Books: Mother's Boy

WHISTLER: A BIOGRAPHY

by STANLEY WEINTRAUB

498 pages. Weybright & Talley. $12.50.

"Why are you so unpleasant?" a female admirer once asked James McNeill Whistler. "My dear, I will tell you a secret," the cocky 5-ft. 4-in. American painter replied. "Early in life I made the discovery that if one is delightful, one has to thrust the world away to keep from being bored to death."

There was rarely any danger of boredom in Whistler's vicinity. He spent most of his 69 years as an expatriate in England and France working as hard on his bon mots as on his canvases and copper plates. It was entirely fitting that when his collected correspondence was published in 1890, it was entitled The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Whistler was one of the most vengeful litigants since Shylock. "When I pay you six-and-eightpence, I pay you six-and-eightpence for law, not justice," he once told his solicitor, who had dared suggest that his client be fair.

A number of good reasons for Whistler's waspishness are suggested in this sturdy biography by Professor Stanley Weintraub, who has also written books about Oscar Wilde and G.B. Shaw. Whistler was sensitive about his size, uncertain about his talents and resentful toward an art establishment that refused to recognize him. Though he liked to see himself as a descendant of American Southern gentlemen, Whistler was born in Lowell, Mass., in 1834, the son of a West Point-trained engineering officer and a mother who, despite her North Carolina heritage, was a prototypical God-fearing Yankee.

He followed his father to West Point, but was dismissed for flunking chemistry. "Had silicon been a gas," he later quipped, "I would have been a major general." Even as a cadet Whistler devoted his serious efforts only to drawing. After leaving the Academy, he worked briefly at the U.S. Coast Survey in Washington where, to the exasperation of the director, he embellished his otherwise excellent map etchings with sea serpents and gulls.

In 1855 he packed a flashy cape, white duck suit and wide-brimmed hat and sailed for Europe, never to return. In France Whistler began groping toward an impressionistic style that eventually matured in a series of nightscapes he called "Nocturnes." It was just such a painting that got Whistler into trouble with British Critic John Ruskin in 1875. "I have seen, and heard, much of the cockney impudence before now," Ruskin told a gallery director, "but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask 200 guineas for slinging a pot of paint in the public's face." At a celebrated libel trial, during which the painting (The Falling Rocket) was exhibited upside down, the 44-year-old Whistler argued that his asking price was for the knowledge of a lifetime. Whistler won the case—and was granted one farthing in damages.