Both: A Portrait in Two Parts

by Douglas Crase

Both is the enchanting account of a remarkable fifty-year Dwight Ripley, the child heir to an American railroad fortune, and Rupert Barneby, the product of a wealthy, baronial English upbringing, shared an obsession with botany from the moment they met at an exclusive boys’ boarding school in England. Together they embarked on a lifelong pursuit of rare plants, first in Europe and then in the United States, where they migrated in the late 1930s. Every spring they explored the American Southwest in a sputtering Dodge, discovering new species and cultivating the spoils at their renowned home gardens. Barneby published so many taxonomic findings that he became a world authority on legumes. But the two men had other interests as they were intimates in the expatriate circles that included W. H. Auden and Peggy Guggenheim, and early collectors of painters such as Jackson Pollock and Joan Miró. Ripley, a prescient artist himself, whose startling work in colored pencil was lost in a trunk for several decades before being rediscovered, used his fortune to bankroll much of the avant-garde art scene of the early 1950s.

The lives of Ripley and Barneby were shaped by a passion for knowing the world in all its lush particulars. Douglas Crase, who received an education in character when he came to know Barneby in the 1970s, offers us not just the brilliantly told story of “both,” but a vivid portrait of the bohemian postwar period they inhabited, bristling with the energy of the new.

Genres: Biography, Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT

320 pages, Hardcover

First published April 6, 2004

About the author

Douglas Crase is known for a single book of poems, The Revisionist.

Born in 1944, Crase grew up on a farm in Michigan, went to Princeton, and planned a career in law. In response to the political turmoil of 1968 he abandoned law school to write the report of the Political Reform Commission of the Michigan Democratic Party. He subsequently served as speechwriter to the Democratic candidate for governor of the state.

As noted in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, he is the Doug in James Schuyler's poem Dining Out with Doug and Frank. For many years he earned a living as a free-lance speechwriter for Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and other corporations. The poems he wrote at the time are informed, according to the Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets, by an "interest in rhetoric" not traditionally associated with poets of that school. When The Revisionist appeared in 1981 its unusual rhetorical address was widely recognized.

Crase followed The Revisionist with essays on favorite writers, including Emerson, Ashbery, and Niedecker. His commonplace book, Amerifil.txt, was published in 1996 and became an example of possibilities in the form. Likewise unusual was Both, his dual biography of artist Dwight Ripley and botanist Rupert Barneby, lifelong partners whose rediscovered story sheds new light on the mid-century art scene in New York.

On his departure from law school Crase was called to the dean's office for an explanation. When he remarked that his classes were boring the dean countered, "My son, ninety per cent of life is boring." Since that interview, he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship for his work. Committed to the city - he was for three years a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities – he also makes time for a mountain stream in Northeast Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Erica · Rating 1 out of 5]

I should have loved this book, because it crosses into so many realms I love: botanical exploration, historical biography; botanical garden interworking and history; high-society Americana in the early 20th century, and gay urban culture and relationships. But starting from the title, this book is muddled and is in sore need of an editor. The title tells us nothing; paragraphs don't have topic sentences and are pages and pages long. It was written by a friend of the two men whose (semi)biographies are written here, and it reads as impressionistic and as having almost no connection to their cultural or historical context. Only made it half way through, as I was constantly irritated at the random name-dropping and having no sense of what these men and their actions meant to those around them.

[James Whitmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is fitting the taxonomic detail that poet and writer Douglas Crase has accumulated about the subjects of this biography of two, the botanist Rupert Barneby and his life partner the poet-artist-linguist-botanist Dwight Ripley. The two, three years apart, met at school in England in the 1920s, Barneby a descendant of the landed British gentry, Ripley the sole inheritor of his great-grandfather’s US railway fortune. They were immediately inseparable. “Together when young,” Crase writes, “they must have looked like ideal casting for Brideshead Revisited”. Barneby was disinherited when he refused to stop seeing Ripley, and from then they lived off the latter’s largesse.Read more on my blog.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a dual biography of two extremely intelligent, gifted, and eccentric individuals, Dwight Ripley and Rupert Barneby. The first was a multifaceted artist, linguist, and poet; the other was a self-taught botanist who eventually ended up LIVING over the garage at the New York Botanical Garden. Both were one of a kind, both were geniuses in their own right, and together (for they were a couple) they created a wholly unusual menage. Rupert was British; Dwight was an American who was brought up in England. The two met and fell in love while at Eton. Rupert said it was because of Dwight's command of the Latin of taxonomy. He (Rupert) would devote his life to the discovery and taxonomy of highly obscure (and rather ugly) American plants. Dwight joined him in expeditions to Utah and Nevada, but also found time to greatly influence the New York art scene and helped bring about the New York School of poets. This is a story full of famous people, tragic deaths, botanical discoveries, and of one life lived well and the other a slowly unfolding disaster. I didn't really warm to either men: I have a hard time liking people I know would have no time at all for me. But I found their lives pretty fascinating... and came away full of admiration for them both.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

As an interdisciplinary artist, I am always looking for books that document people who seem to provide a center for a circle of diverse artists, scholars, etc. So Gertrude Stein fascinates me for the range of people who seemed drawn to her. Rupert Barneby and Dwight Ripley were those kind of people. The two met at an English “public” school, and ended up spending their lives together. Barneby was a respected botanist, despite having no academic degree in botany. Ripley was fluent in many languages, was a writer and talented artist, who spent many years collecting plants with his partner. The two of them seemed to know a remarkable collection of people - poets, critics, artists, etc. So on the one hand, this book provides an introduction to two remarkable men. The author was a friend of Rupert Barneby, and I only wish he had found a different strategy for how to relate the lives of these two men. Dividing the book into two parts does not really help, for their lives are too closely entwined. The book also lacks a clear narrative timeline - I felt bounced back and forth from one period to another. That combined with the constant name-dropping of the famous or demi-famous, makes the book a bit frustrating to read. That said, I am glad I fought my way through it.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a nice little book written by someone who appears to be more of a poet than a non-fiction writer. It's filled with fascinating stories about the wealthy British men whose lives could never be reproduced in this day and age. There are several quotes I'd like to hang on to from this book and I'm also reminded that I need to work on my vocabulary..

[Matthew Steiger · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the book to be rather dense in it's attempt to say so much about these men as artists, as writers, as linguists, as botanists, all while describing in detail their milieu. I found that some sections were easy breezy and others rather dull and obtuse. Not a favorite of mine, but still I enjoyed the book.