In New York last weekend to see The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the opera that opened the season at the Met. Despite the lukewarm review from The New York Times. Clay is homosexual, but it’s a secret he doesn’t accept, and his torment fits with what one would expect from a story set during World War II—and which, inevitably, disappoints today. But the music and the orchestra conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin are excellent. The hall was packed, and the applause at the end must have pleased the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, who is betting on contemporary works to restore his company’s finances. The review in the TLS is rather positive.
On the way back, during my flight, I took the opportunity to read Stan and Gus by historian Henry Wiencek (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2025), which retraces the careers and lives of architect Stanford White and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, influential figures in New York’s renewal during the Gilded Age. The former designed the Washington Square Arch; the latter created The Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C. I found a copy at McNally Jackson bookstore, at Rockefeller Center. Here are a few excerpts:
What began as a professional collaboration became an affective bond and, at least at times, an erotic relationship. In his letters, Stan addresses Gus as “Beloved,” then “Doubly Beloved” and “Sweetest.” Gus addresses Stan as “Beloved Beauty” and “Darling,” closing one letter, “Once more and for the 5999th time you can kiss me.” Atop a letter to Gus, Stan sketches the two of them exuberantly racing into each other’s arms. Gus signs a letter with a long row of erect phalluses. Both men, though married, had many lovers, which was not uncommon in their circle of artists, models, actors, theater producers, and wealthy patrons of the arts. Their shifting sexual and emotional relationships defy labels. Both Stan and Gus had a romantic relationship with an architect in White’s firm, Joseph Wells. Gus fathered a son with his model and mistress Davida Clark, whose face was the face of Diana. He had a separate life with this second family, which for a time he was able to keep secret from his wife, Gussie. Stan deployed his superlative decorative skills for a relentless pursuit of young women in apartments specifically designed for seduction, with sumptuous furniture, mirrors, subtle lighting, and in one apartment a red velvet swing suspended from the ceiling. It was crucial for both of them to keep their private lives secret. Though Manhattan was awash in hedonism and infidelities, it was a hypocritical age. Had their sexual adventures been exposed, their careers would have ended.
If Gus didn’t already know it, he learned after his arrival in Paris that men could be sexually attracted to him. Alfred Garnier, a fellow student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, fell in love with Saint-Gaudens at first sight and pursued him passionately. “What was it attracted me to him?” Garnier would later reflect. “Was it his face? Was it his eyes, so frank, so candid? Yes, perhaps it was his eyes.” Interestingly, Garnier called his feeling for Saint-Gaudens his “demon” and wrote “I ridiculed myself” for pursuing him.
Gus returned to Rome with enough income to rent the Barberini studio and pay assistants to carve portrait busts and copies of Roman statues for rich American tourists. Meanwhile he made a statue of Mozart playing the violin in the nude, a composition that Gus couldn’t explain. “Why under heaven I made him nude is a mystery,” he would write later. He was falling in love with his models, counting up five different affairs, the last one with a woman named Angelina, who refused his offer to elope.
A desperate stage in Saint-Gaudens’s frenzy of destruction and creation had come in February 1890 when he demolished the figure [The Adams Memorial] several times. What provoked him? On February 2, Joseph Wells died as suddenly and unexpectedly as Clover, and Gus began to frantically remake the face of the figure. Perhaps he subsumed his “adored love” into this ambiguous figure. Called “the most beautiful thing ever fashioned by the hand of man on this continent,” perhaps it is simultaneously a memorial to heterosexual marriage and to a lost male lover, a declaration that love’s union has no gender; and it contains the unspeakable anguish of its maker.