By Philip Gambone
One of the most enigmatic paintings by the great Mexican painter Diego Rivera is a portrait of the American poet, Mary Channing “Marina” Wister, which Rivera painted in 1931. The painting, which is on loan to the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in the U.S., is titled “Fantasy and Fugue.” Rivera posed Wister, who was also an accomplished pianist, with her hands poised to play, but the piano is missing. Curiously, she is wearing horseback riding clothes, and a horse is rearing up behind her. The Italian phrase “Fantasia e Fuga,” which runs across a page of sheet music before her, is a reference to one of several compositions by Bach.
In the early 1930s, Wister was living in Philadelphia, but the brightly colored walls in the background of the portrait suggest that Rivera painted her in his Mexico City studio during a visit she made there. When I discovered the Rivera portrait among many other fine Mexican works of art in the Davis collection, I immediately wanted to know more about this woman who had inspired such a handsome, colorful, and mysterious painting.
Wister was born in 1882. She was the daughter of Owen Wister, an American writer and historian, best remembered as the author of “The Virginian” one of the first Western novels. In 1933, she married Andrew Michael Dasburg (1887-1979), an American modernist painter and an early champion of cubism, who, like his wife, was attracted to Mexican culture.
Six years after Rivera painted her portrait, Wister published a book of poems, to which she gave the same title as the Rivera painting. She dedicated her book: “Para mis amigos, D.R. and F.K. de R, como recuerdo,” a reference to her good friendship with Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo.
Wister’s book, “Fantasy and Fugue,” includes 31 poems under the heading “From Mexico.” Each poem highlighted the landscape, the towns, and the people of this country that she deeply loved. A review from April 28, 1938, in the New York Times noted that Wister’s Mexican pieces were particularly strong. “Miss Wister appears to have looked about her with keenly observing eyes,” the reviewer noted, adding that her poems were “vividly pictorial and colored.”
I was fortunate enough to find a library copy of the book last November and read Wister’s poems with delight and admiration. She was a minor, but polished poet. Her rhymes are as winsome as those of her contemporary, Dorothy Parker, her lyricism as lovely as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s.
Wister’s Mexican poems are particularly strong. In poem after poem, she celebrated the landscape of Mexico: the stands of corn and “pale magueys” that spread out like “arrested fountains;” the “stiff flat-fruited hieratic nopals;” the jungles and volcanos she called “fire-mountains.” In one short poem, she describes a cactus forest as “lurching gallow-trees.” In another, she notes the “vacant heaving wastes” of the arid stretches she saw from a train.
Wister’s poems are also full of the imagery of Mexican towns, “where every street wears a name of glory and death;” the plazas and bars, houses with “red-scalloped tiles” and “faded pink façades;” the churches with their “scintillant fanciful domes;” the shops “like midget theatres in a row;” the “garlanded masonry” of 18th century buildings (think of the stonework on the Casa de Canal off the Jardín or the House of the Inquisitor on Calle Cuadrante.)
Indeed, Wister was alert to every aspect of Mexican life: the “drenching light” and “blinding air;” “the zopilote on awful wings;” the “reek of pulque;” the “flaming tongues of music.” Her sketches of Mexicans are never condescending. She loved the “antique dignity” of the people she encountered: women squatting by little stoves; the “gaudy horsemanship” of the charros; the china poblana decked out in “bracelet and pendant, necklace and bangle.”
Her poem “Xochimilco,” one of my favorites, celebrates the “floating festivals” of that famous park in Mexico City:
“The canoes adrift
Secretly lean and swift
Glide through each leafy rift
Veiling them after;
Warm from the flower-lit boat
Sudden, unseen, remote
Linger and ring and float
Music and laughter.”
Notwithstanding her love of the country, Wister was aware of Mexico’s often-troubled history of “tyranny, greed, upheaval,” the “great deeds and the brawls.” Her poem “Daemons” notes the “baleful art / bred of terror” that was the bloody culture of the Aztecs. “La Sombra” is replete with images of candy skulls, toy hearses, and death, so often a “trifle” in this land where bliss and murder sometimes go hand in hand. Her poem “At the Customs,” which notes how “resentful years are built into this wall,” could have been written yesterday.
Wister was not without a sense of humor, which she occasionally aimed at “conscientious tourists.” In one poem, “Promenade,” she satirized the country club set, who “in behalf of exercise, pound out the last years of their lives” on tourist-package horseback parades.
In another poem, “Toys,” she poked fun at the collection of stuff—a pottery piggy bank, a straw figurine—that tourists pick up, only to find, when they get home, that “they will not fit anywhere”—each one a “troubling chip of Mexico.”
Wister’s little book, almost 100 years old, deserves to be reprinted and rediscovered. Each poem is a small gem. One line perhaps best sums up the deep love affair she had with her adopted country: “Here,” she wrote, “life is Fiesta, mesmerized by death.”
Philip Gambone is the author of five books, most recently “As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II” which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe.
