you write to me. Maybe I am inventing; but I’m sure I am close.
But that is not it, is it? I have been here near four years now, with not a peep from you before. If you wanted to send me money, there are easy enough ways of doing it. And no amount of friendship would make you spend more than ten minutes on this island unless there was some compelling reason. People can change, but not that much. You get faint crossing Hyde Park. Nature has never been one of your loves. So what is it that makes you need to sit in my presence for days on end? What is it that you are after, that you evidently cannot ask me directly? That is the way you draw people in, is it not? Sit silently, until they speak to fill up the silence; give little away yourself while the other person reveals their soul?
You see, your very presence takes me back into the past and wakes up all sorts of memories I had forgotten about for years, which have not troubled me for a long time. I got no work done whatsoever after you left, and had recourse in the early evening to that wine which you find so revolting. I drank far too much of it, had only an omelette for dinner; I didn’t want to go to Mère Le Gurun for fear you would be there. The prospect of an evening’s conversation with you made me feel perfectly sick, so I stayed put and made myself feel ill all on my own. I slept badly. I haven’t really slept well for years now. Not since I left England. Some nights are better than others, but last night I scarcely slept at all, despite the pharmacopoeia of potions I have in my little cupboard. I am in a bad mood, mainly because of my ageing stomach, which I find can take less and less of any sort of ill treatment. The man who once used to go for days without sleep in a frenzy of work is no more. Dead, my friend, and buried; only a shade remains, which needs an early night and cannot take too much wine.
I grant that there are some questions to be answered. How is it that an artist in his prime, nearing the peak of his career, should act in such a foolish way? He has income, some small renown and (even better) reputation. He has just taken part in one of the most important exhibitions ever to be seen in the country, is at the vanguard of the artistic revolution sweeping the world. He has achieved, nearly, what he has aimed at all his life. From near poverty in Scotland, then time as a jobbing illustrator for scruffy magazines and penny dreadfuls in London, scrimping and saving to go to Paris, and finally the goal is at hand. Then suddenly—pop!—off he goes. Packs his bags and says farewell to more than twenty years of struggle and hard work. Tells no-one where he is for some time, refuses to answer letters. Why? There is no insanity in the family, is there? Both his parents were well-nigh teetotal, were they not? If he has some horrible disease, better, surely, that he stay in London and get proper medical treatment? What is the cause of this behaviour? What did he do that makes him flee the country like some murderer on the run?
There are limits to eccentricity, after all. Behaving outrageously is conventional, necessary for any painter wishing to be taken seriously these days. But this is beyond outrageous. It is offensive. The whole point of running off to the continent in a fit of aesthetic pique is to come back again, so others may revel in the deed, glory in the flouting of convention, draw strength from the shock and disapproval of others. To disappear completely, send back no pictures to advertise your continued existence, is different; it implies a disdain for all those artists in Chelsea and beyond, and few people can forgive being disdained. Makes them look at their metropolitan lives and wonder. What’s wrong with being here? Should we be doing that too? Or it makes people suspicious, makes them gossip.
You want an explanation. You have a right to know. Well, we shall see; I think you may know the reasons as well as I do. As my painting progresses, perhaps mutual understanding will emerge as well as a portrait. I have been waiting nearly four years for you to ask; you can wait a few days for my answer.
Sit, then; the light is good and I’m often at my best when in an ill-humour. No, no, no. You know better than that. Both arms on the chair, head against the rest; you are meant to look senatorial, the Roman of old, an imposing figure of authority. Don’t you remember? Or did your dinner have a similar effect on you as on me that you slump there like an empty paper bag? That’s better. Now keep still, for pity’s sake.
Memories? Oh yes. Both good and bad, I assure you. Worst of all, you brought out feelings of regret, for the first time since I came here. But then, you always had that effect on me, so why should it be any different now? I started thinking about what might have been, had I stayed in London, had I cultivated people properly, had I stayed in the fight, had I got married. I saw the career ahead of me, culminating in a large house in Holland Park or Kensington, revered by my many pupils, rather than forgotten and living in total isolation. Too late now. Now I would have the reputation of being unreliable, an unsafe pair of hands. How many commissions do you think I abandoned when I left? At least a dozen, most of them paid for. And I doubt that what I paint these days would find much favour. Too eccentric, too strange.
It could have been different, as you know. It was within my grasp; all I had to do was keep in favour with people like you, produce works that were suitably advanced but not too daring that no-one would buy them. That is why I can indulge in regret. You can’t regret a fantasy; only a real opportunity lost can produce that sort of wistfulness. Would success have been so delicious as it seemed when I thought about it late last night in my bed? Probably not; I tasted enough of it to get the bitterness on my tongue, the dry feeling in my mouth when I complimented ugly old women for the sake of their husbands’ wallets, or made polite conversation to dealers interested only in the difference between buying and selling prices. I knew the vulnerability of the successful with those beneath, eager to tear them down and feast on their entrails.
Did we not do that, you and I? Would I have been spared in my turn? I think not. It is the cycle of the generations, played out in every species that walks the face of the earth. The rise of the young, the tearing down of the old. Again and again. Was I supposed to sleepwalk meekly through a play where the script was already written, on which I could have no influence? We sat long hours in Paris bars and London pubs, sneering at the likes of Bouguereau and Herkomer and Hunt, deriding their pomposity, the prostitution of their skills into sterile emblems for the bourgeoisie—those were the glorious, rolling phrases, were they not? How good they made us feel. But what would those below say about me now? What are they called again? Vorticists, Cubists, Futurists or some such? Too weird even for you, I imagine. Sentimental, I think, might be one word for the sort of stuff I was producing in London. Prettified, perhaps; insincere would wound because it would be true. And no doubt a whole raft of other insults I cannot even imagine. Who knows what sins we committed in our turn when we cast our elders into the darkness and trampled so gleefully on their reputations?
We weren’t really very good, you know. Think of all those acres of canvas we churned out when we came back from Paris, all that semi-digested Impressionism. We got rid of the wistful peasants and the studies of girls knitting, true enough; but we replaced them with unending landscapes painted in muted greens and browns. Thousands of them. Didn’t really matter if it was Cumbria or Gloucestershire or Brittany, they all looked pretty much the same. I don’t know why English painters love brown so much. It’s not as if it is so much cheaper than any other colour. We learned from the Impressionists only how to produce pictures safe enough to hang on the parlour wall, next to the engraving of the Queen and the needlepoint made by Granny when she was young.
It is the violence these new people bring to their work which interests me; what they produce may be revolting, incompetent, the antithesis of real art; they may be frauds and fools. Who knows? But they tap into the violence of men’s souls like the first roll of thunder on a summer’s day. They have extended their emotional range into areas we never thought of. There was nothing of that in our work. We challenged those old men in so many ways, but our notion of violence was still heroic. General Wolfe capturing Quebec, Napoleon crossing the Alps. No blood, no death and no cruelty. We produced studies of sunlight on cathedral walls and thought that was revolutionary enough. I could have led the way, you know.
Anyway, I decided not to wait for my inevitable eclipse. I would not be a sitting target. I retreated, packed up, came here; foreswore the knighthood, the obituary in
And bide my time. My renunciation was tactical, not mystical. I do not yearn for obliteration; my opinion of my work is too high for that. True, the wait will be long, but I am not concerned with my reputation during my life. Even had I achieved immense fame, I knew it would evaporate soon enough. I am after a bigger prize than that. Far bigger.
You think I am deranged, that the years of loneliness and isolation have finally tipped me over into an insane self-importance. Ah, but you will see, when I have finished this painting. You will see.
I suppose I’d better tell you my secret; you’ll find it out on your own, and I don’t want that smirk of yours to appear without being summoned by me. I have taken to going to church. Not just for the aesthetics of it all, either.
