Friendship cultivated like a delicate plant

In 1975 poet Douglas Crase, then 31, was taken by his partner, Frank Polach, a plant information officer at the New York Botanical Garden, to meet his senior colleague, renowned botanist Rupert Barneby, “apparently the most accomplished legume taxonomist since [George] Bentham.” What the younger pair perhaps did not immediately register at that point was the full extent of the loss that Barneby had suffered only two years before, with the death of his lifelong partner, Dwight Ripley, variously described as an artist, poet, linguist, botanist and patron of the arts.

But although the younger pair was too late to meet Ripley, they became close friends of Barneby’s, and the story of Barneby and Ripley’s blended lives took on great significance for them. Just a year before his death in 2000, Barneby passed on a piece of advice that also provided Crase with the title for this book: “Take care of both,” he said.

“Both” is clearly a labor of love: a tribute to a relationship that endured for half a century. It is not just one story, but two. The first section of the book is a biographical portrait of Rupert Barneby (1911-2000); the second portrays the life of Dwight Ripley (1908-1973). The two met as adolescents at Harrow School in England, and despite some enforced separation that continued into their university years when Ripley attended Oxford and Barneby Cambridge, the two managed to get together again, forming a bond that would never be broken. Sexual fidelity was not part of that bond: Crase chronicles the various affairs each partner had, sometimes with men, sometimes with women. But each partner’s ultimate loyalty was to the other.

Already as boys, Barneby and Ripley shared a passion for botany: a fascination with the intricacies of plants and their evolution, a delight in their beauty and design, and an enthusiasm for seeking out new specimens and varieties. Neither impulsive nor irrational, this was a passion rooted in careful observation, persistence and dedication. In time, it brought them to the American West, hot on the trail of the desert-loving legume that helped establish Barneby’s reputation: the Astragalus.

Both men could be described as “amateurs” in the best sense of the word. Although Barneby had not taken his university degree in botany, his assiduous labors in that field would make him one of its leading lights. Dedication played its part, but as Crase also points out, inherited wealth certainly didn’t hurt: Ripley’s ability to underwrite Barneby’s work helped compensate for his lack of a PhD.

A gifted artist with a sharp eye for design and a passion for color, Ripley was more often seen by his art-world contemporaries as a useful source of funding. He had been a lonely, precocious child, neglected by his mother, an Anglo-Irish actress; his American father, heir to a Union Pacific Railroad fortune, died of the effects of alcoholism when Dwight was 4. Young Dwight amused himself by drawing, gardening, versifying and learning a plethora of foreign languages. As an adult, his multitalented nature, combined with a certain personal modesty, may have worked to his disadvantage, preventing him from being taken seriously as an artist. As time went by, he declined into alcoholism, and yet, as Crase shows us, he continued to create his artwork, unheralded though it was.

“Both” offers a pair of windows on two worlds: the outdoor world of plants, particularly in the American West, and the indoor world of the postwar New York avant-garde art scene, which included such figures as Peggy Guggenheim, Jean Connolly, Clement Greenberg, Grace Hartigan, Marie Menken and Judith Malina.

Crase’s emphasis, however, is not so much on portraying the social-sexual milieu as on showing us the hidden connections among the seemingly diverse endeavors of painting and botanizing. He has filled his book with many wonderful illustrations -- pictorial and verbal -- that not only demonstrate the special qualities of both men’s work but also enable us to appreciate the underlying values (the philosophy, so to speak) that informed their scientific and artistic endeavors:

“Of gardening with Dwight, he [Rupert] wrote, ‘I think we chose a plant for the reasons one chooses a friend, not for splendor of apparel or purity of profile, but for character and individuality.’ Botanist to the end, he valued in people what he valued in plants: the sign of their artful adaptations to necessity.”

For some tastes, perhaps, “Both” may seem a trifle precious: There’s an air of portentousness about it, and Crase’s slightly overwrought prose style adds to the hothouse atmosphere. But, unlike so many writers one comes across these days, Crase neither condescends to his subjects nor tries to fit them into preconceived categories. Admirable for its sensitivity and sympathy toward its subjects, its scrupulous regard for truth and facts rather than gossip and innuendo, “Both” conveys what bound this pair together and what made each of them unique.