The Last Command: Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn, by Kirk Stirnweis (2001)

The dramatic defeat of Gen. George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876 has been the subject of several paintings by major artists.  But for today, I thought we would take a look at a work by the relatively little-known, working artist Kirk Stirnweis (born 1967), The Last Command: Custer and the 7^th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn.

Stirnweis was born in Suffern, New York, and grew up in Connecticut. He would eventually move with his own family to Montana, Arizona, and then back east to New Hampshire; while keeping a foothold in Loveland, Colorado.  His father was a professional illustrator, and his mother had a background in graphics.  He drew constantly as a child, and his family would often discuss art around the home.

During his high school summers, Stirnweis would draw and paint at the nearby Silvermine Artist Guild. During the same period he studied anatomy with a retired surgeon, taking one of the doctor’s first classes working with professional artists. Stirnweis was taught to master composition by copying the works of the Great Masters, and was encouraged to go into illustration to hone his skills to a professional level.

Kirk was educated at several different schools studying marine biology and medicine, holding degrees in radiologic sciences and Medical imaging. But his scientific studies did not keep him from art: immediately after high school he did illustration for Field& Stream, Harlequin Romance Novels and Leisure Books, and the Danbury Mint. 

Stirnweis says, For the past 20 years I have been painting and sculpting western/historical subjects, mostly Native Americans, mountain men, prairie women, land and seascapes nautical subjects and wildlife of all kinds. Out of the blue I was commissioned to paint Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Big Horn; a daunting task. To complicate matters I had virtually no knowledge of U.S. cavalry at the time and only scant knowledge of the battle. After months of intensive research, hours spent with experts on the subject and several visits to the battlefield; I started painting. Three months later I completed The Last Command. The homework was exhaustive but well worth it, the painting had reaped the distinction of being written up by a West Point graduate and historian as: “The most accurate depiction of the Custer Battle EVER!” An enlarged Copy of the painting now hangs in the renovated Museum of Military History in KS. Subsequently, I was invited to the 125th anniversary of the Little Big Horn Battle, where I met with Native American Veterans of Foreign Wars and Chiefs of the Crow Nation. They expressed their appreciation for the noble way that I depict their culture in my paintings and sculpture.

This is quite a dramatic painting, despite some rather telling flaws.  While Stirnweis has a great gift for painting dramatic faces, the figures all seem to inhabit different pictures, rather than act as an integrated group.  Indeed, in some figures, it seems as if they have no lower body whatsoever.  (Where is the rest of the bugler and his horse?)  Also under-realized are the two fallen horses, one on the left and the other, right.  Neither seem to fully inhabit the picture, and it looks like Stirnweis relied too heavily on tall grass to address issues of foreshortening.

But Stirnweis’ failings are solely those of technique: in terms of drama and composition, he performs admirably.  The gentle rise of the mountain allows the eye to read the frame from the fighters on the left, through the main action on the rise, and then scan back left (to the beginning) by following the trajectory of the arrows.  Stirnweis also uses the empty bask spaces of the West to heightened effect:  aside from another regiment battling in the distance, these men are alone and vulnerable.

Stirnweis also amps the drama by depicting many of the men already wounded or injured, but continuing to fight on.  The look of steely determination on the faces of the small knot of five men dead center of the picture tells the entire story. 

This is an admirable addition to the iconography of Little Bighorn.

Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, by T. J. Stiles (2015)

A fabulous book.

Many of us think we know George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) because we know how he died: at the battle of Little Bighorn, he and his men slaughtered by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors.  Most people see Custer’s end as a cautionary tale: one of hubris, or racism, or simple tragic miscalculation.  But Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles believes that this end-is-the-beginning approach is overly reductive.  In fact, the only way to make sense of Custer, he thinks, is to embrace the totality of his experience, and to understand how he was both a player and observer in a changing America.

Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America argues that Americans saw their world radically remade during Custer’s lifetime.  Custer’s life is the story of the American Civil War, the Westward expansion, and the Indian Wars.  Through it all, Custer was a study in contradictions as he struggled to find foothold in an earth that was ever-changing beneath him.  He was a brave Union solider who sympathized with the South.  He freed countless slaves, but was openly hostile towards people of color.  He was a dutiful and obedient soldier, but he also suffered from a crippling vanity and need for acclaim.  He behaved with reckless abandon and considerable courage on the battlefield, but it is unlikely that he ever fully internalized war’s catastrophic human cost.

Because of these contradictions, historians (and armchair philosophers) have had their way with Custer for decades.  Stiles argues that Custer has been left to be misremembered by each succeeding generation.  Because he is so contradictory a figure, he very much symbolizes to people what they like or dislike about American history.  Is he a hero who died to spread Western civilization, or a murdering racist who targeted Native Americans?  Is he representative of the heroism and valor that is part of the American character, or is he a bully and braggart?

Stiles believes that asking these questions is a losing game:  Custer does not need to bear the full weight of American history, and that his life has significant meaning outside of the narratives told by defenders or debunkers. 

In reading this long and well-argued book, I’ve come away somewhat surprised by how much I liked Custer.   There were many, many things detestable about the man by 21^st Century lights, but to condemn (or praise) figures of the past by the dictums of today is ridiculous.  Historical figures need to be seen in historical context, and to do otherwise would make as much sense as a Venusian judging a rural American through his interstellar worldview.  The differing points of reference are so vast as to render the exercise meaningless.

Custer was profoundly needy, troubled by self-doubt, and always hoping to improve himself.  Last in his class at West Point (a position routinely called ‘the goat’), Custer wanted to live up to his romantic ideals of military life.  His romantic ideals are not to be sneered at: they often translated into bravery in battle, magnanimity to captured enemies, and selfless protection of others.  One of the most telling stories in the book is Custer demanding a litter to take a wounded comrade away during a retreat – while his brother soldiers opted to leave the man behind.

Custer was not a bogeyman or devil nor an angel or a demigod; he was simply a man, with all of the qualities and flaws attendant to that designation.  And in reading this excellent book, Stiles allows us to know that man a little better.

Best of all, Stiles tells his tale with a novelist’s dash.  Here is a representative passage: She emerged into a clearing and encountered mayhem.  Custer’s brigade fought amid a sea of enemy soldiers – bullets cracking overhead, artillery shells exploding, mounted Confederates charging here and there with sabers swinging.  The wagon master approached Custer and asked if he could lead the wagon train to the rear.  Custer looked around and said, “Where in hell is the rear?”

This book is highly recommended to students of Custer, the Civil War, or simply American history.

Education of a Wandering Man, A Memoir by Louis L’Amour (1989)

We recently reviewed a graphic novel based on the work of Louis L’Amour (1908-1988), and we have certainly read many of his novels in the past.  But … we knew precious little about the man himself.  So, it was a delight to come across his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, revised and published in 1989.  It is a remarkable book.

It puts us in mind of the old Chinese legend about tests: the student sits down and simply writes down everything he knows.  L’Amour doesn’t quite do that, but he does create a fascinating account of his own intellectual development, and his deep and passionate engagement with reading.  If you are at all interested in the effect that reading has, and what a tool it can be to enlightenment, then certainly read this fascinating book.

L’Amour’s engagement with reading in his early life is not surprising when one looks at his major characters.  The typical L'Amour hero was a strapping young man in his late teens or early 20's, a romantic, nomadic figure dedicated to self-improvement. His character Tell Sackett carried law books in his saddlebags; Bendigo Shafter read Montaigne, Plutarch and Thoreau; and Drake Morrel, a one-time riverboat gambler, read Juvenal in the original Latin. 

Much like L’Amour, himself.

L’Amour looked like one of his own literary creations – big, ruggedly handsome and self-contained.  He was born Louis Dearborn L'Amour on March 22, 1908, in Jamestown, ND. He was a son of a veterinarian who doubled as a farm-machinery salesman, grandson of a Civil War veteran and great-grandson of a settler who had been scalped by Sioux warriors.

He quit school at 15, roaming the West working as a miner, rancher and lumberjack before taking off for the Far East as a seaman. By the time he was 20, he had skinned cattle in Texas, lived with bandits in Tibet and worked on an East African schooner.  He managed to survive a walk through Death Valley on his own with little water, and rode the rails as a hobo.  He worked as a longshoreman, a lumberjack, an elephant handler, a fruit picker and an officer on a tank destroyer in World War II. He had also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, been shipwrecked in the West Indies and been stranded in the Mojave Desert, and won 51 of 59 fights as a professional boxer.  And all the time he was on the road, he was reading: Shakespeare, Byron, Wilde, Ibsen, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Sheridan, Bacon, Tolstoy … and many, many others too numerous to mention.  L’Amour provides his reading list during the period at the end of the book and, frankly, it made me deeply ashamed of my own profound failings as a reader.

I read Balzac, Victor Hugo and Dumas before I ever read Zane Grey, he said in an interview.  His first book was not a Western, but a collection of poems, published in 1939.  But despite his immense erudition, L’Amour could not reconcile the disdain the literary elite had (and has) for novels about the Western experience.  If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel.  If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.

Here is L’Amour writing about talking to people of the Old West during his wanderings in the 1930s:  Yet there was no better time to learn about what the West had actually been.  Many of those who lived it were still alive, and as the years of their future grew fewer, they were more willing to talk of what had been.  Old feuds were largely forgotten, and time had given the past an aura.

The old cowboy might appear to be as dry as dust, he might scoff at some of the stories, but he was a figure of romance in his own mind (although he would never have admitted it) or he would not have become a cowboy in the first place.  As the years slipped away, he began to want to tell his stories, and I was often there, a willing listener, knowing enough to sift the truth from the romance.

In every town there was at least one former outlaw or gunfighter, an old Indian scout or a wagon master, and each with many stories ready to tell.

One story engendered another, and sitting on a bench in front of a store I’d tell of something I knew or had heard and would often get a story in return, sometimes a correction.  The men and woman who lived the pioneer life did not suddenly disappear; they drifted down the years, a rugged, proud people who had met adversity and survived.  Once, many years later, I was asked in a television interview what was the one quality that distinguished them, and I did not come up with the answer I wanted.  Later, when I in the hotel alone, it came to me.

Dignity.

This is great stuff, one step removed from prose poetry.  We here at the Jade Sphinx (having recently moved our own library from the East to West Coast), sympathize with L’Amour’s acute bibliomania:  A wanderer I had been through most of my early years, and now that I had my own home, my wandering continued, but among books.  No longer could I find most of the books I wanted in libraries.  I had to seek them out in foreign or secondhand bookstores, which was a pleasure in itself.  When seeking books, one always comes upon unexpected treasures or books on subjects that one has never heard of, or heard mentioned only in passing.

Now I know what I wished to learn and could direct my education with more intelligence.

Slowly I began to place on my shelves the books I wanted.  When the shelves were first installed, one workman doubted they would ever be filled, yet a few years later they were crammed with books, filling every available niche.

What I find most refreshing here is L’Amour’s own determination to educate himself, his active engagement with his own intellectual development, and for the breadth of his knowledge.  Here is a wonderfully prescient passage: If we had only Greenwich Village as an example, it would tell us nothing of the rest of America, yet often one discovers a writer, or several of them, giving just such a narrow picture.  One should tread warily when using the life-style of any group as an example of the thinking or practice of a people.

This is a warm, wise and essential book.  Highly recommended.

The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes, by Zack Dundas (2015)

Few figures have loomed across the cultural landscape more largely – more constantly – than Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant consulting detective of 221B Baker Street.  From his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet (1887) until today, his cultural currency has been remarkable.

The profile, deerstalker cap (not really part of the original canon), the curved pipe (ditto), and ever-present “elementary, my dear Watson” (ditto-ditto-ditto), are recognizable the world over.  “Sherlock Holmes” has become shorthand for many things, from “detective” to “intellectual” to “smart ass.”  He is the first fictional character to inspire a slavish fandom, predating such masscult figures as Dracula, Superman and Harry Potter.  Now, 129 years after his initial appearance, Sherlock Holmes is the lead character in one American television series, one (infinitely superior) UK series, and a string of (negligible) international blockbuster adventure flicks.  And I have the sneaking suspicion that he’s only just starting…

Novelist-physician-adventurer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) wrote the first Holmes novel in just three weeks at the tender age of 27.  The initial book was well-received in the UK and did fair business; American audiences, however, ate it up, and made the novel a great success.  Doyle followed it with an even better book three years later, The Sign of Four, and literary detective fiction has never been the same since.

Many of us (Your Correspondent included) first find Holmes in our adolescence.  For the vast majority, Holmes is a milestone passed on the way to greater, broader reading.  But for many, Sherlock Holmes becomes a defining figure in the cultivation of the self, a guidepost to a life of the mind, intellectual acquisition, and moral conundrums.  One of my dearest friends, the New York-based Sherlockian Susan Rice – a woman of remarkable intellectual attainments, generous instincts, expansive humanity and great good humor – credits all the many good things that have come to her in life thanks to her association with Mr. Holmes.  I could think of no higher accolade for a work of art.

In The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes, Portland-based writer Zach Dundas tries to capture the immensity of the impact Conan Doyle’s creation has had upon the culture, and upon the many individuals who actively take part in the Sherlockian experience.  And while he does not quite succeed in his expansive brief, he provides a journey that is engaging, amusing and informed.

For Dundas, the beginning and end of all essential knowledge about Holmes can be found in the four novels and fifty-six short stories by Doyle.  But, he also believes that Holmes is a never-ending work-in-progress, a cultural and imaginative construct that is revised and refitted to meet the needs of succeeding generations.  There has been no shortage of Sherlock Holmes pastiche since nearly the beginning (Doyle actually read some knock-off stories written by both fans and celebrated professionals, like J. M. Barrie), and all of this material has built the decades-long conversation we have had with Holmes. 

Dundas first got the bug while a young man, starting his own Sherlock Holmes society and exchanging letters with other young fans around the world.  He later returned to Holmes, attending the Baker Street Irregulars annual dinner in New York, chatting with people in the Holmes societies around the country, and even tracing the great man’s footsteps throughout London and the English countryside.

Through it all, Dundas returns to what it all means to him – the individual stories and novels, the fandom, the experience of immersion in the Sherlockian world.  There are few efforts to put the Sherlockian phenomena in a larger context, but within the realm of personal experience, his anecdotes sparkle.

He is also laugh-out-loud funny.  Here is a footnote about Jude Law (the recent big screen Watson): Law makes a terrific Watson, whatever one thinks of the movies.  (I enjoy them in the same I enjoy cotton candy, roller derby, and dubious pop music.)  Or, better still, the end of a longish footnote on following Sherlockian leads on YouTube: This can lead, algorithmically, to the hour-long English language cartoon version of Hound from 1983 (with an incredibly fat Watson), not to mention a funky fan-made remix of clips from the splendid 1981 Soviet film adaptation.  Be careful.  You can do this all day. 

Writing about his early infatuation with the tales, and the worlds they opened up for him, Dundas says, I had arrived too late, doomed to be part of a generation clad in oversized Quicksilver T-shirts and sweatpants, fated to live behind a chain-link fence.  A gasogene?  A tantalus?  New Coke had just come out.

Dundas is perhaps at his best detailing the explosion of Sherlockian fandom in the wake of the BBC’s popular Sherlock series.  Historically, Sherlock Holmes devotees have been remarkably different from, say, science fiction buffs or Tolkien geeks or those sad people who obsess over Dark Shadows.  Once a high-camp joke shared largely by New York’s literary elite, Sherlock Holmes fandom has become remarkable inclusive.  It has gone from upmarket game to masscult fandom.  This once all-male preserve has successfully been mined by women (starting with the organization The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, begun by Evelyn Herzog with a cadre of brilliant college-age women in the 1960s who may be ultimately responsible for keeping the movement alive at all), and now includes people who know only the films, or the various television shows … or the contemporary novels featuring an elderly, married (?) Sherlock Holmes.  This seismic shift has shaken some longtime Sherlockians to the core, and Dundas makes hay with various ‘scandals’ in the Sherlockian world. 

Dundas has written a book that is alternately discursive and solipsistic, as well as endlessly funny and often insightful.  However, it is also ultimately a little … thin. He presents us with all the materials necessary to create a fascinating mosaic, but ultimately fails to be them into a beguiling sequence.  I kept waiting for the defining moment, the passage that put it all – Holmes the man, the friendship with Watson, Doyle, the devoted fandom, the nearly unending fascination with this character – into some kind of final context, and was left wanting.  Dundas has no cohesive argument; he just has stuff.

Perhaps the problem isn’t that twelve decades of Sherlock Holmes is enough Sherlock Holmes, but that the saga is really only just beginning.  That it is too early in the creation of the Sherlock Holmes myth to put it into any type of perspective.  There are many literary creations that were as large a presence as Holmes that have fallen by the wayside (think Tarzan or Buck Rogers or Fu Manchu and, to an extent, James Bond); but Holmes has outlasted all of them with a vengeance.

I recall thinking that, while reading the recent novel about an elderly Holmes facing dementia, A Slight Trick of the Mind, that Holmes will continue to resonate.  Not only resonate, but actually be the lynchpin for champion literary novels in the future. 

Perhaps the story of Sherlock cannot yet be told because it’s only just begun.  Maybe … the game is afoot.

These Three, Starring Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea (1936); Part of The Joel McCrea Blogathon

We are delighted to participate in Toby Roan’s Joel McCrea blogathon.  Toby is the mastermind behind the always-delightful 50 Westerns From the 50s blog (see link to your right), and Western lovers – and you know who you are – should visit regularly.

Joel McCrea (1905-1990) has long been one of our favorite actors.  He was equally terrific in comedies, dramas, love stories and westerns.  It would be hard to select a single McCrea performance as his definitive role, as it is really the body of his work that is most impressive.  Some actors – Clark Gable, Gary Cooper or Humphrey Bogart come to mind – often play extensions of themselves.  Their screen personas are so clearly delineated that they all play within the confines of their screen characters.

But McCrea’s art was more subtle.  It’s not that he always played himself so much as he always played … us.  One of the great (and certainly the most missed) inventions of the mid-20^th century was the idea of the American Everyman.  Sometimes comedic, sometimes crusading, always savvy, unfailingly honest and always representative of the best in ourselves, the American Everyman was an idealization that did not strain the truth.  This is how Americans once saw themselves, and few actors better exemplified the American Everyman, with all his flaws and virtues, better than McCrea.  We didn’t want to be him, but, on our best days, we were him.

It’s not surprising that McCrea would eventually morph into a western specialist.  The West is the defining American myth, and McCrea was our surrogate in that world.  Whether opposing outlaws, crooked business interests, Washington fat cats or homicidal Indians, McCrea met the challenges of the West with honesty, integrity and modesty.  McCrea was the natural choice to play many of the great figures of the West, Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill Cody among them, because we would like to see these great figures much like we like to see ourselves.  He made them real by making them like us.

It is too easy to forget how terrific an actor he could be when rising to a challenge. There are two versions of Lillian Hellman’s (1905-1984) 1934 play, The Children’s Hour, and the 1936 version, called These Three and staring McCrea and directed by William Wyler (1902-1981), is easily the best.

Wyler would remake the film himself in 1961, with James Garner (1928-2014) in the McCrea role.  Because the play deals with two women teachers who find their lives ruined when a little girl accuses them of a lesbian relationship, one imagines that the later film would be superior, if for no other reason than Wyler could openly address the scandal.  However, that is not the case:  Wyler’s handling of the situation in 1936 actually has great emotional resonance and honesty.  His 1961 film is so over-the-top in its hysteria, that it lurches into melodrama, and then camp.

With his 1936 cast, Wyler had to change the story to fit the Hays Code: here, a little girl (the magnificent Bonita Granville – justifiably Oscar nominated) ruins the lives of teachers Merle Oberon (1911-1979) and Miriam Hopkins (1902-1972) by starting the rumor that the women are involved in a ménage à trois with local doctor, McCrea.  As a result, their school is ruined and they are later financially crushed when they unsuccessfully sue for libel.

McCrea – quietly heroic, rankling at injustice and eager to set things right – stands by both women.  It’s not that McCrea has any showy scene or overly dramatic monolog: no, it’s his presence.  Here once again McCrea is our surrogate, doing his best in an unwinnable situation … much as we hope we would behave ourselves.  In the later film, Garner (usually a more subtle actor) broadcasts at high volume his integrity and decency, becoming a cartoon.  McCrea just … is, the perfect friend and protector that we would want to be.

Amazingly, Wyler wanted to replace McCrea with Leslie Howard (1893-1943), which would have been a catastrophe.  A terrific actor (in fact, a better actor than McCrea), Howard would have played his helplessness in the situation, providing only dignified weakness, much like his turn in Gone With the Wind (1939).  The friction between Wyler and McCrea is not evident, and one wonders if he changed his mind after the finished film. 

One final note – the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves reflect our points of view and how we interact with the world.  That sense of a national identity – and American Everyman – is impossible in our currently fractured state.  Wouldn’t we be better off if we had a presence like Joel McCrea … who reflected the best impression of ourselves? 

One cannot help but think that we need a hero, not a figure in tights with superpowers, but one who embodies the best qualities in Americans as a people.  I, for one, would certainly welcome the return of more actors like Joel McCrea.

Hector Reproaching Paris, by Pierre Claude Francois Delorme (1824)

We close our brief visit with painter Pierre Claude Francois Delorme (1783-1859) with his 1824 picture, Hector Reproaching Paris, which now resides in the Amiens Museum.

Your Correspondent must confess to never having seen this picture in person, and the photographic representations I’ve been able to find online are not great.  But, it is so interesting that I couldn’t let our look at Delorme pass without a few thoughts on it.

We had written about the very formal Neoclassical Empire style, and how Delorme seemed to separate himself from that tradition a bit, thanks to the influence of his love for Italian Renaissance painters such as Michelangelo and Raphael.  This picture here, with its rigid formalism and tableaux-like staging, is more in line with the style of Delorme’s time, but he still manages to incorporate some Renaissance-Mannerist thinking.

Those who remember their Iliad, recall that the whole disaster was predicated on Paris falling in love with, and taking away, the beautiful Helen of Troy.  Her defection leads to a cataclysmic war, one that takes the life of Paris’ brother, Hector, who is killed at the hand of Achilles.

Delorme’s picture illustrates the scene where Hector breaks into the lovers’ apartments to call Paris to war.  (In the text, Paris is already preparing for battle when Hector enters, but Delorme creates more drama with his staging.)  Delorme’s craft perfectly captures the differences between Hector, the warrior, and Paris, the lover.

The world of Paris and Helen is one of love and sensuality, presented in a pale, golden light.  A statue of Aphrodite (Goddess of Love) holding a dove (symbol of peace) stands in the background, while fragrant blossoms are strewn about the floor and the table is set with food and drink.  On the floor is the lyre that Paris has dropped; he stands partly on it, as if burying his worldly pleasures.  The sensuality of this realm is underscored by the nudity of Paris and Helen; particularly that of Paris, who is caught between the opposing worlds of love and war.  In an ironic touch, Paris grows more naked still – he is removing his wreath – before donning his helmet and armor.

Paris is in marked contrast with the placid and serene beauty of Helen.  She is the lynchpin of the entire tragedy, but remains a passive object to the passions around her.  More important, this perfumed world of love and pleasure is rightly her realm, and she is perfectly at home in it.  It is the figures of Hector and Paris who are the aliens or partial visitors to this space.  (Indeed, note how her pose is similar to the statue of Aphrodite in the background.)  The peacock feathers strike a note of vanity, while the leopard skin on the bed adds a bit of wild carnality.

Hector, depicted largely in shadow, appears as a representative of war, complete with red mantle.  The shield and spear are near-black outlines (the spear being particularly phallic) – this darkness announces the darkness of war.  Indeed, the right-hand side of the canvas, where Paris reaches for his armor, is also dark; the lovers exist in the shadow of war.

Delorme relies on chiaroscuro, more a Renaissance than Neoclassical technique, to provide the contrast between the worlds of love and war, of indulgence and discipline, and of pleasure and duty.  More important, the shadowy figure of Hector is supremely out-of-place in the world of Paris and Helen.

As we saw with Hero and Leander and Cephalus and Aroura, Delorme clearly always sides with the lovers.  I’m with him.

Hero and Leander, by Pierre Claude Francois Delorme (1814)

We see here a very different type of picture by Pierre Claude Francois Delorme (1783-1859), Hero and Leander, painted in 1814.

This is a Greek myth telling of the love between Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite that lived in a tower in Sestos beside the Hellespont (Dardanelles, today), and Leander, a young man from Abydos on the opposite side of the strait.  Leader fell in love with Hero and would swim every night across the Hellespont to be with her.  She would light a lamp at the top of her tower to help lead the way for him.

Aphrodite was the Goddess of Love, but Hero was a virgin.  Leander tells Hero that Aphrodite would not value the supplication of a virgin, and convinces her to let him make love to her.  Their love affair lasts through the summer; but on one stormy night, the waves buffet Leander, who becomes lost; the storm also blows out Hero’s guiding light.  Leander drowns, and when Hero sees his dead body, she throws herself over the tower’s edge, uniting them in death.

This tale has been popular with painters, poets, troubadours and writers for thousands of years.  (One wonders if the seed of Romeo and Juliet can be found within it.)  Of the many literary retellings of the story, perhaps the best known was by Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593).  In Marlowe’s version, Leander is spotted during his swim by Neptune, who confuses him with Ganymede and carries him to the bottom of the ocean.  Neptune is clearly besotted by the young man.  Marlowe writes of "[i]magining that Ganymede, displeas'd, [h]ad left the Heavens ... [t]he lusty god embrac'd him, call'd him love ... He watched his arms and, as they opened wide [a]t every stroke, betwixt them would he slide [a]nd steal a kiss, ... And dive into the water, and there pry [u]pon his breast, his thighs, and every limb, ... [a]nd talk of love," while the boy, naive and unaware of Greek love practices, protests, "'You are deceiv'd, I am no woman, I.' Thereat smil'd Neptune.”  When Neptune realizes his mistake, he brings Leander back to the shore, giving him a bracelet that would keep him safe from drowning.

Leander arrives at Hero’s tower.  She answers the door to find the youth nude, and after much love talk, consummate their relationship.  The poem ends with dawn approaching; Marlowe was never able to finish his epic; he would be murdered in a barroom brawl before completion.

Delorme would no doubt have been aware of Marlowe’s text, and it’s possible to see where it informed his painting.  With his delicate curls, beatific smile and shimmering, supple body, Leander is quite beautiful.  Hero anoints his tresses with perfume (or, perhaps, sweet-smelling oils) taken from the open box beside them, a particular irony, seeing that the youth is doomed to drown.  Take a moment to look at how wonderfully Delorme delineates each of Leander’s fingers (on Hero’s shoulder).  These are not the fingers of a Samson, but, rather, a pretty boy.  And though he looks up at Hero with adoration, he is a little … sappy.

The most splendid component of this picture is the glorious Hero.  Once again Delorme harkens back to Raphael for inspiration of the heroine’s face.  But it is in the depiction of her voluptuous (and, frankly, sexual body) that the quality of the picture rests.  It is no mistake that the centerpiece of the entire painting is Hero’s mons veneris; it lies dead-center in the picture, and Delomre’s use of light draws the eye’s attention directly to it.  It is also the center of the figure, and the playful gestures of both her arms and her legs seem to stem from it.  (Even the application of perfume is code for what is going on, as the couple rejoices next to an open box.)

Delorme’s coyness extends to the background, where he has a makeshift curtain block the background window; he places the lyre at the base of Aphrodite’s statue.  In the symbolism of ancient Greece, Orpheus was able to play the lyre in such a way as to knock down stone walls.

This is a witty, beautifully constructed picture.  Not inexplicably moving, like his Cephalus and Aurora, but accomplished nonetheless.

Cephalas Carried Off by Aurora, by Pierre Claude Francois Delorme (1851)

Here is a wonderfully (and unexpectedly) tender painting by an artist we have not covered before, Pierre Claude Francois Delorme (1783-1859).  He is not as well known in the United States as he should be, but his relatively small oeuvre is replete with delicacy and grace.

Delorme was born in Paris and was a student of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (1767-1824) – who was, himself, a student of Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), whom we have covered many times in these pages.   The influence of both Girodet-Trioson and (once-removed) David are readily apparent.  Delorme was, in many ways, an exemplar of the classical style of painting of the Empire period.  He painted a number of significant works, including pictures for the palaces of Versailles, Fontainbleau, Neurilly and Compiegne, as well as various Parisian churches.

Like his masters, Delorme produced pictures featuring monumentally sculpted figures in a posed, almost tableaux-like composition.  His interests were historical and mythological, like others of the period, and he sought to tell universal truths about people through evocations of a more sublime ideal.

However, Delorme parts company with his contemporaries because he also carries within his worldview an earlier, Renaissance ideal.  Following his apprenticeship, Delorme spent many years in Italy, where he became enamored of the works of such later Renaissance figures as Raphael and Michelangelo.   The influence of these painters – more human, more emotional, more fluid -- lent his work an added depth; almost as if the Mannerist experiment added a touch of humanity and emotion to what is a technically brilliant, but emotionally cold, school of painting.

The story of Cephalus and Aurora is told in Book Seven of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Cephalus, an Athenian hero, falls in love with Procis, and marries her. Shortly afterwards, while hunting deer, he catches the eye of Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn.  Though a Goddess, Aurora was sexually adventurous and was frequently attracted to young mortal men.  Descending from her mountain home, Aurora carried Cephalus off with her. However, on finding that he remained faithful to Procris, she allowed him to return home, privately swearing vengeance. She caused a spirit of jealousy to infect their marriage and this eventually resulted in the accidental death of Procris who suffered a wound inflicted by Cephalus with his enchanted hunting spear. 

For a story with such a tragic ending, this is an exceptionally sweet and affecting picture.

Let’s start with Aurora.  The debt to Raphael is particularly strong in this picture, as is evidenced by the serene beauty of Aurora, and the delicate pansexuality of the putti.  The gossamer quality of her hair, along with the placidity of her gaze, mark Delorme’s Aurora as a Renaissance figure.  Look, too, at her delicately drawn feet, and the diaphanous quality of her dress, which renders her leg visible.  This is draughtsmanship of a high caliber, and the subtlety of the lighting effects are clearly influenced by Late Renaissance (or Mannerist) painting.

Cephalus also looks more like a Renaissance figure than a figure from the French Empire era.  Delorme paints a male figure of heart-breaking beauty.  Look at the graceful lines of the body and the angelically handsome face; it’s impossible to look at Cephalus without a sense of awe at his transformative beauty.

Delorme achieves this with strategic lighting effects:  his strong brow and sensitive line of nose are well lit.  The light then accentuates the wide, capacious breast, lilting down to the stomach and growing darker, darker around the powerful legs.  The artist also hints at the width of his body by the hot, white light of the right knee, popping up behind the shadowed foreleg.

But the real heart of the picture is Aurora’s hand, placed lovingly on the breast of Cephalus.  This component, if nothing else in the picture, is the work of pure genius.  That one touch denotes romantic love, sexual passion, possession, gentleness and protection.  The impression transcends the emotional and moves into the range of the elemental.

Artist Leon Kossoff (born 1926), would often look at the paintings of great masters, sketching his own conceptions of the art before him.  He would often sit before a painting of Cephalus and Aurora (though, the one he gazed at compulsively was by Poussin).  One day, he had a transformative experience before the painting, which he remembered thusly: It seemed as though I was experiencing the work for the first time.  I suppose there is a difference between looking and experiencing.  Paintings of this quality, in which the subject is endlessly glowing with luminosity, can, in an unexpected moment, surprise the viewer, revealing unexplored areas of self.

That is exactly how I react to Delomre’s depiction.  That glowing quality of luminosity completely takes me by surprise, and I feel as if I’m keying into some extraordinarily powerful emotional undercurrent.

Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, by Glen Weldon (2013)

A few weeks ago, we looked at Glen Weldon’s delicious The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture.  We enjoyed it so much, we moved onto Weldon’s earlier book on the world’s first superhero, Superman: The Unauthorized Biography.  With Batman, Weldon had hoped to put nerd culture into some type of larger perspective; his Superman book is less ambitious, but more focused and successful a production.  If you are a Superman buff, it is highly recommended.

We here at The Jade Sphinx have always much preferred Superman to his darker counterpart.  This is a prejudice we suspect that Weldon shares, as his book on Superman is relentlessly amusing, affectionate and reverential.  Superman’s creators, Siegel and Schuster, says Weldon, saw their creation as quite simply, the ultimate American: a Gatsby who’d arrived on a bright new shore, having propelled himself there by burning his own past as fuel.  The Old World could no longer touch him, and now it was left to him to forge his own path.  Throughout the book, Weldon’s prose seems charged with a powerful nostalgia for a simpler, and perhaps wiser, America.  One that still believed in heroes and other symbols of hope; and, we suspect, one where childish delights were viewed in perspective by adult fans, and not with the soul-crushing scrutiny of today’s Perpetual Adolescents.

One of Weldon’s strongest passages concerns science fiction writer Larry Niven’s 1971 essay on the possible outcomes of Superman having sex with Earth women.  The essay, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, made excruciating (and amusing)  conclusions, and it can still be found and makes for great reading.  But Weldon places this now 45 year old work in contemporary perspective:  The gag, of course, is the deadpan, painstaking manner in which Niven lays out his thought process.  This is where you end up if you take this stuff too seriously, he seems to say: killer sperm from outer space.

Looking back on Niven’s humorous essay today, it’s impossible to see it as anything but a chilling harbinger of the high-level weapons-grade nerdery that would seize comics in the decades that followed.  All too soon, legions of fans and creators adopted Niven’s let’s-pin-this-to-the-specimen-board approach and proceeded to leach humor and whimsy and good old-fashioned, Beppo the Super-Monkey-level goofiness out of superhero comics, leaving in their place a punishing, joyless, nihilistic grittiness.

Weldon sees Superman as an ever-changing figure, who always reflects a constantly evolving America.  The New Deal crusader of the late 1930s is different from the patriotic boy scout of World War II, and very different indeed from his Jet Age counterpart.  What Weldon sees as the core of Superman is not his persona, but his motivation.  And that is, simply, that Superman always puts the needs of others over those of himself, and he never gives up.  That is the definition of a hero.

Weldon also posits that Superman has long ago transcended the various media that deliver him to us: he has become an idea that is bigger than the comic books, cartoons, TV shows and movies that feature him.  It is an idea that has weathered 75 years, and Weldon predicts that will last at least another 75 more.

It is this protean quality that makes Superman much like Sherlock Holmes, Dracula or even Ebenezer Scrooge: each generation can find something new and vital to say about him, and, in doing so, say something about their own era.

Fortunately, Weldon is also laugh-out-loud funny.  We had the giggles paging through most of this book.  Here he is on the sexy aesthetic of Legion of Super-Heroes artist Mike Grell: Detractors have dinged Grell’s designs for their Ming-the-Merciless collars, bikini bottoms, and pixie boots (and that’s just on the men) – and it’s true that in some panels, Legion HQ crowd scenes seem more like the VIP lounge at Studio 54, but his designs made the book look like nothing else on the shelves.

Here he is on Superman writer Marv Wolfman’s prose: Wolfman proceeded to slather on the pathos, gilding the emotional lily so fervently it makes Dickens’s death of Little Nell read like an expense report. 

It would be hard to imagine a better guide through Superman’s complex history, and we look forward to hearing from Glen Weldon again.

Law of the Desert Born, A Graphic Novel, by Louis L’Amour

Here’s a first for The Jade Sphinx, a review of a graphic novel, and it’s a humdinger, Law of the Desert Born, adapted from a Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) short story of the same name by Charles Santino (working off a script by Beau L’Amour and Katherine Nolan), and illustrated by Thomas Yeates.  Even if you have never been the ‘type’ to try a graphic novel (i.e., novel in comic book form), you should try this one.  Not only is it a model of the craft, it is a spectacular Western, as well.

The late Gary Cooper (1901-1961) used to opine that he loved Westerns because, when they were good, “there was an honesty about them.”  Though they sometimes devolved into simple stories about white hats vs black hats, more usually there were shadings of complexity and subtlety.  Great (and even really good) Westerns are only ‘plot driven’ in the same manner as great literature: we are the sum of our motives and the consequences they drive us to.

Law of the Desert Born takes place in New Mexico, 1887, during the worst drought that anyone can remember.  Rancher Tom Forrester has his access to the Pecos River cut off by the son of his old partner, and he convinces his foreman, Shad Marone, to rustle cattle on his land.

Shad squeezes his poor employee, Jesus Lopez, a half-Mexican, half-Apache on the run from the Fort Marion prison in Florida, to do his dirty work.  Lopez, a scout and tracker for the army, helped relocate the Chihenne and Chiricahua Apaches for the government, and was repaid for his loyalty with a one-way trip to the same gulag.

When the rustling is discovered, Lopez takes the fall.  Tensions escalate, and Forrester is fatally injured by his enemy; Shad kills the rival rancher in revenge and goes on the run.

Now, the sheriff must release Lopez from jail and allow him to use his skills as a tracker to lead the posse to Shad.  Lopez guides them through miles of trackless badlands, into a crucible to test their courage and skill.  But, as the story continues, the question becomes: what are Lopez’s real motives?

This is great stuff.  Both Shad and Lopez are equal parts hero and villain, and the sheriff is both compassionate man of justice and unthinking hardcase.  The townsfolk that make up the posse are like most humanity – neither hero nor rogue, just simply people trying to get along.

L’Amour also dispenses with many of the tropes that would degrade the core integrity of the tale: there are no deadeye gunslingers, or rancher’s daughters to provide love interest – nor even any clear indication of whether either side was right or wrong in the issue of water rights.  What it all is … is very complicated.  Much like life.

The book comes with a wonderful coda from Beau L’Amour on the differences between this adaptation and his father’s original pulp story, and details his efforts to get the story made into a film.  It also has some valuable biographical data on his father, and notes to put the whole story in historical perspective.

Now, a graphic novel lives or dies on its illustrations, and I’m delighted to report that Yeates’ pages are wonderful.  Rendered in stark black and white, Yeates has created a pen-and-ink wash world of stark landscapes, wide vistas and intense close-ups.  He creates his pages with a cinematic flair; if anyone ever did make a movie of this, they could simply tear the pages out and stuff them into the camera.

Yeates’ anatomy does sometimes seem to be slightly off, but any slight failures of draughtsmanship are more than made up by his genius for composition.  His pages are not a static series of regiment panels, but, rather, a dynamic expression of motion and story on the page.  It’s a textbook lesson on how the form is done.

This oversize hardcover is a great addition to the library of any Western or comic fan, or, indeed, anyone who likes a good story.