In Which We Die On The Altar of Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy: Kind of a Dick

by PAUL JOHNSON

It has been said that a careful reading of Anna Karenina, if it teaches you nothing else, will teach you how to make strawberry jam.

- Julian Mitchell

Leo Tolstoy's diaries reveal that, as a young man of twenty-five, he was already conscious of special power and a commanding moral destiny: 'Read a work on the literary characterization of genius today, and this awoke in me the conviction that I am a remarkable man both as regards capacity and eagerness to work. I have not yet met a single man who was morally as good as I, and who believed that I do not remember an instance in my life when I was not attracted to what is good and was not ready to sacrifice anything to it.' He felt in his own soul 'immeasurable grandeur'. He was baffled by the failure of other men to recognize his qualities: 'Why does nobody love me? I am not a fool, not deformed, not a bad man, not an ignoramus. It is incomprehensible.'

Tolstoy believed himself to be very highly sexed. Diary entries record: 'Must have a woman. Sensuality gives me not a moment's peace.' 'Terrible lust amounting to a physical illness.' At the end of his life he told his biographer Aylmer Maude that, so strong were his urges, he was unable to dispense with sex until he was eighty-one. In youth he was extremely shy with women and so resorted to brothels, which disgusted him and brought the usual consequences.

One of his earliest diary entries in March 1847 notes he is being treated for 'gonorrhoea, obtained from the customary source'. He records another bout in 1852 in a letter to his brother Nikolai: 'The venereal sickness is cured but the after-effects of the mercury have caused me untold suffering.' But he continued to patronize whores, varied by gypsies, Cossack and native girls, and Russian peasant girls when available. The tone in his diary entries is invariably self-disgust blended with hatred for the temptress : 'something pink... I opened the back door. She came in. Now I can't bear to look at her. Repulsive, vile, hateful, causing me to break my rules.' 'Girls have led me astray.'

The following day he made good resolution but 'the wenches prevent me.' An entry for April 1856 records, after a visit to a brothel: 'Horrible, but absolutely the last time.'

Another 1856 entry: 'Disgusting. Girls. Stupid music, girls, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, girls, girls.' Turgenev, whose house he was then using like a hotel, gives another glimpse of Tolstoy in 1856: 'Drinking bouts, gypsies, cards all night long, and then sleeps like the dead until two in the afternoon.' When Tolstoy was in the country, especially on his own estate, he took his pick of the prettier serf-girls. These occasionally excited more than simple lust on his part. He wrote later of Yasnaya Polyana, I remember the nights I spent there, and Dunyasha's beauty and youth... her strong, womanly body.'

One of Tolstoy's motives in travelling in Europe in 1856 was to escape what he saw as the temptations of an attractive serf-girl. His father, as he knew, had had such an affair, and the girl had given birth to a son, who was simply treated as a male estate serf, being employed in the stables (he became a coachman). But Tolstoy, after his return, could not keep his hands off the women, especially a married one called Aksinya. His diary for May 1858 records: 'Today, in the big old wood. I'm a fool, a brute. Her bronze flesh and her eyes. I'm in love as never before in my life. Have no other thought.' The girl was 'clean and not bad-looking, with bright black eyes, a deep voice, a scent of something fresh and strong and full breasts that lifted the bib of her apron.'

Probably in July 1859, Aksinya gave birth to a son, called Timofei Bazykin. Tolstoy brought her into the house as a domestic and allowed the little boy to play at her heels for a time. But, like Marx and Ibsen, and like his own father, he never acknowledged the child was his, or paid the slightest attention to him. What is even more remarkable is that, at a time when he was publicly preaching the absolute necessity to educate the peasants, and indeed ran schools for their children on his estate, he made no effort to ensure that his own illegitimate son even learned how to read and write. Possibly he feared later claims. He seems to have been pitiless in dismissing the rights of illegitimate offspring.

Tolstoy knew he was doing wrong in resorting to prostitutes and seducing peasant women. He blamed himself for these offenses. But he tended to blame the women still more. They were all Eve the Temptress to him. Indeed it is probably not too much to say that despite the fact that he needed women physically all his life and used them - or perhaps because of this - he distrusted, disliked and even hated them.

In some ways he found the manifestation of their sexuality repulsive. He remarked at the end of his life, 'the sight of a woman with her breasts bared was always disgusting to me, even in my youth.' Tolstoy was by nature censorious, even puritanical. If his own sexuality upset him, its manifestations in others brought out his strongest disapproval. In Paris in 1857, at a timewhen his own philandering was surging in full spate, he noted: 'At the furnished lodgings where I stayed, there were thirty-six menages, of which nineteen were irregular. That disgusted me terribly.'

playing tennis with some friendsiesSexual sin was evil, and women were the source of it. On 16 June 1847, when he was nineteen, he wrote: 'Now I shall set myself the following rule. Regard the company of women as an unavoidable social evil and keep away from them as much as possible. Who indeed is the cause of sensuality, indulgence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? Who is to blame for the loss of our natural qualities of courage, steadfastness, reasonableness, fairness, etc if not women?' The really depressing thing about Tolstoy is that he retained these childish, in some respects Oriental, views of women right to the end of his life.

In contrast to his efforts to portray Anna Karenina, he never seems to have made any serious attempt in real life to penetrate and understand the mind of a woman. Indeed he would not admit that a woman could be a serious, adult, moral human being.

He wrote in 1898, when he was seventy: '[Woman] is generally stupid, but the Devil lends her brains when she works for him. Then she accomplishes miracles of thinking, farsightedness, constancy, in order to do something nasty.' Or again: 'It is impossible to demand of a woman that she evaluate the feelings of her exclusive love on the basis of moral feeling. She cannot do it, because she does not possess real moral feeling, i.e. one that stands higher than everything.'

His choice finally fell, when he was thirty-four, on an eighteen-year-old doctor's daughter, Sonya Behrs. He was no great catch: not rich,a known gambler, in trouble with the authorities for insulting the local magistrate. He had described himself, some years before, as possessing 'the most ordinary coarse and ugly features... small grey eyes, more stupid than intelligent... the face of a peasant, and a peasant's large hands and feet'. Moreover, he hated dentists and would not visit them, and by 1862 he had lost nearly all his teeth. But she was a plain, immature girl, only five feet high and competing with her two sisters; she was glad to get him. He proposed formally by letter, then seems to have had doubts until the last minute.

The actual wedding was a premonition of disaster. On the morning he burst into her apartment, insisting: 'I have come to say that there is still time... all this business can still be put a stop to.' She burst into tears. Tolstoy was an hour late for the ceremony itself, having packed all his shirts. She cried again. Afterwards they had supper and she changed, and they climbed into a traveling carriage called a dormeuse, pulled by six horses. She cried again. Tolstoy, an orphan, could not understand this and shouted: 'If leaving your family means such great sorrow to you, you cannot love me very much.' In the dormeuse he began to paw her and she pushed him away.

They had a suite at a hotel, the Birulevo. Her hands trembled as she poured him tea from the samovar. He tried to paw her again, and was again repulsed. Tolstoy's diary relentlessly recorded: 'She is weepy. In the carriage. She knows everything and it is simple. But she is afraid.' He thought her 'morbid'. Later still, having finally made love to her, and she having (as he thought) responded, he added: 'Incredible happiness. I can't believe this can last as long as life.' Of course it did not. Even the most submissive wife would have found marriage to such a colossal egotist hard to bear.

tolstoy w/ anton chekhovSonya had sufficient brains and spirit to resist his all-crushing will, at least from time to time. So they produced one of the worst (and best recorded) marriages in history. Tolstoy opened it with a disastrous error of judgment. It is one of the characteristics of the intellectual to believe that secrets, especially in sexual matters, are harmful. Everything should be 'open'. The lid must be lifted on every Pandora's box. Husband and wife must tell each other 'everything'. Therein lies much needless misery. Tolstoy began his policy of glasnost by insisting that his wife read his diaries, which he had now been keeping for fifteen years. She was appalled to find - the diaries were then in totally uncensored form- that they contained details of all his sex life, including visits to brothels and copulations with whores, gypsies, native women, his own serfs and, not least, even her mother's friends. Her first response was : 'Take those dreadful books back - why did you give them to me?'

Later she told him: 'Yes, I have forgiven you. But it is dreadful.' These remarks are taken from her own diary, which she had been keeping since the age of eleven. It was part of Tolstoy's 'open' policy that each should keep diaries and each should have access to the other's - a sure formula for mutual suspicion and misery. The physical side of the Tolstoy marriage probably never recovered from Sonya's initial shock at learning her husband was (as she saw it) a sexual monster. Moreover, she read his diaries in ways which Tolstoy had not anticipated, noting faults he had been careful (as he thought) to conceal.

She spotted, for instance, that he had failed to repay debts contracted as a result of his gambling. She observed, too, that he failed to tell women with whom he had sex that he had contracted venereal disease and might still have it. The selfishness and egotism the diaries so plainly convey to the perceptive reader - and who more perceptive than a wife? - were more apparent to her than to the author. Moreover, the Tolstoyan sex life so vividly described in his diaries was now inextricably mingled in her mind with the horrors of submitting to his demands and their ultimate consequence in painful and repeated pregnancies.

She endured a dozen in twenty-two years; in quick succession she lost her child Petya, while pregnant with Nikolai, who in turn died the same year he was born; Vavara was born prematurely and died immediately. Tolstoy himself did not help with the business of childbearing by taking an intimate though insensitive interest in all its details. He insisted on attending the birth of his son, Sergei (later using it for a scene in Anna Karenina), and broke into a frightening rage when Sonya was unable to breast-feed the baby.

As the pregnancies and miscarriages proceeded, and his wife's distaste for his sexual demands became manifest, he wrote to a friend: 'There is no worse situation for a healthy man than to have a sick wife.' Early in the marriage he ceased to love her; her tragedy was that her residual love for him remained. At this time she confided in her diary: 'I have nothing in me but this humiliating love and a bad temper, and these two things have been the cause of all my misfortunes, for my temper has always interfered with my love. I want nothing but his love and sympathy but he won't give it to me, and all my pride is trampled in the mud. I am nothing but a miserable crushed worm, whom no one wants, whom no one loves, a useless creature with morning sickness and a big belly.'

Take the famous sentence from Anna Karenina: 'All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' The moment one begins to search one's own observed experience, it becomes clear that both parts of this statement are debatable. If anything, the reverse is closer to the truth. There are obvious, recurrent patterns in unhappy families - where, for instance, the husband is a drunk or a gambler, where the wife is incompetent, adulterous, and so forth; the stigmata of family unhappiness are drearily familiar and repetitive. On the other hand, there are happy families of every kind. Tolstoy had not thought about the subject seriously, and above all honestly, because he could not bring himself to think seriously and honestly about women: he turned from the subject in fear, rage and disgust. The moral failure of Tolstoy's marriage, and his intellectual failure to do justice to half the human race, were closely linked.

Paul Johnson is the world's greatest living historian. He is the author of Intellectuals, from which this excerpt is taken. You can purchase that volume here.

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In Which Ernest Hemingway Is The Finest Quivering Sensitive of Our Time

The Deep Waters of Ernest Hemingway

by PAUL JOHNSON

A more weird combination of quivering sensitiveness and preoccupation with violence never walked the earth.

- a friend of Ernest Hemingway's describing him at 20 years old

In his fiction Hemingway often wrote about women with remarkable understanding. He shared with Kipling a gift of varying his habitual masculine approach with unexpected and highly effective presentation of a female viewpoint. There have been all kind of speculations about a feminine, even a transvestite or transsexual streak in Hemingway, arising from his apparent obsession with hair, especially short hair in women, and attributed to the fact that his mother declined to dress him in boy's clothes and kept his hair uncut for an unusually long time.

What is clear, however, is that Hemingway found it difficult to form any kind of civilized relationship with a woman, at any rate for long, except one based on her complete subservience. The only female in his own family he liked was his younger sister Ursula, 'my lovely sister Ura' as he called her, because she adored him. He told a friend in 1950 that when he came back from the war in 1919, Ursula, then seventeen, 'always used to wait, sleeping, on the stairway of the third floor staircase to my room. She wanted to wake when I came in because she had been told it was bad for a man to drink alone. She would drink something light with me until I went to sleep and then she would sleep with me so I would not be lonely in the night. We always slept with the light on except she would sometimes turn it off if she saw I was asleep and stay awake and turn it on if she saw I was waking.'

This may have been an invention, reflecting Hemingway's idealized notion of how a woman should behave towards him; but, true or false, he was not going to find such submission in real, adult life.

As it happens, three out of his four wives were unusually servile by twentieth-century American standards, but that was not enough for him. He wanted variety, change, drama as well. His first wife, Hadley Richardson, was eight years older and quite well off; he lived off her money until his books began to sell in large quantities. She was an agreeable, accommodating woman, and attractive until she put on weight while pregnant with Hemingway's first child, Jack ('Bumby'), and failed to get it off afterwards. Hemingway had no scruples about fondling other women in her presence - as, for instance, the notorious Lady Twysden, born Dorothy Smurthwaite, who figures as Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, a Montparnasse flirt and the source of his row with Harold Loeb.

Hadley put up with this humiliation and later with Hemingway's affair with Pauline Pfeiffer, a sexy, slender girl, much richer than Hadley, whose father was one of the biggest landowners and grain-operators in Arkansas. Pauline fell heavily for Hemingway and in effect seduced him. The loving pair then persuaded Hadley to permit the setting up of a menage a trois - 'three breakfast trays', she wrote bitterly from Juan-les-Pins in 1926, 'three wet bathing suits on the line, three bicycles'.

When this did not content them, they pushed her out into a trial separation, then into a divorce. She accepted, writing to Hemingway: I took you for better, for worse (and meant it).' The settlement was generous on her part, and a delighted Hemingway wrote to her in fulsome terms : 'perhaps the luckiest thing Bumby will ever have is to have you as a mother . . . how I admire your straight thinking, your head, your heart and your very lovely hands and I pray God always that he will make up to you the very great hurt that I have done to you - who are the best and truest and loveliest person I have ever known.' There was a small element of sincerity in this letter in that Hemingway did think Hadley had behaved nobly. On this proposition he began, almost before he married Pauline, to erect a legend of Hadley's sanctity. Pauline, for her part, noted Hadley's unbusinesslike approach to the divorce and determined Hemingway would not be so lucky the next time.

ernest & pauline in key westShe used her money to make their life more ample, buying and embellishing a fine house in Key West, Florida, which introduced Hemingway to the deep-sea fishing he came to love. She gave him a son, Patrick, but when in 1931 she announced she was having another child (Gregory), the marriage went into decline. By now Hemingway had acquired his taste for Havana and there he took up with a strawberry blonde, Jane Mason, wife of the head of Pan-American Airways in Cuba,  fourteen years his junior. She was slim, pretty, hard-drinking, a first-class sportwoman who enjoyed hanging around with Hemingway's barroom chums, then driving sports cars at reckless speed.

She was in many ways an ideal Hemingway heroine, but she was also a depressive who could not handle her complicated life. She tried to commit suicide and succeeded in breaking her back, at which point Hemingway lost interest. In the meantime Pauline had taken desperate steps to win back her husband. Her father, she wrote to Hemingway, had just given her a vast sum of money - did he want some? 'Have no end of this filthy money . . . Just let me know and don't get another woman, your loving Pauline.'

She built him a swimming pool at Key West and wrote: 'I wish you were here sleeping in my bed and using my bathroom and drinking my whisky . . . Dear Papa please come home as soon as you can.' She went to a plastic surgeon: 'Am having large nose, imperfect lips, protruding ears and warts and moles all taken off before coming to Cuba'. She also dyed her dark hair gold-colour, which turned out disastrously.

But her trip to Cuba did not work, Hemingway called his boat after her but he would not take her out in it. He had issued a warning in To Have and Have Not: 'The better you treat a man and the more you show him you love him, the quicker he gets tired of you.' He meant it. Moreover, being a man who felt guilt but who responded by shifting it onto other people, he now held her responsible for breaking up his first marriage and therefore felt she deserved anything that was coming to her.

martha gellhornWhat came was Martha Gellhorn, a passionately keen reporter and writer, Bryn Mawr educated (like Hadley) and, as with most of Hemingway's women, from a secure, upper-middle-class Midwest background. She was tall, with spectacular long legs, a blue-eyed blonde, nearly ten years his junior. Hemingway first met her in Sloppy Joe's Bar, Key West, in December 1936, and the next year invited her to join him in Spain. She did so, and the experience was an eye-opener, not least because he greeted her with a lie : 'I knew you'd get here, Daughter, because I fixed it up so you could' - this was quite untrue, as she was aware. He also insisted on locking her room from the outside, 'so that no man could bother her'.

His own room at the Hotel Ambos Mundos, she discovered, was in a disgusting mess: 'Ernest,' she wrote later, 'was extremely dirty . . . one of the most unfastidious men I have ever known.' Hemingway had inherited from his father a fondness for onion sandwiches, and in Spain delighted in making them from the powerful local variety, munching them with periodic swigs from his silver hip-flask of whisky, a memorable combination. Martha was inclined to be squeamish and it is unlikely she was ever in love with him physically. She always refused to have a child by him, and later adopted one (There's no need to have a child when you can buy one. That's what I did').

She married Hemingway primarily because he was a famous writer, something she was passionately keen to become herself: she hoped his literary charisma would rub off on her. But Pauline fought bitterly to keep her husband, and when she felt she was losing remembered Hadley's easy settlement and insisted on a tough one, which delayed the divorce.

By the time it was through Hemingway was already inclined to blame Martha for breaking up his marriage; friends testify to their blazing public rows at an early stage. Martha was easily the cleverest and most determined of his wives, and there was never any chance of the marriage lasting. For one thing, she objected strongly to his drinking and the brutality it engendered. When, at the end of 1942, she insisted on driving the car home because he had been drinking at a party, and they had an argument on the way, he slapped her with the back of his hand. She slowed down his much-prized Lincoln, drove it straight into a tree then left him in it.

Then there was the dirt: she objected strongly to the pack of fierce tomcats he kept in Cuba, which smelled fearfully and were allowed to march all over the dining table. While he was away in 1943 she had them castrated, and thereafter he would mutter fiercely: 'She cut my cats.' She corrected his French pronunciation, challenged his expertise on French wines, ridiculed his Crook Factory and hinted broadly that he ought to be closer to the fighting in Europe. He finally decided to go, cunningly arranging an assignment with Collier's, which had been employing her and now, to her fury, dropped her. She followed him to London nonetheless and found him, in 1944, living in his customary squalor at the Dorchester, empty whisky bottles rolling about under his bed.

From then on it was downhill all the way. Back in Cuba, he would wake her in the middle of the night when he came to bed after drinking : 'He woke me when I was trying to sleep to bully, snarl, mock - my crime really was to have been at war when he had not, but that was not how he put it. I was supposedly insane, I only wanted excitement and danger, I had no responsibility to anyone, I was selfish beyond belief. It never stopped and believe me it was fierce and ugly.'

He threatened: 'Going to get me somebody who wants to stick around with me and let me be the writer of the family.' He wrote an obscene poem, 'To Martha Gellhorn's Vagina', which he compared to the wrinkled neck of an old hot-water bottle, and which he read to any woman he could get into bed with him. He became, she complained, 'progressively more insane each year'. She was leading 'a slave's life with a brute for a slaveowner', and she walked out.

His son Gregory commented: 'He just tortured Marty, and when he had finally destroyed all her love for him and she had left him, he claimed she had deserted him.' They broke up at the end of 1944, and under Cuban law, since she had deserted, Hemingway kept all her property there. He said his marriage to her was 'the greatest mistake of my life' and in a long letter to Berenson, he listed her vices, accused her of adultery ('a rabbit'), said she had never seen a man die but had nonetheless made more money out of writing about atrocities than any woman since Harriet Beecher Stowe - all untrue.

Hemingway's fourth and final marriage endured to his death mainly because his protagonist this time, Mary Welsh, was determined to hang on whatever happened. She came from a different class to the earlier wives, a logger's daughter from Minnesota. She can have had no illusions about the man she was marrying, since right at the start of their relationship, at the Paris Ritz in February 1945, he got drunk, came across a photo of her Australian journalist husband, Noel Monks, hurled it down the lavatory, fired at it with his sub-machine-gun, smashed the entire apparatus and flooded the room.

Paul Johnson is the world's greatest living historian and the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This excerpt is taken from his book Intellectuals which you can purchase here.

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In Which Evidently The Boy Had Been Drawing For Many Years

Salvator MundiThe Walnut Essence of Albrecht Dürer

by PAUL JOHNSON

Albrecht Dürer was among the most creative individuals in history. As soon as he could hold a pen, he was drawing. A drawing of himself, done when he was thirteen, survives, showing him with long, silky hair and wearing a tassled cap, pointing earnestly to his image in a mirror.

It survives because his father loved it and kept it, and it is not only brilliant but highly accomplished: evidently the boy had been drawing for many years, probably from the age of three, which is when most natural artists begin.

It is hard to believe that he let a single day of his life pass without creating something, even when he was traveling - for Dürer discovered (as I have) that watercolors are perfect for a traveling artist, light to carry, easy to set up, and ideally suited for a quick landscape or townscape sketched while there is half an hour to spare. His topographical watercolors were the first landscapes done by a northern European and the first use of watercolor outside England; and considering the novelty of the topic and the medium they are extraordinarily accomplished.

Dürer's initiation in adopting the new medium - watercolor - so that he could record his travels and never waste a day was characteristic both of his intense, unremitting industry and of his voracious appetite for new artistic experiences. His output included 346 woodcuts and 105 engravings, most of great elaboration, scores of portraits in various media; several massive altarpieces; etchings and drypoints; and 970 surviving drawings (of many thousands). Virtually all his work is of the highest possible quality, and he seems to have worked at the limit of his capabilities all his life. Indeed he was always pushing the frontiers of art forward, and the number of firsts he scored in technical innovation is itself striking. The Leonardo of northern Europe (but with much more pertinacity and concentration), Dürer had a scientific spirit that compelled him to ask why as well as do, and to seek means of doing better all the time by incessant questing and searching.

Virgin and Child with Saint AnneDürer pursued, simultaneously, the art of creating unique images in pencil, ink, and paint. He was not only at the center of the printing revolution in Germany but on the northern fringes of the Renaissance. It was centered mainly in Italy but, in its cult of humanistic recovery and study of ancient Latin and Greek texts - and of carrying their message into modern life - it was also a phenomenon throughout Europe. Dürer was a scholar as well as an artist, accumulating a sizable library, and as avid to learn more about the world by reading as to improve his art by watching the masters at work.

His closest and lifelong friend was the humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, to whom he poured out his heart in noble letters, some of which survive. In 1494, when he was twenty-three, Dürer was obliged by his father to take a suitable wife, Agnes, daughter of a successful master craftsman, Hans Frey. Agnes was intelligent and played the harp well, and Dürer's drawing of her as a bride shows affection. But while we might have expected a succession of portraits (not least, one of her playing the harp) none appears to have survived. There is some evidence that they did not live happily together, and Pirckheimer, who hated Agnes, says she was cruel to him. It may well be that husband and wife differed over religion, for Dürer lived in the opening phases of the Reformation and was an admirer and supporter of Martin Luther and a friend of Luther's co-reformer Philip Melancthon, whom he portrayed splendidly. If Agnes, as I suspect, was a conservative daughter of the church, that would explain much.

However, Agnes benefited Dürer enormously in one respect. She brought with her a dowry of 200 gold crowns, and with this Dürer financed a trip to Italy, Venice especially, the first of two journeys. These travels were formative for Dürer in a number of ways. They produced his travel watercolors. They introduced him to southern light - and heat. In Germany he suffered greatly from Nuremberg's cold winters, icy springs, and uncertain summers. He wrote to Pirckheimer from Italy, rejoicing in the sunshine: "Here I live like a prince, in Germany like a beggar in rags, shivering."

Indeed, by the time Dürer returned to Venice, he found himself almost as famous there as in Germany, so much were his woodcut books admired (and copied). Modest as always, humble in his insatiable desire to acquire knowledge and skill, he found himself constituting a bridge between northern and southern art, a conduit along which flowed ideas and innovations from Italy to Germany and vice versa.

During pauses between his big woodcutting and engraving projects, Dürer drew and painted - in watercolor, tempera, and other color media - a variety of living things: plants, flowers, and above all animals, such a squirrels, foxes, and wolves. The realism with which he depicted fur amazed the Italians. Giovanni Bellini asked to borrow one of the "special brushes" Dürer used for fur. Dürer gave him a brush. "But I've got one of those already," said Giovanni. "Ah!" said Dürer.

He is best remembered not so much as an artistic celebrity but as a simple workman in art, with the tools of his trade in his hand: the sharp knives, gravers, scorpers, tint tools, spit sticks, rollers, and mallet of the woodcutter; pots of black and brown ink; chips of wood everywhere, the gravers, gougers, rockers, and roulettes of metal engraving; the needles of the etcher; drypointers and styluses, scrapers and burnishers, and literally hundreds of pens, brushes, charcoal sticks, and graphite pencils from Cumberland plumbago.

the adoration of the magiHis workroom had scores of aromatic smells: linseed oil and egg white, walnut essence, sizes and glues, gesso and tempera, hog smells from the brushes, coal and carbon dust, chalk and earths for color mixing, squirrel skins for minute eye brushes, turps, and other dryers, lavender oil, waxes and resins, varnish and gypsum, powerful acids for biting into metal, and the reek of fresh canvas rolls and treated wood panels. His hands, to judge from his self-portraits, were big (like the hands of most painters) and worn by the trade, with cuts, calluses, old scars and acid stains; imperfectly washed; the nails black, or red and raw from carbolic - the hands of a man who worked with them all his painstaking life.

Paul Johnson is one of world's most honored historians and the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This abridged excerpt is taken from his collection Creators, which you can purchase here.

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