The Lost World

If you subscribe to the New Yorker – as indeed you should, in these scoundrelly times, because it provides clarity and purpose, and restores some small threshold of grace to our debased coinage – you happen on unexpected rewards.  This year just past was their 100^th anniversary, and their archive yields some hauntingly authentic stuff, not least their portraits of a vanished history, a history which was everyday back then, but which can seem to us almost an archeology.  They ran one a couple of weeks ago, S.N. Behrman’s profile of the prewar art dealer Joseph Duveen, a genteel hustler with an appetite for grand gestures.

Duveen was himself a fascinating character, and he cultivated a celebrated circle of clients and contacts, John D. Rockefeller, the Armenian oil baron Calouste Gulbenkian, the émigré Russian prince Felix Youssoupoff – one of the conspirators who murdered Rasputin.  My initial interest, though, was less about the specifics, and more about the atmosphere, the climate of the rich and entitled. 

I’ve written a number of period mystery stories set in New York in the late 1940’s, featuring a leg-breaker for the Irish mob named Mickey Counihan.  (A recent Mickey story, “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” appeared in the SleuthSayers anthology Murder, Neat.)  I thought maybe art fraud, as the hook for a story – shades of Lovejoy – or hovering in the background, the cultural pretensions of American robber barons, used as leverage, in some way.  I don’t mean, by the by, that Duveen was a swindler; he had a sharp eye for art, and his taste ran ahead of his buyers, his skill was knowing how to put the right piece of art in the sight line of a guy like Rockefeller, and make it necessary for John D. to own.  In the context of a Mickey story, I was thinking more along the lines of how you might probe the weakness in a Rockefeller, would vanity get the better of him?  Could you set somebody like that up, if you put them in competition with another tycoon like J.P. Morgan, or Frick, or Mellon?  Suppose they were in a bidding war for a Fabergé egg, or a Gainsborough oil.

In other words, I didn’t know.  I had no idea how to use this, it was just floating around in the zeitgeist.  In the meantime, though, reading about Duveen, his lifestyle, his tastes, his indulgences, you get a terrific sense of this lost world, up where the steaks are thick and the air is thin.  These are not people who drink jug wine.  At the same time, for all their self-confidence, they harbor doubts, the Dürer, the Gainsborough, not so much that they might be cheated, but that they might be buying in when the fashion has already passed them by. 

This is a very interesting kind of one-upsmanship, or fear of missing out, or cultural insecurity.  You know you could do something with it.  Henry James, eat your heart out. 

As so often, it isn’t the thing itself.  It isn’t the missing drug money, or the Fabergé egg, or the fact that Rasputin just won’t stay dead, no matter the poison, or the bullet wounds, or sewing him into a bag full of rocks and dumping him in the frozen Neva.  It’s whether Prince Youssoupoff is going to keep his wits about him, or come unglued.  In other words, as Hitchcock says, the object isn’t interesting; what’s compelling is that everybody’s so invested in the object. 

I can’t tell you how this story comes out.  I can’t even tell you how it begins.  It’s no more than a whisper.  I’ll let you know when it comes in earshot.