Books: The Game of the Spirit

CONVERSATIONS WITH BERENSON recorded by Umberto Morra, translated by Florence Hammond. 305 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95.

“Sculpture is nothing but a trap for light.’

“Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.”

“Perforce there are limits in me, in my mind and in my character; if not, I would not exist. Limitation is the condition of existence; therefore God, who is limitless, cannot exist.”

Bernard Berenson speaking. The world remembers him as the century’s most celebrated connoisseur of Italian painting; his friends have long insisted that he was also a master of the never-quite-lost art of conversation. He called it “the game of the spirit,” and until his death in 1959, at the age of 94, he played the game in the grand manner with a happy few who were invited to I Tatti, his palatial villa in the hills above Florence.

Talk Thesaurus. One of Berenson’s frequent guests, Count Umberto Morra, had bad manners and took notes; and these notes, recorded between 1931 and 1940, have now been assembled in a book that will not soon find its equal as a thesaurus of talk.

In discussions of art, Berenson was relentlessly dazzling: “Artistic creation, in relation to its creator, is like a hernia —it has the least possible zone of communication with his actual person.” Furthermore: “We lack today, with our use of cement, any sense of resistance of material; and where the material does not resist there is no longer any art. Cement is like cardboard, giving way in any direction, and adaptable to every use. Art should break the bonds of material.”

In general remarks he was often acute. “Wanting to rationalize Catholic dogma is like wanting to derationalize mathematics.” But sometimes homely: “The English have established the law of dressing in the evening as an excellent revenge on everyday reality. That quarter of an hour which each man spends at his own toilet separates all annoyances, business, and worries from the evening.”

Wise Guy. Berenson’s anecdotes were always redoubtable, included the familiar Wilde story: “Having very clearly failed to meet some commitment, Oscar telegraphed: T cannot come. Lie follows.’ ” His aphorisms were provocative. “The first in a flock is still a sheep.”

And his gossip was inspired. “I came to know Proust during the War: dirty, untidy, with a voice like a peacock. His conversations were like his letters, interminable explanations of why he could not stay longer. He had an absolutely oily timidity, and made a great show of aplomb which was entirely secondhand.”

Many of the passages in this book, it would seem, were spoken by an aging wise guy; many others by an old wise man. “There are human relationships which make one think of an hourglass; one single extreme point of contact, a point through which barely a thread passes. Often sexual relationships are like this: take away that point and there is nothing else, nothing human, in common.” And again: “I don’t want clear or definite opinions in which no surprise awaits me. I like to be the midwife of confused and painful opinions which are struggling to reach the light of day and in which one feels effort and pains. Between the truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second.”