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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Two wealthy gay 20th century lives, July 9, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Both: A Portrait in Two Parts (Hardcover)
"Both" is the portrait, written by a devoted friend, of two wealthy gay men, two men bound by love, inherited wealth (well, one was disinherited for being gay), and a passion for botany. They met as schoolboys at the British "public" school of Harrow, and maintained their intimate friendship through their college years, Dwight Ripley at Oxford and Rupert Barnaby at Cambridge. Devoted to alpine gardening and the identification and collection of new species of plants, the two roamed the hills of Spain after college, and later of Nevada, making significant contributions. The fates of their gay friends, often binational partners, during the Nazi years in Europe are described, and we do get an interesting glimpse at what life was like for wealthy gay men in pre-WWII England -- privileged but criminal. But as far as the two being gay, this is almost the last reference to the fact in the book.
Ripley became an artist whose style was precise, fanciful and delightfully imaginative, as was his poetry. Thanks to his wealth, generosity and his own artistic endeavors, the two became involved in the avant garde New York art scene of the abstract expressionist years after 1950 and were intimates of Peggy Guggenheim, Clement Greenberg, and a host of other notable personalities. As a loving portrait, though, we don't get fully rounded characters. We have no idea, for example, of their attitude toward the hoi polloi -- something which we polloi might well be curious about, particularly because when allowed to speak for themselves they come across as being effete -- or of much else besides art and botany. The two seem to be removed from the world going on around them -- not one word about either the Stonewall riots or the Vietnam War, or anything else going on in the larger world with a few brief exceptions at the end of the book. Atmospheric atomic bomb testing destroyed much of the diversity of plant life in their Nevada collecting area which caused them great anguish. While on a plant collecting trip to Mexico in 1968 Ripley experienced and was dismayed by the mounting military juggernaut against the students at the National University which ended with the killing of 300 demonstrators. And his just outrage is directed at the mindless destruction of the natural world by the atomic bomb testing and by blind uncontrolled land development, and he'd only experienced the run-up to what has since mushroomed unabated. Ripley though obtusely blamed the common man, rather than the economic system, for the latter.
Despite these limitations, those interested in the personalities of the New York art world of that era, and of the unusual devotion of two people to the esoteric passion of botanic collecting and taxonomy, will find the book interesting.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A perfect match, August 24, 2006
This review is from: Both: A Portrait in Two Parts (Hardcover)
I first heard of Dwight Ripley about 20 years ago from a friend, the poet Harold Norse, who was then writing his memoirs. Norse reported that he, Ripley, to get a date with him, Harold, who was playing hard to get, and Ripley finally asked, well, what would it take to get you to go out with me? And thinking on his feet Harold said shyly, I guess a Picasso. And a day or so later a messenger brought a Picasso to his tenement door. (This story was much better told, by Norse himself, in his autobiography MEMOIRS OF A BASTARD ANGEL.)
I can't imagine a biographer better suited to tell the life of Dwight Ripley (and the conjoined life of his partner, the botanist Rupert Barneby) than Douglas Crase, for whom this project is so evidently a labor of love.
The two men were fabulously wealthy, and have long ago passed into legend, legend of the Augaean sort from which it would take Hercules to extricate them. Crase makes a good case for his thesis that Ripley's drawings with colored pencil are worthy of further study. Of course he hardly helped his credibility as an artist by bankrolling the gallery (Tibor de Nagy) which showed his work. And everyone knew it, or so it seems. No wonder people thought of him primarily as an eccemrtic Daddy Warbucks with a blushing problem.
Meanwhile Rupert was discovering new specimens of plants and designing dramatic garden vistas.
Crase tries to pry back the curtains of myth and show us the sometimes troubled, more often perfect relationship between the two men, and to argue that they were quite accomplished. "Yes, but" is this reader's response. Sure, they did good work, but with that kind of bankroll, they might have conquered cancer! I suppose this isn't a very fair response to BOTH, and it's one that Crase answers sensibly but noting that, while Fitzgerald told us that the rich are different than you and I, the truth is that WE are different when we're around the rich.
Anyone who loves plants, art, mad queens, money or Marie Menken and Willard Maas will enjoy this book immensely. I know I did.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A contrapuntal masterpiece about two polymaths, January 12, 2011
This review is from: Both: A Portrait in Two Parts (Hardcover)
Rupert Barneby was arguably one of the greatest botanists of the 20th Century. Dwight Ripley was a polymath who excelled in horticulture, music, language and painting. The infinitely complex interplay of these two giants of 20th Century Anglo-American culture is wonderfully limned by Douglas Crase's lucid prose. Ripley and Barneby began their relationship as plant obsessed youngsters in a Public School, and Ripley's parents early demise left them with vast means at a young age to pursue their mutual obsession with rare plants in the Mediterranean. World War II caused them to relocate to Los Angeles, whence they began their epic explorations of Western America. The scope of this book did not justify a detailed description of the numerous expeditions they were to mount across Western America over the next few decades where they made countless discoveries of species new to science, and rediscovered and enormously expanded the knowledge of Western American flora. I hope some day such a book will be written based on Ripley's superb articles in the Alpine Garden Society bulletin and from herbarium vouchers on plants they collected. It would be fascinating reading. During this process, Barneby (with no formal botanical training) became the acknowledged dean of New York Botanical Gardens and world authority on the Bean Family. His enormous professional productivity--curation of a vast herbarium, prodigious scholarly monographs--contrasts dramatically with Ripley's substance abuse which diminished his productivity. Ripley died without completing his magnum opus, a vast dictionary of colloquial plant names. Crase reveals, however, that when they moved to New York City in the late 1940's Ripley provided generous support to many of the artists and galleries that fostered the artistic renaissance of that city. Indeed, one can speculate that they were both a major force in the Apotheosis of the Big Apple as cultural center. I was riveted reading about the fascinating interactions of these two enormously talented minds: with such similar tastes and temperaments, why did Barneby thrive, producing a vast body of literature and accomplishment over the last century while Ripley became stymied in middle age? This book is a testament to the complexity of relationship. I was privileged to know Barneby personally, one of the most brilliant men I have ever known. Ripley was his match: one cannot help but ponder how and why he sacrificed so much of his own genius. Anyone who is interested in botany, horticulture or the American art scene at a crucial junction in the 20th Century would surely find this book to be a revelation. If you are intrigued with genius, this book delivers a double dose. A masterpiece!
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