By
JOHN SCHERBER
THE DEAD HAND
This is not a
horror piece; it’s about possessions. The Dead Hand is a phrase commonly used
to refer to the attempt to control things, usually real estate or earthly
goods, from the grave. It says, yes, we know we can’t take it with us, but
we’re damn well going to define it’s used before we go.
A classic case
was that of the Barnes Foundation. This is a Philadelphia organization
established by Albert Barnes, a chemist who had made a fortune by inventing a
cure for gonorrhea––this was before antibiotics. He was also a man of perceptive
taste who assembled a world-class collection of paintings and decorative
objects. He bought the Impressionists, and the early moderns, such as
Modigliani, Picasso, and Matisse. In the early twenties he built a museum to house
his collection and opened it to students and scholars by appointment.
He was also a
control freak. Each painting or object had its precisely assigned place and
couldn’t be moved. Nothing could be sold or added after his death in 1951.
Nothing could go on tour, and Barnes forbade color reproductions of any of the
pictures. Visitors had to apply by letter for admission. Barnes had a
friendship with the president of Lincoln University, a distinguished black
college in Pennsylvania, and in his will he required that four out of the five
seats on the board of directors would be reserved for faculty of that school,
although they were experts neither in art nor museum management.
By 1961
pressure was growing to update the mandate of the Foundation, and for the first
time the general public was admitted in strictly limited numbers on a few days
each week. By the 1980s it was clear that the endowment Barnes had left was
inadequate to maintain the building and the program. The limited admission fees
did not make up the shortfall. The roof was failing and the collection was
urgently in need of better security. (Think of the Gardner Museum robbery in
Boston.) The board of directors, controlled by Lincoln University members, was
not able to deal effectively with these issues, since what was needed were experts
in the field. A lengthy court battle in 1992 opened the way to put a number of
paintings on tour to raise money. In 2002, after a decade of squabbles, the
management went to court in an effort to break the will. This challenge was
ultimately successful. Today the collection is worth about $25 billion.
I won’t go into
any more detail of the Barnes wars, which were nasty and prolonged, but it
illustrates in stark relief the way the dead hand can impede the natural
development of the future.
What I focus on
in this story is ownership. Does it not mean control? Wasn’t Albert Barnes’
will only a way of maintaining that control long after his death? What right
did he have to exercise such rigid restrictions over some of the best art
produced in the last 150 years, none of it by him?
We are heir to
the European tradition of ownership. We enjoy things within certain limits when
we’re alive and we can dispose of them to some degree when we die. This
tradition is not universal. When Europeans under Henry Hudson arrived in what
is now the United States in 1609, they assumed that the local hunter and
gatherer indigenous people had the same concept of property they did. But the
Indians on Manhattan Island, who accepted $24 worth of beads for the property,
were surely focused on the beads, and had no idea that the land could be
disposed of.
The Barnes
Collection, in my view, is part of the cultural heritage of all of us. It
contains Picassos that Barnes bought for $300. It can be displayed, reproduced,
taken on tour, placed on line, but it cannot be dictated by the dead to be privately
hoarded away from the public eye.
What happens
when the objects are made by the
owner rather than purchased? Is the quality of ownership then different?
An example is
Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, who died in 2000. The Peanuts comic
strips brought Schultz many millions of dollars during his lifetime, and it
acquired an iconic cultural value worldwide that continues today. The family
has turned it into an even larger business. Now new Peanuts material is being
generated all the time. But is it really Peanuts? Schultz is gone. The people
generating new episodes cannot get into his mind.
It is common
when a popular author dies, that if he has an unfinished manuscript in process,
his publisher will find another author to finish it. I can understand this,
because it does add, if only partially, another legitimate element to the
author’s bibliography. But is it proper for that publisher to then cut a deal with
the dead author’s heirs, and go on producing more books featuring that author’s
characters, but conceived and written by strangers?
I don’t think
so, and here are two reasons why. First, the new material is generated by a
different sensibility, a different life history, a different way of thinking, and
cannot deliver the same experience to the reader. Second, this faked effort of
a dead writer takes the place of new material by writers who cannot get access
to New York publishers for a variety of reasons. One might be that, being at an
earlier stage of their career, they don’t have the following of even a faked
book by a dead author. Yet, the New York publishers are insistent on
positioning themselves as the gatekeepers of good writing, even as they impede
the reader’s access to new work.
This reminds me of the way Hollywood
produces remakes of old popular classics every generation or so. They do this
because they feel it’s safe. Each
time this happens, some talented person’s original idea does not see daylight.
Is there really only limited room? When I started writing mysteries I was told
by a NY agent that only one new mystery writer was admitted to publication each
year.
If it were up
to me, the author’s character would die with the author. He cannot be replaced,
only mimicked. He stays available on the page in the library or the bookstore,
but we ought not to allow others to make plaster casts of his body and sell
them as if he were still having new adventures. If he ends with his author,
then that makes room on the stage for the next bright creative person’s effort.
We will miss the older character even as we applaud the arrival of his
replacement.
The author’s
legacy is his original work, and it is bequeathed to everyone. But his concept belongs to him and his creative
process alone. He may legitimately grasp that much in his dead hand. Imitation
in this case is not flattery, it is theft.
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