by Dana Delibovi
I grew up two towns west of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. The house, a National Historic Landmark, sits on 50 acres in New Canaan, Connecticut. The straight glass walls frame wide lawns, maple trees, and a round swimming pool rumored to be modeled on the martini. I haven’t lived near New Canaan for 20 years, but for some time now I have studied a literary image of glass that jogs my memory of Johnson’s design. It’s St. Teresa of Ávila’s description of the human soul as a glass castle. The brilliant 20th-century architect and the brilliant 16th-century mystic shared houses of glass. If you look within, you can see they shared religious intolerance, too. So did I, during my high school days in Connecticut. We threw stones at others. Our glass is cracked.
Johnson’s Glass House has been universally acclaimed. The design critic Alice Rawsthorn said the Glass House is “the only house in the world where you can watch the sun set and the moon rise at the same time. And the snow. It’s amazing when you’re surrounded at night with the falling snow. It’s lighted, which makes it look as though you’re rising on a celestial elevator.” The house made Johnson a star. He remains one of the most celebrated architects in American history, with a legacy of iconic buildings that include New York’s “Lipstick” building and Pittsburgh’s PPG Place—both works of glittering glass.
People love the Glass House. In New Canaan, people love Johnson, who lived in the house from 1949 until his death in 2005. The Glass House and its grounds are serene and saturated with old money. That kind of money protected Johnson, who inherited a fortune in stocks from this father. He could afford to do as he chose. For a while, he chose fascism.
Throughout the 1930s, Johnson dabbled in anti-Semitism. He published favorable reviews of translations of Mein Kampf in the hard-right Connecticut Examiner. He hung out in Germany with Nazi financiers for “purely social” reasons and supported ideas like “race suicide” and finding solutions to “the Jewish Question.” While working as a reporter in 1939, Johnson was embedded with German troops in Poland. He said that his Glass House was inspired by “a burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick.” Johnson’s biographer, Mark Lamster, believes this statement may be a reference to shtetls that were torched by the Wehrmacht.
A castle of “very clear crystal” is how Teresa of Ávila symbolizes the human soul in her prose masterpiece, Interior Castle. Teresa’s book, written five years before her death, was the culmination of her life as a public intellectual, memoirist, poet, mystic, and activist administrator of a religious order—a remarkable achievement for a woman in patriarchal 16th-century Spain. In Interior Castle, Teresa imagined the soul as a light-filled glass dwelling—like the Glass House, but with multiple rooms. Our self-awareness can travel through the rooms, eventually ending up in the part of soul where God abides.
The metaphor of a crystal soul suggests that our innermost selves are transparent. God is within us, but also sees right through us. If so, God might have seen some intolerance in Teresa. She displayed an anti-Islamic streak from an early age. Teresa was born into a wealthy family in 1515, only 23 years after the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista of Spain from Muslim rule. When Teresa was seven years old, she and her brother Rodrigo ran away to martyr themselves to the anti-Islamic cause. As she wrote in her autobiography, their hope was to be beheaded for their crusade “in the county of the Moors.” They made it as far as Ávila’s walls before an uncle collared them.
The Spanish Inquisition, which began in 1478 as the Reconquista was nearing its culmination, brutally removed Jews and Muslims from Spain with a policy of convert, leave, suffer, or die. On her father’s side, Teresa’s recent ancestors were conversos—Jews forced by the Inquisition to convert to Catholicism. Juan Sanchez de Toledo, Teresa’s paternal grandfather, had been prosecuted by the Inquisition in 1485 and compelled to become Catholic. The Inquisition also tormented Protestants as the Reformation roiled across Europe in the 16th century.
Teresa sometimes ran afoul of the Inquisition. They did not trust her mysticism. But never in Teresa’s life did she question the Inquisition’s bigotry, which her family had directly suffered. She also sided with the Inquisition on the Reformation, declaring in her autobiography that any Catholics converting to Lutheranism would be going to straight to hell.
It’s common to excuse the bigotry of figures like Johnson and Teresa. The thinking goes that they were products of their time, and otherwise led exemplary lives. Johnson issued apologies and did pro bono work in Israel. Teresa could never have been expected to buck the Inquisition, especially coming from a family with Jewish ancestry. After all, another writer of converso heritage, Miguel de Cervantes, was often in trouble with the Inquisition—although he still managed to poke a sarcastic pen at the antisemitic Inquisition trope of blood purity in his play, The Altarpiece of Wonders.
Besides, both Johnson and Teresa were icons. Johnson built some of the world’s most elegant buildings. The Museum of Modern Art dedicated a set of galleries to him, and he donated Jasper Johns’ seminal painting, Flag, to MoMA. Teresa of Ávila changed Catholic theology and prayer. The church canonized her rapidly, only 35 years after her death. Her literary works, notably Interior Castle, led to her recognition as the first woman “Doctor of the Church.” Teresa is beloved by many Catholics, and by many women, like me, who write or translate. We admire her determination to live publicly as an author, administrator, and reformer at a time of unabashed patriarchy.
I have made similar excuses for myself. When I failed to speak up against bigotry in the past, I was simply too young to find the courage. I have changed and now I am never silent in the face of intolerance. Besides, I have really done some good in my life.
When I was in high school, I got-in with a crowd of old-money, WASPy kids. I really didn’t belong. I came from a blue-collar family, of the kind now completely priced out of places like New Canaan and my nearby hometown. I was of Italian-descent and Catholic, with two of four grandparents born in Italy. Sometimes I felt lived behind a glass wall. My friends could see me, but not touch who I really was.
I knew it was wrong to hate other religions. I had heard this expressly from my staunchly atheist mother—a woman so rational she raised her kids Catholic so we could make informed choices as adults. Yet week after week, I sat there, wordless but giggling, while my rich friends imitated Jews in the crudest ways. I understood that I couldn’t speak—I was just some lowly Italian Catholic behind the glass. But I could laugh.
Once, I was lolling in the back of a Volkswagen bus, traveling with my friends to Maine for a summer weekend of drunken sailing and fires on the beach. As a working-class kid, I was always astonished to be in the company of rich people with Revolutionary War pedigrees. Maybe astonishment helped keep me numb and grinning through my friends’ Jewish pantomimes, which lasted for hours on that drive. We were almost in Maine when it hit me: “If they say this about Jews, what do they say about me?” Italian-Americans were easy to mock. Surprising it took me most of a school year to figure this out.
The scene in the VW has stayed on my mind lifelong. It would have been only a small risk for me to tell my friends to stop insulting Jews. The Inquisition wouldn’t come after me, nor would any MoMA curators. I couldn’t feign ignorance. I knew I shouldn’t accept religious prejudice, but I did it anyway. During college, I consciously tried to wipe out the stain, opening myself to the breadth of cultures in New York City. I slipped away from those high school friends, realizing that I couldn’t keep smiling through the slurs. But my fault remains, like a seed-bubble in a sheet of glass, powerful enough to crack the pane if ignored.
Teresa and Johnson showed intolerance. So did I. While bigotry may be explicable by time, place, and circumstance, it is still immoral—not in hindsight, but immoral at the time they were committed. Since Abraham, Buddha, Christ, and Confucius, we have all known better than to hate. We have lived in glass houses for a very long time.
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator with recently published work in Salamander, Psaltery & Lyre, and Noon. Her book of translations and essays, Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila, is forthcoming from Monkfish Book Publishing. Delibovi is poetry editor at the e-zine, Cable Street.
After the Art 