When we opened the door to the second place and went in and turned on the lights, it all suddenly looked rather poor and shabby to me, as though with their smart luggage and expensive clothes and their air of acquaintance with luxury, L and Brett had imported a new standard, a new way of seeing, in which the old things could no longer hold their shape. The wooden cupboards and shelves looked rough and higgledy-piggledy and the stove and table and armchairs stood bleakly in the electric light. Our reflections glared out from the windows, for it was more or less dark by then and the curtains weren’t drawn. I drew them, averting my eyes from the images the glass held. L looked around and said nothing, and there was nothing to say, though I had already understood it was physically impossible for Brett to repress her urge to comment, so was not in the least surprised when she gave a tittering laugh and exclaimed:
‘It’s a cabin in the woods, straight out of a horror story!’
You will remember, Jeffers, that L’s fame came strongly at the beginning of his career, when he was only in his twenties. After that, it must have felt as though he’d been given some heavy object he had to carry around for the rest of his life. Such things distort the flow of experience and misshape the personality. He told me that he left his family home when he was still a child, fourteen or fifteen years old, and went to the city, though how he survived in that period I don’t know. His mother had several children from a previous marriage and those older children had apparently attacked him and threatened his life in some way, and so he ran away. His father had been his friend and protector, but the father died, of cancer, I think.
They lived in a desolate part of the world, a small town plunked down in miles and miles of empty plain. His parents owned a slaughterhouse and the family lived across from it. Some of his earliest memories were of looking out of his bedroom window at the chickens in the yard, pecking at pools of blood. The violence of his early work that so shocked people and drew their attention, and that was understood to be a production of societal violence generally, was probably rooted in this much more primitive and personal source. I wonder whether this explains L’s failure to ever hit quite the right note with the critics again, since they expected him to go on shocking them, when in fact he had been introspective all along. So his celebrity and his success were a sort of uphill trudge after that, always accompanied by a sense of reservation and half-spoken disappointment; yet partly because of his virtuosic talent he never lost his prestige or his artistic honour, even as painting went in and out of fashion over the years. He survived those changes in taste, and people have often wondered why he did, but I believe it was because he had never prostituted himself to them in the first place.
I’m telling you all this, Jeffers, because it was what L told me: I don’t know if these facts about his childhood – if facts they are – are generally known. It’s important to me that I only tell you about what I can personally verify, despite the temptation to enlist other kinds of proof, or to invent or enhance things in the hope of giving you a better picture of them, or worst of all making you identify with my feelings and the way I saw it. There’s an art to that, and I have known enough artists to understand that I’m not one of them! Nonetheless I believe there is also a more common ability to read the surface of life, and the forms that it takes, that either grows from or becomes an ability to attend to and understand the works of the creators. One can feel, in other words, a strange proximity to the process of creation when one sees the principles of art – or of a particular artist – mirrored in the texture of living. This might go to explain some of the compulsion I felt toward L: when I looked at the marsh, for instance, which seemed to obey so many of his rules of light and perception that it often resembled a painted work by him, I was in a sense looking at works by L that he had not created, and was therefore – I suppose – creating them myself. I’m unsure of the moral status of these half-creations, which I can only hazard is akin to the moral status of influence, and therefore a powerful force for both good and evil in human affairs.
I woke up early the morning after L’s arrival and saw the sun rising pink and golden through the glade, and so I got up and left Tony still asleep and went outside. I felt a great need to soothe myself and reconnect with my place in the world, after all the jars and jolts of the previous day – and
