More Finger

I think Uncle John would have enjoyed The Finger: A Handbook, just as he got a big kick out of A Brief History of the Smile. During the 1970s, when he worked for Roy Barling as an antique dealer in Mount Street, Mayfair, Uncle John made occasional purchases of modest Greek and Roman antiquities from the Astarte Gallery in Grosvenor Square, long before they went exclusively on-line. He sold most of them before he died, but about fifteen years ago Uncle John gave me this rather fetching ring, ostensibly late Roman. The gesture was characteristically generous. He had polished it up to a burnished splendor, and it looked remarkably like gold—but since then it has tarnished into the unavoidable reality of brass, and why would any self-respecting Roman goldsmith create a signet ring out of brass? In this instance, the “late” in “late Roman,” is I suspect nearer to 1958 than A.D. 458, but fortunately I am very interested in fakes, so I wear it occasionally with some amusement, thinking of Uncle John busying himself at the kitchen table with a bottle of Brasso and an old duster. Naturally it causes some confusion, because the only finger I can wear it on is the ring, and alas there’s absolutely no significance there, and never has been—although I live in hope. Anyhow, ancient jewels, whether genuine or not, make a special claim upon our attention. Prized by a savage creditor from the fat finger of some failed Levantine merchant? Stolen from the sarcophagus of a Roman matron? Exchanged for a handsome slave—a body servant, perhaps—in the old market at Damascus? Won by an Egyptian courtesan in a crooked game of dice? Or lately hammered out (along with 150 others) by a Neapolitan racketeer with solid connections in Zurich, and a battered vespa? It doesn’t really matter to me personally, and fortunately my art museum is not in the dodgy business of Greek and Roman antiquities. And nor was Uncle John. His special province was medieval French, German, and Spanish furniture and objets d’art. For many years the Begum Aga Khan asked him to select a suitable Christmas present for her husband Those objects were destined for their house in Paris. I imagine most of them are still there, reflecting John Borthwick’s exquisitely monkish taste. I’m sorry I never asked him why on earth the Aga Khan observed or even acknowledged Christmas. The first Begum was actually an Englishwoman; I suppose that is the reason.

The Finger Again

On special occasions, such as the recent publication of The Finger: A Handbook, or A Brief History of the Smile, I wear this ring, which was made for me some years ago by the distinguished Australian silversmith Marcus Foley. By coincidence, Marcus and his partner Dore Stockhausen live with their family at Nungurner, on the Gippsland Lakes, quite close to the spot where we spent our summer holidays growing up at Metung. But I first met Marcus in Adelaide. I want to say it was through my colleague Christopher Menz, who was then curator of decorative arts, or maybe it was through our mutual friend the jeweler Nele Schmidt-Teuteberg. I cannot now recall. Anyhow, to this ring attaches a story. In the Upper Pleisticine era, when in Melbourne I worked as a civilian aide to the Governor, Davis McCaughey, someone broke one of the shapely Minton cream jugs from the enormous Government House service, and Mr. Young the butler, formerly of the Coldstream Guards, tossed it in the rubbish. Now mark this: I did not break it, someone else did. But prudently I retrieved the pieces, and in due course had them invisibly mended. The only problem: there is no such thing as invisible mending. For years it sat in a cupboard, the mends gradually becoming more and more visible. Then I had the bright idea of commissioning Marcus to harvest the vice-regal badge on the shoulder and the pale blue stripe around the rim and turn them into a ring and matching cufflinks. The badge is slightly off-center because that is where the break ran. It is the perfect souvenir of those happy, happy days at Government House, Melbourne—that and my photograph of the late and much lamented Cocky McGrath. The badge itself consists of part of the personal cypher of Queen Victoria, surrounded by the garter and motto HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE, the whole surmounted by the crown of St. Edward, in other words a suitably pompous emblem for a young and ambitious colony of settlers that was for a while awash with gold.

The Cheshire cat again

The earliest printed reference to the Cheshire cat’s grin evidently comes in 1792 in the concluding lines of Peter Pindar’s A Pair of Lyric Epistles to Lord Macartney and His Ship:

Yet, if successful, thou wilt be ador’d –
Lo, like a Cheshire cat our Court will grin!
How glad to find as many gems on board,
As will not leave thee room to stick a pin.

Pindar, whose real name was John Wolcott, was referring playfully to the British government’s high expectations of the magnificent, but ultimately unsuccessful diplomatic mission of Lord Macartney to China, which sailed in September 1792 on board the 64-gun Lion. Some years later the essayist Charles Lamb remarked in a letter to Thomas Manning dated February 26, 1808, that his friend the dramatist Thomas Holcroft “grinned like a Cheshire cat.” Interestingly Holcroft was himself responding to a humorous remark about the cat. “Why do cats grin in Cheshire?” Lamb continued. “Because it was once a county palatine and the cats cannot help laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.” An English ‘county palatine’ was a county over which an earl or lord originally had royal privileges with the right of exclusive civil and criminal jurisdiction. Presumably Lamb’s cat laughs at the disjunction between this ‘palatine’ status and modern, more bucolic realities. The phrase also crops up in chapter 24 of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes: Memoir of a Most Respectable Family (1855). There it is applied to a character who smiles “with all her might.” I am not quite sure where this leaves us, but I suppose it adds a little glimmer of extra light to the section about Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, and the bizarre grin that makes a walk-on appearance in his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For reasons that I cannot now recall, that excursus needed to be excised from the chapter about deceit in my last book, A Brief History of the Smile. The thing about collateral losses of this kind is that they represent quite a lot of hard work, and I suppose the genius of blogging is that you can dust them off and put them in a place where interested parties can find and use them.