Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 by Harry Kessler

Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 by Harry Kessler

Author:Harry Kessler
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307701480
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-15T07:00:00+00:00


Maillol and Hofmannsthal in Greece, 1908, photograph by Kessler (photo credit ill.32)

Phaleron. May 25, 1908. Monday.

I traveled in the morning to Kallithea to look for the boy and found him finally at work in the railroad repair shop. He had been afraid to come yesterday, but promised to today. After lunch he really showed up. The hotel owner had cleared a hidden, shaded corner of the garden to serve as Maillol’s studio. We set up a table, a pair of chairs, and a screen, and the boy proved to be a very intelligent model. Maillol worked with verve for a couple of hours. I took photographs for him.

Phaleron. May 29. 1908. Friday.

Maillol posed Angelos in the sea and had him pose in the water, which barely reached up to his knees. As soon as the boy had undressed in the bright sun on the beach, his enthusiasm was as great as on the first day. “It’s here where I should have done the statue. If I return (he’s thinking seriously of returning here because of the many beautiful nudes whom you see every day on the beach and who can be engaged as models), if I return, I will have to have some poses in the sea.” He made a dozen drawings in different poses before the boy became cold, then he packed up.

Naples. June 3, 1908. Wednesday.

Arrived in the morning. I brought him [Maillol] back to the ship, where we took our leave. Returning, the coachman said that must have been a ship’s captain whom I had brought. He looks in fact like an old seaman.

So ends our trip. Not too early, for over the long run his companionship isn’t easy. He is too much the peasant and too narrow-minded. Conversation with him is impossible. He states his point of view and finds everything that deviates from it “stupid.” His views are often on the mark and usually amusing and picturesque, but the inability to add anything except a flat “yes” is unbearably tiresome after a while. As soon as someone utters something that he dislikes in some way, he doesn’t bother trying to understand, he rejects it curtly without further discussion. So he rejects any discussion, any conversation about a point that he doesn’t see, and indeed almost always impolitely. Even his remarks on literature, on worldviews, yes, even on the beauty of a landscape, are absolute; he tolerates not the slightest contradiction. As soon as you say something that could start a discussion, or a conversation, he says, “Well, I, I see it this way,” and with that, basta. He has no intellectual flexibility. He sees things quite rigidly, from one point of view, and doesn’t recognize his own views when you show them to him from another standpoint. It’s as if he has a secret feeling of being weak, uneducated, and wants to deafen this by an overabundance of certainty.

The peasant comes out in his manners as well. He eats with his fingers and spits here and there fish bones and the like on the carpet.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.