West Pointer with a Brush

THE MAN WHISTLER (276 pp.)--Hesketh Pearson--Harper ($3.75).

In a West Point chemistry class one day in 1854, Cadet James Abbot Whistler was asked to discuss silicon. He began: "Silicon is a gas." "That will do, Mr. Whistler," said the professor--and shortly thereafter Cadet Whistler was handed his discharge papers. In later years, when he had made himself one of the finest painters of his day, he liked to say: "If silicon had been a gas, I would have been a general."

The episode foreshadowed more than a bon mot. When Whistler died (in 1903), his famed Mother was almost the only solid which he had not defined gaseously. Like rebellious painters of every era, he believed that his contemporaries never painted what they saw--only what professors had bullied them into believing they saw. In Whistler's magical eyes, all natural objects appeared to be misty, intangible "arrangements," "harmonies" and "symphonies" constructed of overlapping tones of light & shade--which may be why he crept up on an artist absorbed in painting a stone-for-stone facsimile of St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice and chalked on his back in large letters: "l AM TOTALLY BLIND."

Correcting Nature. Author Hesketh Pearson has proved his skill as an anecdotal biographer before this, e.g., in G.B.S., Disraeli, Dickens, Oscar Wilde. In The Man, Whistler, he does a similarly deft job on an expatriate Yankee who was not only the most uncrushable wit of his day but an artist who believed he existed to correct and perfect Nature itself.

One of Whistler's first corrections concerned his registered birthplace, Lowell, Mass. "I shall be born when and where I want," said Whistler, "and I do not choose to be born at Lowell." He was not averse to Baltimore, or even St. Petersburg, where his father had lived when building railroads for Czar Nicholas I, and occasionally accepted one of them as his birthplace.

Having next revised his name (dropping "Abbot" as gloomy and substituting his mother's name McNeill), he went to work on his character. He decided to be a West Point-trained officer & gentleman, and though his difficulties with chemistry brought his military career to a sudden halt, he kept what he regarded as his military manners to the end. Moreover, he held that the rudeness of Englishmen (amongst whom he spent most of his life) was in no way a result of his rudeness to them but simply a consequence of their not having had the advantage of a West Point training.

Courtly Bows. Whistler's professional "mission" was "revealing the Thames to the people who lived on it but had previously only seen it as a stretch of water." His avocation was what he called "the gentle art of making enemies." A lady who asked him if he thought a certain sketch indecent was told, "No, madam, but your question is." When one of his students who had painted a "red elbow with green shadows" argued, "I am sure I just paint what I see," the Master answered, "Ah, but the shock will come when you see what you paint."

His Sunday breakfasts were famous in Chelsea. Guests sat on packing-cases (Whistler rarely unpacked) and the Master served up buckwheat cakes and molasses. Sunday was also the day when he conducted his mother to the Chelsea parish church, leaving her at the door with a courtly bow. When friends said that they found it hard to believe that he had a mother, he answered: "Yes, indeed I have a mother, and a very pretty bit of color she is." Author Pearson does not say what Whistler's mother thought of her son's illegitimate children (he had two) and multitudinous mistresses, but he mentions that out of deference to the old lady, Whistler tried not to paint on Sunday.

Preacher to the End. "There never was," Whistler declared, "an artistic period. There never was an art-loving nation." This meant, as Whistler saw it, that the artist might fight the Philistine with every available weapon. He was convinced, for example, that even after a painting was sold, it remained the property of the painter, and his purchasers much resented his habit of demanding his paintings returned to him.

As he grew older, his wit became crude as well as spiteful, his endless libel suits and squabbles a bore to his friends. His wealth and fame only made him bitter, when he looked back on the hard times which had preceded them. He never gave up his favorite role of preaching the "truth" of life and art to the world at large--and at the end the world at large became tired of listening.

In his last court case, after everyone else had spouted endlessly in the witness box, Whistler himself entered it, "deliberately placed his hat on the rail . . . leisurely pulled off his gloves, carefully adjusted his monocle" and said to the judge, "And now, my lord, may I tell you why we are all here?" To which his lordship replied with gentle finality: "No, Mr. Whistler. We are all here because we cannot help it."

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