Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Anna became a well-known figure in Washington, testifying at great length as a friendly witness before several important committees, discoursing on such varied subjects as the sending of subversive literature through the mails and the effect of sex education in the public school systems of several Northern states. She even had the exhilarating experience of having her girdle pinched in an elevator by a senior Senator from the West. As was inevitable, she was invited to countless dinners, receptions, congresses, and parties, and to all of them Baranov faithfully escorted her. In the beginning, living in the free atmosphere of literary and artistic America, Baranov had seemed to shed the taciturnity that had set in during the last part of his years in Moscow. He laughed frequently, he sang old Red Army songs without much urging, he insisted on mixing Manhattans at the homes of his friends, he spoke up on all subjects with disarming and agreeable gusto. But after a while he began to sink back into his old silences. Munching peanuts, occasionally muttering a monosyllable, he would stand by Anna’s side at parties, watching her closely, listening with strange concentration as she spoke out, clearly and fully, on the destiny of the Republican Party, trends in the theater, and the intricacies of the American Constitution. It was at this time, too, that Baranov began to have trouble sleeping. His weight fell off and he began to work at night.

Half-blind as he was, Suvarnin saw what was happening. Excitedly, he waited for the great day. In advance, he composed once more the stirring tribute to his friend’s genius that he had first written so long ago in Moscow. Suvarnin was one of those writers who hates to see any word of his go unpublished and the fact that nearly twenty years had passed since he had been forced to jettison his appreciation only made him more eager to get it finally into print. Also, it was a great relief to write about painting again, after the long months of Betty Grable and Van Johnson.

On the morning that, Anna being in the city and the house quiet, Baranov came to him and said, “I would like you to come into my studio,” Suvarnin found himself trembling. Stumbling a little, he hurried out of the house and followed Baranov across the driveway to the barn which had been converted into a studio. He peered through his darkening eyes for a long time at the enormous canvas. “This,” he said humbly, “this is the great one. Here,” he took out some manuscript papers from his pocket, “here, read what I have to say about it.”

When he had finished reading his friend’s eulogy, Baranov wiped a tear from his eye. Then he went over to Suvarnin and kissed him. There was no question this time about hiding the masterpiece. Baranov rolled it up carefully, put it in a case, and with Suvarnin at his side, drove in with it to his dealer. However, by silent agreement, he and Suvarnin tactfully refrained from telling Anna anything about the matter.

Two months later Sergei Baranov was the new hero of the world of art. His dealer had to put up velvet ropes to contain the crowds who came to see the green nude. Suvarnin’s tribute now seemed pale and insubstantial in the torrent of adjectives poured out by the other critics. Picasso was mentioned in the same sentence as Baranov countless times and several writers brought up the name of El Greco. Bonwit Teller had six green nudes in their windows, wearing lizard shoes and draped with mink. A Baranov Grapes and Local Cheese, which the painter had sold in 1940 for two hundred dollars, brought fifty-six hundred dollars at an auction. The Museum of Modern Art sent a man around to arrange about a retrospective show. The World Good Will Association, whose letterhead boasted the names of many dozen legislators and leaders of industry, requested it as the leading item in a show of American art which they proposed to send, at government expense, to fourteen European countries. Even Anna, to whom, as usual, no one dared mention the interesting resemblance of painter’s wife and painter’s model, seemed pleased, and for a whole evening allowed Baranov to speak without interrupting once.

At the opening of the show of American art, which was being revealed in New York preliminary to its trip overseas, Baranov was the center of attention. Photographers took his picture in all poses, toying with a Manhattan, munching on a smoked salmon canapé, talking to the wife of an Ambassador, looking up gravely at his masterpiece, surrounded by admirers. It was the crowning moment of his life and if he had been struck dead that midnight he would have expired happily. In fact, later on, looking back at that evening, from the vantage point of the events that followed, Baranov often bitterly wished that he had died that night.

For, one week later, on the floor of Congress, an economy-minded representative, enraged at what he called the irresponsible money-squandering proclivities of the Administration, which had put up good American dollars to send this sinister travesty on America to our late allies, demanded a thorough investigation of the entire enterprise. The lawmaker went on to describe the main exhibit, a green nude by a Russian foreigner, as sickening twaddle, Communist-inspired, an insult to American womanhood, a blow to White Supremacy, atheistic, psychological, un-American, subversive, Red-Fascistic, not the sort of thing he would like his fourteen-year-old daughter to see either alone or accompanied by her mother, decadent, likely to inspire scorn for the Republic of the United States in foreign breasts, calculated aid to Stalin in the cold war between America and the Soviet Union, a slap in the face to the heroes of the Berlin air lift, injurious to trade, an offense to our neighbors to the South, artistic gangsterism, a natural result of our letting down our immigration barriers, proof of the necessity of Federal censorship of the press, the radio, and the movies, and a calamitous consequence of the Wagner Labor Relations Act.

Other developments followed quickly. A conservative, mellow-voiced radio commentator, broadcasting from Washington, announced that he had warned the country over and over again that New Deal paternalism would finally spawn just such monstrosities and hinted darkly that the man responsible for the painting had entered the United States illegally, being put ashore from a submarine by night with a woman he alleged to be his wife.

Several newspaper chains took up the matter in both their editorial and news columns, sending their least civil employees down to the Baranov farm to question the culprit and reporting that a samovar stood in a place of honor in the Baranov living room and that the outside of the studio was painted red. One editor demanded to know why no cover from the Saturday Evening Post was included in the collection of paintings. Leaders of the American Legion filed a formal protest against sending the paintings in question over to the lands where our boys had fought so bravely so shortly before and pointing out that Baranov was not a veteran.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities served a subpoena on both Baranovs and put a tap on their telephone wires, hiring a man who knew Russian to monitor it. At the hearing, it was brought out that Baranov in 1917, 1918, and 1919 had served in the Red Army, and the Bureau of Immigration was publicly denounced for allowing such doubtful human material into the country. Ministers of all three religions circulated a petition calling upon the government to halt the shipment of the paintings to Europe, a place which all knew was badly shaken in the department of religious faith as it was. A well-known jurist was quoted as saying he was tired of modern art experts and that he could paint a better picture than the green nude with a bucket of barn paint and a paper-hanger’s brush. A psychiatrist, quoted in a national magazine, said that the painting in question had obviously been done by a man who felt rejected by his mother and who had unstable and violent tendencies which were bound to grow worse with the years. The FBI threw in a squad of investigators who conducted interviews with seventy-five friends of the Baranovs and discovered that the couple had subscriptions to the Book-of-the-Month Club, House and Garden , and the Daily News , and that they often spoke Russian in front of their servants.