtue cannot be ascribed to anyone who has never suspected the existence of fear. She was tall, milk-fleshed, redhaired, chokingly beautiful. She was--she thought--an intense idealist.

She was certainly one of the most spectacularly feminine of feminists, leaving such things as bloomers and cigars to the merely high-minded. One of the first sculptresses on record, she had a vigorous if minor talent. She also designed her own startling clothes; all her life she looked like the prizewinner at a masquerade. By the time she was in her middle 205 she was the good friend of Humboldt and Schopenhauer. By the time she was in her middle 305 she had modeled these two, as well as Garibaldi, George V of Hanover, Victoria of England, Ludwig II of Bavaria and platoons of chemists and literary men. At the crest of her fame and beauty, she left Europe, spent the rest of her long life in Texas. There she was, if anything, more fantastic.

Elisabet was sustained by an appealing cast of minor eccentrics. She would never admit that she had married Edmund Montgomery, bastard of a Scottish baron, lifelong searcher for the mainspring of life in the pullulations of protoplasm. All his life he called her "Miss Ney." In his silence, his patience, his courage, his poetic nobility, he emerges as almost a saint. Crescentia ("Cencie") Simath, the maidservant, was apparently paralyzed with love for Edmund and endured, if possible, even more than he did. Lorne, the son, was a tragic, horrifying product of idealism crossed with rampant mother love.

"Ath." Elisabet used her beauty to shoehorn her way into art classes (strictly stag, up to then) and to blast men's balance. Perhaps her greatest conquest was Germany's ace misogynist, atrabilious old Arthur Schopenhauer. By the time she had worked on him a week he was babbling utter fatuities. "By God," he gloated, "I almost feel like a married man!" When Elisabet reminded him that, once his polysyllabic frock coat was stripped off, his animadversions against women were those of any Junker or farm hand, all he could manage was to blame it on his mother--a sensible old lady who refused to live with him.

When Elisabet was leaving his home she wanted Schopenhauer's picture as a keepsake. He detested photographers. At the studio he set himself, dourly, as Schopenhauer, The Pessimist. He was asked to smile, and looked even more like a German philosopher's impersonation of a Japanese war mask. Elisabet got him goofily drunk and thus got one of the few Schopenhauer smiles on record. When her bust of him was finished he was grieved to find that, for lack of space, Elisabet had carved under it simply "Ath. Schopenhauer." She replied that one could make only certain changes. He had to settle for Arth.

"Hell Hole of Texas." She left Europe because she was pregnant. It was the most horrible thing that had ever happened to her, and she had to hide it from her world. She and Edmund and Cencie went to Georgia with some gently bred Bavarian aristocrats, founded a cooperative, Four-ieristic "phalanx" which went to pieces in the heartache of optimistic, bewildered German romanticism. Before the Utopia collapsed, Elisabet bore two sons, as much in fury as in pain--and became one of the most anguishedly possessive mothers in history.

The family moved, in 1873, to Texas. They bought, for $10,000, the best that the U.S. could substitute for a Castle of Otranto--the huge, ravaged plantation Li-endo, whose monstrous rooms they could not even furnish and whose fields dis solved swiftly, under their care, into wil derness. Hempstead, the nearest town, was "admiringly known in the '70s as the Hell Hole of Texas." Edmund shut him self in his laboratory, almost never came out. The elder son (named after Schopen hauer) sickened and died. Elisabet modeled his body, poured kerosene over it, and burned it in the fireplace. "The Greeks had cremated their dead kings, she said strangely, when they fell on foreign soil." The Negroes told it around. Liendo became a show place -- at a safe distance.

Often, along back-country roads, natives would step aside for a heavily veiled woman with grey-red hair, who thundered past at a mad gallop, a brace of six-shooters at her hips, a dirk in her belt, her Grecian robe flying.

Rough Riding. The second son, Lorne, fared worse than his brother -- if possible. His mother dressed and barbered him like a Fauntleroy and, "with a sort of inverted morality," never admitted even to him that he was a legitimate child. In time the poor child got a Grecian robe like his mother's. When he expostulated, she ranted ferociously about the glory of freedom.

After Lorne beat up three tutors, his father emerged from the laboratory to say that it was high time the boy was sent off to school. Elisabet never forgave Edmund. From that night forth she locked her bedroom door and Cencie slept across the threshold. Lorne went to Swarthmore and to Germany, became a waiter in Spain, at last returned. He was a brilliant, and a brilliantly handsome, pathologically overmasculine young man, his mind sprained into hatred for everything, bad or good, which his mother represented. He became the county Lothario, ran through three wives and six children, fought with Roosevelt's Rough Riders.

Elisabet moved to a Grecian-style studio in Austin, where she slept in a hammock and tried to show her Indian servant how to handle a canoe. Edmund, forced now to take a hand with the plantation, became president of the Melon Growers' Association and one of the truly fine Texans of his generation. Elisabet too, as her life wore on, was accorded the proud indulgence which is often, after years of hardheartedness, given the local genius.

Elisabet died in 1907. Edmund followed her four years later. Lorne died in 1913. He had wanted to be buried as a soldier, and later that year his body was moved "to Arlington National Cemetery, Spanish-American War Section." Edmund Montgomery's fine library went, after 20 years' decay, to Southern Methodist University. The books which were his lifelong, semi-religious, poetic contest with Darwin on cell structure, and which anticipated Bergson and Whitehead, still have some use. S.M.U. "conducts a course on the science and philosophy of Dr. Montgomery, using his books as texts."

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