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Thursday
I was pleasantly surprised recently to see Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s niece and vocal critic, using a Robert Browning poem to understand our current turmoil. She also uses it to understand her own father since, like the Italian painter Andrea del Sarto, he never lived up to his potential. In Mary’s case, her dysfunctional family and the current state of the nation are connected: while her father had more substance, the parents preferred their flashier but less talented younger son.
Mary draws a parallel between her father, who died a disappointed alcoholic, and her country, which she sees as failing to live up to the challenges of the present moment. Like del Sarto, both are trapped in a “common greyness” that “silvers everything.”
Using the dramatic monologue form for which he was famous, Browning captures the lament of a painter who is good but not great. While the del Sarto in the poem has perfect technique, he lacks that special something—inspiration, soul—that marks his contemporaries Raphael and Michelangelo. The poem shows him whining to his wife about how (to borrow from Marlon Brando) he could have been a contender. For his failures, del Sarto blames everything from Lucrezia to his own lack of effort to external circumstances to inner limitations. “Important to Browning’s project,” Mary writes,
is del Sarto’s grappling with recognition—and his unwillingness to accept—that the extraordinary talents he possesses are not enough, have never been enough, in and of themselves to elevate his art to the level of the sublime. His dawning awareness that he is ultimately the only one responsible for having squandered his potential, and the reasons for his having squandered, remains beyond his ability to acknowledge.
Mary recognizes Fred Trump II in the monologue, especially the lines
I do what many dream of, all their lives,
—Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing.
She writes,
Those lines, and the tone of resignation that runs throughout the poem, reminded me of my father and the fact that his extraordinary accomplishments ended up being for naught. As he floundered, his unaccomplished and unworthy younger brother usurped his position and his fortune.
“One of the diseases that ravaged my family,” she elaborates, “was the delusion that Donald of all people was great, while somebody like my father was a loser. When families operate in service to perpetuating such delusions, you get a thin-skinned, constantly aggrieved bully.”
Of more interest to most of us is how Mary applies the poem to our present moment. Just as Andrea del Sarto is in the twilight of a disappointing career—his sober landscape paintings are pleasant enough—so this 250-year-old democracy is dwindling from great to something merely good:
A common greyness silvers everything,—
All in a twilight, you and I alike
—You, at the point of your first pride in me
(That’s gone you know),—but I, at every point;
My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down
To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole.
The poem, Mary notes, is in part a meditation on the idea that greatness without effort is unsustainable. “If you believe you possess a greatness that is immanent,” she writes, “there is no need to strive to be good.” This is our situation:
American exceptionalism is based on the belief that this country is de facto superior to other countries, that our way of being—our culture, our beliefs—should never be challenged and changed. This has led to complacency and a failure to challenge the status quo. Worse, it has led to an insupportable arrogance and a steady degradation of the things upon which our ideas of being exceptional are based.
Browning’s poem concludes with Lucrezia leaving del Sarto for her lover. As America withdraws into isolation, the rest of the world is looking elsewhere for leadership, with economist Paul Krugman recently observing that Trump is managing “to make China great again.”
Can this trend be reversed? The most famous passage from “Andrea del Sarto” is “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?” What’s important is the striving. But as Mary points out, the lines that follow reveal what happens once the striving ends:
All is silver-grey,
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
Make America Great Again is a longing for the past, not a striving toward a future. “Placid and perfect” describes the Mayfield of Leave It to Beaver, not a country capable of rising to the challenges of the 21st century.
“We might have risen to Rafael, I and you!” del Sarto says to his wife at one point. We can relate only too well to his sorrow over what could have been.
