Dear Diary:
The Milkmaid (I)
A good day, lots done — it began, really, last night, when I went to the Museum with Ms NOLA. I had a ticket for two to a members’ preview for the new small show, The Milkmaid. Built entirely around one not-very-large Vermeer, on loan for a month or two from the Rijksmuseum, the show gathers the five Vermeers that the Museum already owns (only two of which really compete with The Milkmaid — although I’m very fond of The Woman with a Lute) together with a few other thematically related pictures by Ter Borch, de Hooch, and so on. The paintings don’t begin to fill the available wall space, which gives the show an air of desperation that we may learn to see as something else.
The Milkmaid isn’t the picture that I should have chosen to borrow from Amsterdam — that would have been The Little Street, a picture that I must have looked at for twenty minutes when I stood in front of it, in 2002. The milkmaid has always made me feel uncomfortably warm. She seems to be perspiring, and her jacket looks like a corset. But Walter Liedtke’s bulletin-length essay, which I was reading earlier this evening, is increasing my appreciation. I’m learning to regard the milkmaid as chaste and serene.
The Milkmaid, which I’m pretty sure I saw often as a child, on the walls of older people’s apartments, also makes me feel uncomfortably stifled, as if I were living in a room whose windows could not be opened. When I was little, chaste serenity was not much of an attraction. It would have been beyond me to suppose that the serving girl hated her job and felt underpaid, but I could see that she was expected to Be Good. I associated being good with frustration. You could try all you liked, but you would never, ever want to Be Good. It goes without saying that Being Good involved fantastically unnatural behavior, such as Sitting Still and Being Quiet. And wearing excruciatingly itchy wool trousers. As a sort of not-really reward, Being Good featured the bonus-points feature called Offering It Up.
This will sound like a child’s complaint about the relative dullness of adult life, but as I saw it, the adults were the real sufferers. They had simply given up, capitulated, lowered the drawbridge and allowed tedium to overrun the citadel. Adults could no longer help Being Good. Their artificial smiles would always make horror-film zombies look amateurish by comparison. You can still see the kind of meaninglessness that I’m talking about in the smirks of society dames (never the heroines) in movies from the early Thirties. These women were still living in the Twenties.
You may think of the Twenties as a decade of gin, jazz, and chrome, but it was in fact the terminal moraine of respectability. Moated by Prohibition, the American home attained unimagined levels of stupefied entropy. The choice of colors was limited to sepia and écru. Your mother’s hemline might reveal a bit of darkly-stockinged ankle, but from there on up she was either a scarecrow or a Hefty Bag stuffed with down pillows.
The silver lining in all of this came from living in the Fifties. Ordinarily, I think a child might have dreaded the future, horrified by the doom of growing up to become a replacement for these older people. In the Fifties, though, it was clear that Nothing Was Going To Be The Same. The drawback to this silver lining was that it made the old people who were going to stay the same seem dead while they were still alive. They were already as chained to Yesterday as was Vermeer’s milkmaid.