JUST PASSING THROUGH: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday: The Diaries and Photographs of Milton Gendel, edited by Cullen Murphy
If Paris is a moveable feast, as Hemingway would tell every college junior on a gap year, then Rome is a stately banquet at which guests linger perhaps longer than they intended. The photographer, critic and salonist Milton Gendel was one. He arrived there on a Fulbright scholarship at 30, and more or less stayed for almost 70 more years.
Born in New York City (a … diner with clattering forks?) to Russian immigrants in the garment industry — his mother once clocked a nonunion worker with an umbrella during a strike — Gendel grew up to be perhaps the most cultivated person many of your cultivated friends have never heard of. “Just Passing Through,” a new book of his diaries and photographs elegantly edited by Cullen Murphy, the former captain of The Atlantic, thumbs its nose at that careerist New York party question: “What do you do?”
Digging through its lasagna of images, journal entries and footnotes, it’s not immediately clear what Gendel did; a little P.R. for the industrialist Adriano Olivetti, Murphy relates in his affectionate introduction, helped pay the bills. At living, though, the guy was an obvious expert. In between marriages, for example, he fathered fraternal twins with Olivetti’s former daughter-in-law Vittoria; any disturbance to the social and professional ecosystem is not apparent here. “Irrationally, oramai [by now], the prospect still makes me uneasy,” he wrote in 1980, of marrying the woman who would become his third wife, Monica Incisa della Rocchetta. “As if I had an indefinite future that was still full of novelty and surprises and I would certainly live till 95 or 105. Well, who knows that that isn’t my destiny.”
Indeed, he made it to 99, noting a typo in The New Yorker the day before he died.
Years before Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term, Gendel was a “connector” — or as Murphy puts it, “a convenor, a collector” — of objects as well as people (actors, painters, poets, even a zoologist), all of which he arrayed in a series of rented past-their-prime palazzi. One of his most regular excursions was to the flea market at Porta Portese, where he was a rueful shopaholic, often picking up pieces of heavy furniture or figurines that he didn’t necessarily want, perhaps just for the warmth of negotiation. (“I was in a bad mood, top heavy with my cold, and got stuck with a Neapolitan Saratoga trunk.” Happens to the best of us.)
Though Gendel contributed regularly to ARTnews and published several monographs, it’s notable, considering the facility for language on display here, that he didn’t have a shinier byline. (There’s a lone Talk of the Town item floating on Google, unsigned but computer-tagged, from 1935, around when he attended Columbia.) Turning on the TV, he finds “Johnny Guitar”: “an old meatball of cross-starred love, gunplay, hate and lynching.” An arts administrator he meets after traveling to Manhattan in 1980, when sweet corn and cocaine are on the rise, is described as “the sort of man who would fit in anywhere: a museum, Wall Street, running a gas chamber.” Back in Rome, he had recorded lunching with Betsy Baker, the longtime editor of Art in America, and how she seemed more interested in putting his name on the masthead than giving him actual assignments. “I like her despite a few little annoying NY stigmata like the use of like as an expletive,” Gendel wrote. “How mere can a detail of personality get?”
More public writers are observed concisely and without mercy, both their work and their personalities. Of Muriel Spark: “She is a bag fumbler.” On “Portnoy’s Complaint,” by Philip Roth: “It is brilliant. But caricatural and pseudo-literary,” with “comic strip characters.” Evelyn Waugh is held to account for his “bitchy right-wingery and his vein of anti-Semitism,” even as Gendel fraternizes with his eldest son, Auberon. Graham Greene is deemed a “brilliant tightrope walker edging between God and his grubby little creatures” but nonetheless compares unfavorably to Isaac Bashevis Singer.
As ever Gore Vidal, a friend and fellow resident of Rome, makes for some of the most entertaining copy. “The house is like his work, which is also slick, easy and sometimes sleazy,” Gendel wrote after a visit. “The real accomplishment is his career, which from its unfavorable beginnings — those unspeakable novels — has been perfected as an intricate, smooth-running mechanism. A Rolls-Royce engine of a career.”
Gendel’s career seems to have been more of an Autolinee Federico bus: humming along quietly and reliably for years, picking up and discharging many along the way without fanfare, but with an excellent view of the winding road below.
He was 58 when someone thought to mount an exhibition, a last-minute fill-in, of the photographs he’d taken diligently but casually for years. He seems to have fixed everyone and everything with the same ennobling, tender eye, whether it was a little boy cuddling a baby fox on a chain, Princess Margaret grinning from a bathtub or a peeling piece of statuary. Oh, and by the way, here is Cecil Beaton in a red velvet suit complaining about pain in his testicles. It’s that kind of book.
If I have a complaint about “Just Passing Through,” it’s that it’s perhaps too well-edited. Murphy writes that the diaries amounted to 10 million words and that there are 72,000 photographs held by the Fondazione Primoli, one of Rome’s oldest nonprofit organizations, which surely could have fed a Publication Event with the heft and fanfare of the longtime Condé Nast editor Leo Lerman’s “The Grand Surprise” (2007). But Gendel was a modest man, more observant than chest-thumping, and this comparatively lissome, quiet volume might be what fits him best.
JUST PASSING THROUGH: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday: The Diaries and Photographs of Milton Gendel | Edited by Cullen Murphy | Illustrated | 272 pp. | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | $35
