BACKGROUND AND NOTES

SYNOPSIS

Through the comprehensive and sensitive narratives of Theodore Besserman, the long-time trustee of a venerable Boston charitable Trust, a younger attorney, Edmund Schofield, is initiated deeply into the life and ideals of the founder of that Trust and the subsequent history and personal lives of his family: compassionate, high-purposed men and women whose lives in the 1920s and 1930s were exemplary both in their devotion to the loftiest moral ideals as well as to the pursuit of refined cultural achievements. 

Yet, Edmund learns, at the heart of this family lies a haunting and moving tragedy involving the liaison between a beautiful aspiring actress and a young, dedicated physician. From Besserman, Edmund not only hears the story of this liaison; he soon even becomes part of that story, helping Besserman to resolve the long-term mystery bequeathed by it.

Puzzled throughout the book about why Besserman involved him in particular in this delicate inquiry in the first place, Edmund does finally discover the answer . . . but not until the rather startling revelation reserved for the final pages of the novel.

SETTING

In his masterpiece Brideshead Revisited, novelist Evelyn Waugh has Captain Charles Ryder provide a wistful, yet compelling remembrance of his involvement in the 1920s with a fabulously wealthy but fractured British family.

Similarly, today American novelist Johann Moser in this, his own masterpiece, has attorney Edmund Schofield provide a wistful, yet compelling remembrance of his own involvement in the late 1970s with a very wealthy Boston family, memories enriched by his reports of tales about the family in the 1920s and 1930s related to him by attorney Theodore Besserman, trustee of the family’s charitable Trust.

THE REMARKABLE COMPANY

Much of the richness of this story – and, Edmund learns, much of the shape of the lives of its main characters – arises from the actions and ideals of Schefflin’s, a great and quite generous commercial enterprise in Boston, now long since vanished, whose resources originally funded its large Boston charitable Trust, and of the actions and ideals of its extraordinary founders whose business acumen, industrial skills, imaginative creativity, and managerial perspicacity allowed the enterprise to prosper as it did.

Imbued by those same founders with a spirit of civic charity rarely matched today, Schefflin’s was truly a supreme gift to its customers, its workforce, its neighborhood, and to all who, over a century of activity, benefited from its enormous variety of products and services.  More than simply being a commercial enterprise, it assumed the role of a notable cultural institution, granting a richness and color to the urban life of its time.

FORMAL STRUCTURE AND STYLE

The Ivory Fount is written in seven parts, each having a formal integrity of its own and each devoted to a significant aspect of the story. The narrative style is reminiscent of the complex semantic and syntactic achievements perhaps best exemplified in the American literary tradition of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and others.

Its dense, luxuriant prose is meant to be read and savored slowly, enabling its nuanced complexities of character and action to delight the intellect with its delicacy of form. Not only does this work celebrate many of the most important dimensions of our lives; itself it deserves to be celebrated for its exquisite craftsmanship and finesse.

FOUNDATIONAL THEMES

Fundamentally, The Ivory Fount is a novel about love, and love in its many forms and contexts: spousal and parental love, love of family, love in friendship, love of beauty and erudition; love of nature, love of humane artifacts, love of the manifold social bonds that give meaning and substance to our lives, of ethnicity, solidarity, and civility; love of work, of enterprise, and philanthropy; even of that love whose intimations promise a yet more comprehensive love which acts as both the foundation and preservation all the loves which bind us together. At novel’s end, Theodore Besserman, a man steeped in a venerable tradition of ancient and immutable wisdom, discourses on these matters and concludes the work with an unforgettable meditation on love itself.