Guard's Eye View of The Met

In a state of grief after the death of his brother, a young man quits his job at The New Yorker and takes a position as a guard in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, spiriting himself away to a hushed world beyond the clawing ambition of the city. It may sound like a novel, but this is the premise of a new memoir by Patrick Bringley, "All The Beauty In The World." Bringley will appear in person at The Hotchkiss Library's Summer Book Signing in Sharon, Conn., on Friday, Aug. 4. The Brooklyn, N.Y., based author spoke with me on the phone while vacationing in The Finger Lakes in New York State.

Alexander Wilburn: This is an incredibly literary book in terms of its voice, so much so I kept expecting, in a Donna Tartt narrator way, for something terrible to befall you. Did you have any literary influences or sources of inspiration?

Patrick Bringley: There were things I liked to read while I was working on the book because they put me in a good mood. I love George Orwell’s nonfiction, I love his book “Home To Catalonia.” I love Joseph Mitchell, the great New Yorker writer. They both write in a very unadorned way, and I knew they wouldn’t unduly influence my voice while I was writing. I came to the voice of the book trying to get the flavor of thoughts that I had on post at The Met. I had all this time to think in a long wavelength, a long quiet rhythm. I tried to mirror that with my prose as I wrote notes on my break and on the subway home.

AW: It’s a very interior, solitary experience you share in this book.

PB: Across an eight to twelve-hour day, I had all this time to stand in front of these works of art and think about, “If I were to say something about this, what would I say?” I was trying to dig past what it says on the label or what an art historian might say and discover something that’s more authentic to what I feel.

AW: This is an interesting book to be discussing this summer — New York is in the midst of all kinds of union disputes. Your book relays the dignity of a service job that many people view as invisible.  You write about an art student who imagines herself alone in a museum room, even though you're standing right there.

PB: When you work with the guards it becomes immediately clear this is an extraordinary corpse of more than 500 people that come from all different backgrounds with different ways of relating to the art. But if you’re looking at it in a thoughtless way you might think, “These are the people at the bottom of the totem pole, they’re not making much more than minimum wage when they start, and the important people are the curators.” But it doesn’t take too much reflection to realize that that’s not true. The guards are never one type of person, and they’re not just someone with an art history degree from a fancy college. You have a wide variety of people who step into the role. The Met guards are deserving of more dignity in how they’re perceived, and that would be true of workers in all sorts of overlooked jobs in New York.

AW: The Met is, largely, a collection of fairly literal paintings. So much of the work depicts what once was, and even the touches of supernatural or the spiritual look like us — the Greek gods take mortal form, in Moreau’s painting of Oedipus, the sphinx has a human face. These aren’t the modern nightmares of Frances Bacon.

PB: When you’re looking at this art from a very long time ago you may have two different reactions that exist at the same time. One is that this is done by people who are very different from me, someone who lived in ancient Egypt 45 hundred years ago. Their structure of the world and their theology can feel very alienating. Other times you can see these were made by human hands just like the hands I have now. They were thinking about life and death and that’s what we’re thinking about today. They had bodies like mine, heads, and hearts like mine. The sun was shining over ancient Egypt roughly the same way it does now over New York City. You can feel this kinship and realize The Met is about the human species. It’s the beauty we find in our lives and the beauty that we’re able to create. All those things make you feel like you’re not alone, that there’s a tradition of thinking these thoughts. That can be true of modern and contemporary art — but there are works that feel like they were created just to be a work of art that would make people impressed, whereas many things in The Met weren’t even made to be a work of art. They had a purpose that feels very human.

AW: I won’t ask you to pick a favorite piece in the Met. Instead, can you point to a piece that you think is overlooked?

PB: If you go past The Temple of Dendur there’s a little room that has these figurines made over 2 thousand years prior to when the temple was made. They’re remarkable because, for one, they were in a hidden chamber, no one had laid eyes on them for 4 thousand years when The Met found them. But another thing is they are depictions of ordinary people, in breweries and bakeries, and a slaughterhouse, and rowing ships. They are made to look authentic to how people really lived. This is something you don’t get almost anywhere else in the museum. They were created to be buried with the rich man who owned the estate that all these serfs were working on. He wanted to take them to the afterlife, as if the figurines would make them eternal. In a way, he succeeded, because here we are thousands of years later, still getting glimpses at these people. It’s an extraordinary look at normal people.

Simon & Schuster

The Temple of Dendur Courtesy of The Met

'Oedipus and the Sphinx' by Gustave Moreau Courtesy Of The Met

Simon & Schuster