The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story. Pamela Petro
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epitomized the Normans’ masculine, martial culture. ‘The meaning of the central tower cannot be mistaken,’ he wrote; ‘it is as military as the ‘‘Chanson de Roland’’; it is the man-at arms himself … the mere seat of the central tower astride of the church, so firm, so fixed, so serious, so defiant, is Norman …’ For Kingsley it became the place where the present cracked open and he glimpsed his future. He’d been standing in front of the cathedral when suddenly, he recalled, ‘shined a light round him’, and it was as if he’d fallen into a trance. When he awoke, he later told Lucy, he knew he would never be a lawyer.
Like his rival, the Frenchman Émile Mâle, Kingsley felt he had been called to the study of medieval art – a vocation announced by epiphany rather than mere choice or happy accident. ‘Only romantic personalities,’ wrote Janice Mann in a study of their rivalry, ‘would imagine themselves so singled out by fate.’ It was the passion of this conviction that made Kingsley a memorable teacher. Students who later in life couldn’t tell a cornice from a corbel could not forget the intensity of his love for the subject, which lay like bedrock under his surface shyness and affability. They remained a little star-struck, even years later. ‘His intransigent idealism, his extreme sensitiveness, his incorruptible magnanimity and high-mindedness, even his prodigious capacity for work, have something Shelleyan about them,’ wrote one. Others were moved to even loftier comparisons:
It was … in the manner in which he transmitted to others the results of his own studies and of his perfectly rounded character, making an indissoluble unit of his research, his instruction, and his friendship, that he attained an Hellenic integration of all aspects of his personality.
One of the reasons for Kingsley’s immense popularity was that Lucy channelled his generosity into a weekly schedule. Both Porters became famous at Harvard for their ‘Sunday Afternoons at Home’, when they would open their house to students who flocked there to converse, look at photographs, and be fed. One undergraduate later wrote of Kingsley and his Sundays: ‘I value the memory of hours spent with him in his study and photography collection from 1925 to 1930 beyond any other recollection of the university.’ Lucy had hit upon the idea of Sunday parties to protect her husband, who otherwise would have had students round every night. She was, one of them later recalled, the unflagging guardian of Kingsley’s ‘never robust health’.
That Kingsley felt the same way about his students as they did about him is evident from the dedication he made in his 1931 study, Crosses and Culture of Ireland. ‘To My Teachers’, wrote Kingsley, ‘– My Harvard Students’.
On 1 June 1912, Kingsley married Lucy Bryant Wallace in her parents’ home in New York City, when he was 29 and she 35. During their courtship, initiated by his loan to her of some photographs of Italian architecture, he portrayed himself to her as precisely the reserved romantic his peers made him out to be. Shortly after their engagement he’d made the mistake of perching himself on the arm of another woman’s chair at a tea given by Lucy’s family. By the time he reached home he was eaten up with guilt, and immediately wrote her to apologize. ‘I am afraid you have in hand a wild and wayward nature that has so seldom thought of conventions and forms that it never considers until afterwards that one’s thoughts are judged by purely external actions.’ In the same letter he reminded her, ‘as you know darling social tact is the one thing more than any other that I haven’t’.
Despite his protestations to the contrary, Kingsley’s was a waywardness strictly controlled (so strictly it was perhaps only apparent to himself, though he tried hard in his letters to impress this ‘wild side’ upon Lucy). When she complained that a visit from his relatives had been ‘the most formal kind of call’ he explained to her: ‘My family are all so mannered and stiff; the only way to treat them is to rather break through the ice wall with which they surround themselves. I know because I am just like them.’ Later in life he expanded on the theme to Berenson. Kingsley wrote that it was a part of his ‘Puritanism’ never to show his feelings, a characteristic he loathed, and tried hard to rectify in letters. In many ways, art history – his brand of it, practised in the field – offered a means by which to reconcile his self-perceived ‘wildness’ with his inherited propriety. Roving about the European countryside on his own terms (universities and publishers gave him so much free reign he felt guilty) was never anything less than a respectable vocation. Yet it simultaneously renounced the ‘very formal, very quiet, very refined, in perfect taste, and deadly dull’ world of tennis and dinner parties in which he had grown up.
Kingsley’s second fortuitous discovery was Lucy Wallace: a wealthy, respectable woman with whom he could have a comfortable and respectable marriage and yet, from the first, share his inner nature. While propriety laid its claims on her as well, Lucy’s natural spontaneity reduced the distance between her public and private selves, just as Kingsley’s habit of reflection increased the space between his. The letters they exchanged during the six months of their engagement, beginning on 12 December 1911, are revelatory. Kingsley’s were neat, even-lined, long and analytical; Lucy’s dashed at top speed in impossible scrawl on tiny blue note cards (when she ran out of space she borrowed the old technique of turning the cards on their sides and writing on the perpendicular, between her previous lines). She made no bones about how she felt: ‘Just the tiniest note in the world to carry the biggest amount of love to the finest and most loveable man.’
When Kingsley went to a conference in Pittsburgh shortly after their engagement, she chafed under her sister Ruth’s watchful eye and literally counted the hours until he returned to New York, unembarrassed that she was 35 and carrying on like a teenager. ‘Sweet adorable Kingsley (I just can’t be proper anymore) are you never coming back to me?’ Further down she added, ‘I must wait forty-four hours before you can hold me in your arms again. That would or should solicit tears from a stone (Lucky Ruth does not censure this note!).’ The day before, she promised him that she was getting fat and rosy and lonesome in his absence. This she later amended, insisting ‘I’m not getting fat and rosy. I’m only getting lonesomer and lonesomer and LONESOMER.’
For Lucy, such declarations must have been the equivalent of going out on an emotional limb, for until she met Kingsley she practised a degree of independence unusual for women of her time and, especially, class. She worked as a schoolteacher – by choice, certainly not financial necessity – teaching elementary students at a private school in New York City. In one of her letters she tried to tease Kingsley into coming along to help her hunt for subjects and predicates during a grammar lesson. That she continued teaching, possibly against her parents’ wishes, certainly against her friends’ – one was scandalized that she kept it up after her engagement – suggests that Lucy, too, chafed against the world into which she was born. ‘I never leaned so willingly on anything’, she wrote to Kingsley before their wedding, ‘as I did on your protective care. And can it be I am to have that always, Kingsley, dear?’
After their marriage and honeymoon at Lake George, in New York State – snapshots show Lucy looking uncharacteristically demure, holding a parasol, and Kingsley surprisingly jaunty – the Porters were inseparable, moving always as a pair. When, in 1918, Kingsley was appointed by the French Ministry of Fine Arts to a panel of experts charged with assessing war-damaged medieval monuments (the only foreigner so honoured), Lucy went along and took photographs and made notes. The Porters were based in Paris, where they would remain until the autumn of 1919. It infuriated Lucy to be attending luncheons in the same city where Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau were simultaneously redrawing the world map for the Treaty of Versailles and to be without adequate news sources.
‘I stumble in my groping ignorance,’ she wrote in frustration. ‘I can’t feel it is fair for the ‘‘Little Powers’’ to have only 5 representatives together against two for each of the 5 powers.’ Paris at the time was still very much a city in recovery. Even for the very wealthy a lukewarm bath was reason for celebration; mail delivery was sporadic at best. And Lucy’s French was still a work-in-progress. In February 1919 she wrote of attending a lunch party with one of Kingsley’s colleagues and his family: kind people who were none the less not of the same social class as the Porters. It was the first time Lucy had been able to speak French with abandon in Paris, a feat for which she later berated herself in her journal. ‘I was ashamed’, she wrote, ‘that