From then on, the sky seemed made of another blue, and the clouds, too, were a different white, with tones of yellow in them. Yellow is the true color of spring, not green, the new grass, the clouds, the misty, sunny air, the sticky buds like little feathers on the trees, are mixed with yellow tone, with the haze of sun and earth and water. Green is for summer, blue for fall.
***
I smiled at him across the table. “I’m only beginning to think about things like that,” I said.
“Well,” he said unhappily, “I wish you wouldn’t. The artist ought not to think so much. It’s bad for his color sense.”
Having watched and reviewed the old movie, “Portrait of Jennie,” a few days ago, I went and got the original novella. It’s better than the movie, even better than I remembered.
The film veers off from the book toward the end, but it starts pretty much the same. On a winter’s day in Manhattan in the 1930s, Eben Adams, a struggling artist, meets a strange little girl dressed in oddly antique clothing. The sketch he draws of her the next day becomes the first work of his that a particular art dealer finds interesting. On the basis of this sale, he begins an increasingly successful period of his career. Occasionally through that winter he meets the little girl again, and each time she is visibly a few years older. Gradually he realizes (as she seems to know from the start) that they are living in different timelines, which cross occasionally. She is “hurrying,” she tells him, to grow up in time to catch up with him.
In the movie, Eben goes to visit the convent school she attended, where he learns from a sympathetic old nun that Jennie studied there decades before, but died in a hurricane on Cape Cod. That is a departure from the book, where Eben goes to Cape Cod for artistic inspiration, and has his final encounter with Jenny there unexpectedly. In my opinion, the book’s ending worked better. (Another change the film made is changing Eben’s friend Gus from a Jew to an Irishman. Thus we lose Gus’s ruminations on the “tough break” God handed his people.)
Aside from the entrancing, fantasy love story, the great pleasure of Portrait of Jennie is the prose. Robert Nathan was a superb literary craftsman. His descriptions reminded me of Sigrid Undset – he revels in detail, in texture and scent, but especially in color – as is entirely appropriate for a story narrated by a painter.
I highly recommend Portrait of Jennie. Robert Nathan was Jewish, but there was almost nothing in his meditations on God and eternity that I disagreed with.
