A QUEST TO SEE ALL OF BRUEGEL
No sports car for Toby Ferris. Facing midlife, the author is on a quest to see all the artist’s authentic panels
Short Life in a Strange World Birth to Death in 42 Panels Toby Ferris Harper: 326 pages; $32.50
Toby Ferris opens his first book, “Short Life in a Strange World: Birth to Death in 42 Panels,” with a young man falling: a friend of a friend plummets in a paragliding accident. He survives, but something in Ferris is dislodged. “As I recall it,” he writes, “the hillside shook, but perhaps it didn’t; perhaps it was just an interior thud I felt.” A similar ambiguity motivates this work.
Ferris is writing from the middle of his life, what Dante referred to as “a forest dark,” in which “the straightforward pathway had been lost.” At 42, having recently lost his father, parent himself to two young sons, he seeks to root himself. He finds a guide of sorts (his Virgil?) in Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the 16th century Flemish artist who left 42 authenticated paintings. Determined to visit all of them, the author embarks on the book’s central quest.
That Ferris has never given Bruegel much thought is one of the points of the book and also one of its difficulties. Is this art criticism or travelogue? Is it a memoir or something more undefined? I am drawn to such work, which blurs the boundaries, eschewing traditional categories or creating its own. And yet I can’t decide, exactly, if the book is successful. Not unlike Icarus, or that plunging paraglider, it can be graceful, transcendent even, until its equilibrium drops away.
“Short Life in a Strange World” is not without antecedents; I think of Rebecca Mead’s “The Road to Middlemarch” or Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.” At the same time, those texts emerge from preexisting fascinations, whereas Ferris’ intentions are more contrived.
To give himself a road map, he creates a spreadsheet he calls “the Bruegel Object,” even though it fails to encompass the most essential issues: “my ignorance of Bruegel; my ignorance of the museums in which his panels hang; my ignorance of the cities which those museums grace; and my ignorance of the impulses or affinities which have brought me to the brink of this project.”
Were Ferris more intrepid, his ignorance might function as a catalyst. Too often, though, he seems to go through the motions, cataloging the images and their history without connecting to them in any fundamental sense. In part, this has to do with his timidity. “I never dared much,” he admits, “nor aspired to dare. I never risked much. There is very little risk in these projects, certainly. There is only a long slow gliding descent through the museums of Europe and North America, safe in international space: hotel, station, airport, museum.”
It’s a disquieting admission, coming at the start of a process that will consume six years. Why undertake it? The best Ferris can offer is a def lection: “Why Bruegel?,
why all of it? and why now? are questions the spreadsheet is not designed to address.”
And yet, this deflection is revealing because what we know of Bruegel is also fragmentary. Even the provenance of some paintings is in question; the first image Ferris introduces, “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” is now considered a copy, painted on canvas rather than wood panel and dated to 30 years after the artist’s death.
In such moments, “Short Life” is at its strongest, linking what we know with what we can never know. A similar sensibility might apply to family, which Ferris explores primarily through his father, who was engaged but also absent, not least in regard to himself. “One evening,” his son tells us, “… he sat down and wrote in an enormous year diary one line: It is said that in every life there is one story. This is mine.” He never wrote another word.
For Ferris, the “deep blankness” of that diary is emblematic of the hidden depths of those we love. He finds an analogue among the paintings, many of wyehich have been sanitized across the centuries. In “The Massacre of the Innocents,” which portrays soldiers ransacking a village, a dead baby has been covered over by a bulky package. In “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent,” a corpse lies “concealed beneath a layer of brown paint.”
One effect of these discoveries is to heighten the insubstantiality of the images, their (yes) ambiguity. How are we to trust what we see when its authenticity is unclear? Ferris makes the question explicit when he writes about “The Wine of St. Martin’s Day.” Hanging at the Prado, it has recently been restored, leaving him to wonder, “What do we see now? The original, restored? Or a new confection?”
The answer is both and neither. “Perhaps underlying all of Bruegel,” Ferris conjectures, “there is a psychological hardness which is alien to us. … We look at his panels now and we see an artist of great sensibility … But it could be that we mistake his clear-sightedness for compassion.”
This is an insightful observation, returning us to the issue of conditionality. As “Short Life in a Strange World” progresses, however, it becomes increasingly schematic. We feel obligated, rushing like bad tourists from city to city, gallery to gallery, as if it were movement that was essential rather than art.
“Mostly when I come to see my Bruegels,” Ferris acknowledges, “I do not feel reverence, or joyful anticipation, or solemn resolution. I feel anxiety.” It is not the anxiety of influence but of necessity. The dislocation becomes most problematic on a final trip to Brussels to revisit “The Census at Bethlehem,” which Ferris saw at the onset of his journey. “In the end,” he writes, “I get in with fortyfive minutes to spend in the gallery before I will have to run for my train back to London. Forty-five minutes is enough.”
Doesn’t this obscure the whole idea, which is that by immersing in art, we allow ourselves for a moment to step outside time? Early in the book, after the paragliding incident, Ferris describes the phenomenon of “cloud suck,” in which gliders are pulled “tens of thousands of feet into black storm clouds” and experience “furious, volatile darkness, hailstones the size of oranges, incredible forces of updraught and precipitation.”
What he’s referring to is mystery, which is what art delivers as well. For this to happen, though, we have to lose ourselves. Or better yet: We have to fall. “As with black holes,” Ferris writes, “we examine our objects askance, by inference.” But “Short Life in a Strange World” never fully gives itself over to that impulse, which leaves its investigations discontinuous, incomplete.