...We've all had the experience of meeting someone, only to discover what a small world it is. They dated your cousin, or you have friends in common, or you are connected by some other uncanny coincidence. It's not six degrees of separation, often its just one or two.
With even a passing familiarity with things Japanese, that's what it is like reading "The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese eccentrics and the Opening of Old Japan" by Christopher Benfey.
On nearly every page Mr. Benfey introduces an American intellectual, writer or artist, or fact, or Japanese artifact, or incident, that makes the reader smile in wonder at the web of connection.
Mr. Benfey looks at how a wealthy circle of New England friends and relatives introduced Japan to the United States. Aptly named for the Hokusai print, evoking the tsunami - the social and cultural tidal wave that crashed across the United States and over Old Japan - Mr. Benfey has put together a cultural puzzle, linking Herman Melville, John Manjiro, Isabella Gardner, Henry Adams, John LeFarge, Lafcadio Hearn, Kakuzuo Okakura, Frank Lloyd Wright, Emily Dickinson, Theodore Roosevelt and a dozen others, mostly friends, relatives, lovers and schoolmates, who made it happen.
The book opens with one such coincidence.
Herman Melville boarded the whaling ship Acushnet, in Fairhaven, Mass. Jan. 3, 1841, bound for Japan. Two days later, on the other side of the world, a 14-year-old boy named Manjiro, set out on a day-trip from a fishing village on Shikoku, Japan, only to be caught in a storm, washed out to sea and rescued by an American whaling ship, which eventually took him to Fairhaven.
Coming from opposite sides of the world, they were befriended by the same missionary in Honolulu, missing each the other by a couple of months. Each was destined to be a player in the introducing of East to West, and West to East, Melville with his books, and Manjiro, once back in Japan, as a translator and diplomat.
It would be 13 more years before Commodore Perry sailed into Yokohama harbor to "open" Japan. But from the time Manjiro and Melville passed each other on ships in the night, a handful of individuals, mostly from wealthy New England families, and small group of Japanese diplomats, artists, and writers, were to meet, marry, have affairs, travel, write, collect, catalogue and create art with one another, in an unprecedented intermingling and crosspollination of talent and energy, centered on Japan.
In each chapter of the book, Mr. Benfey picks two individuals and tells their intertwing stories. For example, one chapter is dedicated to Melville and Manjiro. Another to Okakura and Gardner. One of the most fascinating, to my mind, details the lives of Percival Lowell, a Washington astronomer, and Mabel Loomis Todd, who wrote what many consider to be the most erotic diary of the Victorian era. Suffice it to say, you'll never read your Emily Dickinson the same way again.
While the principle characters are familiar as individuals, Mr. Benfey places each in context with the others and Japan. My only complaint is that I wish Mr. Benfey had provided a schematic or genealogy to keep help keep it all straight.
The book is full of surprises.
Washingtonians know Henry Adams, and the Augustus St. Gaudens memorial to his wife "Clover" in Rock Creek Cemetery. Who knew it was inspired by Japan's Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of Mercy, and a trip Adams took to Japan, with the artist John La Farge, after his wife's suicide?
Okukura, who knew India's Rabindranath Tagore, spoke several languages, studied and traveled with Ernest Fenollosa, and scandalized Boston society, with a rumored affair with Isabella Gardner, also collected art for American museums. He produced several books on art, Japanese tea and culture and was something of a cultural ambassador.
He was one of Adams' hosts in Japan, when Adams was traveling with La Farge, who managed to merge East and West in his Church of the Ascension mural in New York, a seminal painting that uses Japan's mountains as background.
His writings influnced at least three American poets: Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
One of my favorite stories in the book is that German philosopher Martin Heidegger after reading Okakura's "The Book of Tea," apparently borrowed some of the concepts that were introduced to the West as his own in "Being and Time."
There is plenty more.
The New England collectors criss-crossed Japan, buying art, religious artifacts, ceramics, prints, and whatever else caught their fancy. The ones bent on preserving the Old Japan, may be most familiar to us today - as we have the Sackler Gallery in Washington, the Gardner Museum in Boston and the Peabody in Salem, all of which grew out of the Asia trade first established by New England whaling captains. who brought home stage and wonderful souvenirs from their travels to exotic lands. The New England collectors added to them to create amazing repositories of Asian art.
I found myself marveling at the web of friendships, kinships, relationships and interests this circles' legacy. The characters in Mr. Benfey's "Great Wave" seemed to know every important artist, diplomat, writer and intellectual in the world. It's an adventure to enter their circle and make their acquaintance.

OK.....we all know from our schooldays that there was a Boston Tea Party. We also know that in Japan they have a very elaborate tea ceremony. Early on in this very clever, erudite, and complex book, the author mentions these two facts. Is there a reason for him to do so? Well, yes, there is. It is one of the many interesting ways that Mr. Benfey shows the connection between Boston and Japan. Merchant ships from Boston (and the surrounding area) were deeply involved in the oriental tea trade. Also, ships from nearby ports were involved in whaling and frequently travelled to the whaling grounds off of Japan. Also, as the author shows, quite a few Boston Brahmins were interested in the culture of "Old Japan." They were disgusted with what they perceived to be the material crassness and lack of spirituality of America, as well as the jarring modernity of the Industrial Age. They wanted to go to Japan and to study the Japanese way of life before Japan, which had recently been "opened" by Commodore Perry, became "westernized." It was felt that there was much to learn by studying the religions of Japan, such as Buddhism and Taoism, as well as Japanese art and architecture. Mr. Benfey describes a few Japanese that travelled to the West, but most of the book details traffic going in the other direction. The author does an excellent job of describing how people as diverse as Henry Adams, Herman Melville, Frank Lloyd Wright, the artist John La Farge, the writer Lafcadio Hearn and the astronomer Percival Lowell (the man we mainly remember for his, erroneous, theory regarding the presence of "canals" on Mars) were shaped or influenced by their journeys to (or study of) the "mysterious East." Mr. Benfey weaves a magisterial tapestry, as he has purposely chosen people whose lives intersected. Thus, in a chain-reaction, one person who has fallen in love with Japan sparks an interest in another person, and so on down the line. So, for example, Percival Lowell influenced, through his writings on Japan, his poet-sister Amy Lowell. Dr. William Sturgis Bigelow, attempting to get Theodore Roosevelt to adopt a pro-Japanese stance, figured it would be best to appeal to the President's aggressive side. (Roosevelt was well-known for not believing that "the meek shall inherit the earth.) In Bigelow's view the smart thing was to steer clear of oriental art and Buddhism and get the President interested in judo and the warrior ethic of the samurai. If the President could be convinced that the Japanese were manly and not effeminate, he might be more inclined to favor them. Bigelow got Roosevelt hooked on judo by pinning him to the floor in his office. Roosevelt set aside a Judo Room in the White House and studied with an authentic Japanese judo master. The enthusiastic Roosevelt even mentioned at a cabinet meeting "that his 'Japanese wrestler' had throat muscles 'so powerfully developed by training that it is impossible for any ordinary man to strangle him.'" Another interesting section of the book details how Frank Lloyd Wright's ideas on architecture were influenced by the traditional Japanese belief in simple lines and the importance of empty space and lack of clutter. Likewise, we see how Ezra Pound's admiration for the succinctness of Japanese poetry was reflected in his own work. One thing that is very interesting about the book is "the eye of the beholder" aspect: people saw what they wanted to. Some people saw the Japanese as warriors and "masculine" , while others saw only the artistic, "feminine" side of the country. Some thought the Japanese were "mere imitators" while others recognized great creativity. Ironically, while some Westerners longed to see "mystical, unspoiled" Japan, the country was busy trying to catch up to the West- but trying to do so without abandoning its traditions. If the book has one weakness, it is that it is too heavily weighted with examples of Westerners travelling East. It would have been enlightening to have learned about the experiences of some more Japanese who journeyed to America. Still, this is a brilliantly conceived and executed book, which shows how culture is spread and that not only "nature abhors a vacuum"- people do, as well. No matter how creative we are, nobody is able to make something out of nothing. We all need something to build on, and to spark our creativity.

Benfey spends less time on the famous French painter Edgar Degas and the alleged influence that New Orleans and his Creole relatives had on his work than he does in relating the story of one of Degas' relatives: a brilliant "quadroon" engineer named Norbert Rillieux who invented an efficient steam-driven apparatus for refining sugar.

When you ignore Benfey's racist use of the term "black" to describe people who are far from it, you find important information about the privileges and oppressions experienced by mixed-race Creoles in 19th century New Orleans. Rillieux (who is often falsely listed as a "black" inventor) was a highly respected professional whose predominate white ancestry allowed him to utilize his talents in a way that would not have been possible if he had been black.

One of Rillieux's close friends and major supporter in Louisiana sugar circles was Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate luminary who later served as Jefferson Davis's Secretary of State. In a nice touch of irony, Benfey compares the image of the "mulatto" in American literature with than of the "Jew" in European literature:

"Almost white, almost free, `oriental,' and effeminate, at once wealthy and a social pariah, the free man of color in his literary depictions occupies much the same place as the Jew in literary Europe. (The first article of the eighteenth-century `Code Noir,' or Black Code demanded the expulsion of the Jews from New Orleans.) Jews and free men of color were difficult to detect; they often LOOKED like white citizens, and passed for such. It was against the radical `otherness' of Jews and free people of color that the proper Englishmen and proper Louisiana Creoles respectively sought to define their own uneasy identity."

Maybe the most important thing for you to know about this book is that it isn't just, or even mostly, about Edgar Degas. If you're in the market solely for an art book about Degas, you may not like this book. What this book is really about is 19th century New Orleans. Degas' 1872-1873 trip is the main theme which the author has used as his framework. Mr. Benfey "improvises" on this theme and goes off in interesting directions. He talks about what made New Orleans unique- the early Creole settlers vs. the "Americans" that arrived after the Louisiana Purchase; the free black population (pre-Civil War) vs. the slaves who became free because of the war; the rupture caused by the war- as New Orleans was occupied by Federal forces through almost all of the conflict. (Many of the local women proved to be fairly feisty in showing their contempt for the Yankees. One woman in the French Quarter supposedly downloaded the contents of a chamber pot onto Admiral Farragut's head. On another occasion, the soldier in charge of keeping order, General Benjamin "Beast" Butler, was riding by some women and they all turned their backs to him. Butler remarked, "those women evidently know which end of them looks best.") After the Civil War the economy, based almost solely on King Cotton, took a beating in the Depression of the 1870's. Yankee "carpetbaggers" were despised. Liberals who wanted integration of the races did battle, sometimes literally, with reactionary forces who yearned for a return to the days of slavery. Mr. Benfey works in some analysis of the writers Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable, who were interested in some of the above themes. The author does devote a fairly good portion of the book to discussing Degas' "Louisiana Connection," (his mother was born in New Orleans; he had relatives who were involved in the cotton trade; and his younger brother, Rene, left France to try to make his fortune in New Orleans). If you enjoy Degas' art, you will find Mr. Benfey's musings on the portraits and "genre scenes" that Degas did during this period to be interesting and informative. For example, from a purely painterly standpoint, Degas enjoyed the juxtaposition of black and white skin, as well as the white of cotton against the black suits and hats commonly worn by businessmen of the time. Mr. Benfey also, convincingly, shows that Degas' started to use, in these paintings, certain compositional effects- such as slanted floors, the arrangement of figures in interior spaces, and certain hand and head movements- that would shortly reappear in the more famous "ballet paintings." We also see Degas in transition from his early "realistic" phase to a looser, more "Impressionistic" style of painting. I also found it interesting that Degas was fascinated by many things he saw while walking around New Orleans, but he was limited mostly to painting interior scenes because the light of New Orleans was bothering his eyes. (He started to have problems with his vision while serving in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. By the time of his death in 1917 he was nearly blind.) There was enough about Degas and his family and art in this book to satisfy me, plus I enjoyed Mr. Benfey's "improvisations." If, in addition to being a Degas fan, you have any interest in the antebellum and post-Civil War worlds of New Orleans, I think you will get a lot of enjoyment and intellectual stimulation from this book.

This book is a wonderful history of Degas and his family. Anyone who loves art and enjoys history of any kind about New Orleans will like this book.