The Lyre of Orpheus

by Robertson Davies

  “Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that we do anything,” said Maria. “I was just suggesting that we talk a little more compassionately.”

  “You don’t understand modern compassion, Sim bach. It’s a passive virtue. I see what Maria means; let’s pity Wally, and maybe send him a few grapes in the slammer. If anybody is going to be nasty to the criminal classes, it must be those horrible cops and the hard-faced men in the courts. That’s what we pay them for. To make the world cosy for us. We smash Wally without having to harbour a hateful, revengeful thought; our servants do all that kind of thing for us.”

  “That’s a new dimension of the Kater Murr philosophy,” said Darcourt. “Thanks for explaining it to me, Geraint bach.”

  “After the baby is born, I think I shall write a whole volume, expanding Kater Murr,” said Maria. “Hoffmann didn’t begin to get all the good out of him. Kater Murr is really the foremost social philosopher of our time.”

  This was what Darcourt wanted. This was almost the old Maria, the woman infused with the spirit of François Rabelais, a spirit vowed to the highest reaches of scholarship and illuminated by a cleansing humour. Arthur, he thought, was looking decidedly better. Had some sort of new serenity descended on the Cornish household? Well—Powell was still there, and Powell was making himself very much at home.

  “I must leave you shortly,” said he, “but meanwhile I am enjoying the peaceful retirement of your dwelling. This is one place where I am sure I can’t be got at by the abominable Al Crane.”

  “Oh, don’t think you are safe here,” said Arthur. “Last night Al and Sweetness turned up and he cross-examined me for two hours, taking a full five minutes to formulate each question. In the modern lingo, Al lacks verbal skills; lingually, Al is a stumblebum. He brought a taperecorder, so that every precious Um and Ah would be preserved forever. He wanted to know what my Motivation was for putting the Fund behind the opera scheme. He doesn’t believe anybody might do something for a variety of reasons; he wants one great, big, juicy Motivation which would be, he says, a significantly seminal thread in a complexity of artistic inspirations. He wants to identify all the threads that are woven into the complex tapestry of a work of art—I am quoting Al, you understand—but some threads are more seminal than others, and mine is wonderfully seminal; it could even be the warp, or maybe the woof, of the whole tapestry. I thought I would faint from boredom before I finally got him out of the house.”

  “Arthur did not suffer alone,” said Maria. “All the time Al had him on the spot I was being bored rigid by Sweetness, who thanked me for receiving her in my Gracious Home, and then talked about what she called Our Condition. There are countless ways of making pregnancy nauseating, and I think Sweetness explored them all.”

  “Sweetness is delighted with you. She told me so,” said Darcourt. “Because of your both being pregnant, of course. You and she, greatly in pod, are what she calls an Objective Correlative of the job of bringing this opera to birth. You, and she, and the opera all burst upon a waiting world at roughly the same time.”

  “Spare me Sweetness’s scholarly insights,” said Maria. “She is not an Objective Correlative of anything, and she disgusts me as parodies of oneself always do. She expects me to embrace her as a loving companion in gravidity, and if she gives me much more sisterly love I may miscarry. But she would be sure to interpret that as an ill omen for the opera, so I don’t think I’ll oblige her. Never again does she cross the threshold of my Gracious Home.”

  “They didn’t get a great welcome in Nilla’s Gracious Home,” said Powell. “Nilla doesn’t know what an assessor is, and I can’t tell her. I always thought the word meant a judge, or somebody who estimated something. What is an assessor, exactly, Sim bach?”

  “It is something new in the academic world,” said Darcourt. “Somebody who watches something happen, and gives an enormously detailed report on it; somebody who shares an experience, without having any real involvement with it. A sort of Licensed Snoop.”

  “But who issues the licence?” said Arthur.

  “In this case, it seems to have been Wintersen. He says watching the production process will enrich Al immeasurably, and if Al develops his thesis into a book, it will give permanency to a deeply interesting and profoundly seminal experience.”

  “Nilla is not pleased,” said Powell. “She knows only one meaning for seminal, and she thinks Al is being indecent in a male chauvinist way. She told him flatly there was nothing seminal in what she and Schnak were doing, and when he contradicted her she was very brusque. Said she had no time for such nonsense. Sweetness burst into tears, and Al said he fully understood the mercuriality of the artistic temperament, but the act of creation was seminal and it was his job to understand it so far as in him lay, which he seemed to think was pretty far. I just hope Al does not prove to be the condom in the act of creation.”

  “Not much fear of that,” said Arthur.

  “No fear at all, really. Nilla and Schnak have worked like Trojans. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Wintersen weren’t encouraging a deputation of Trojans to come and measure the energy involved. How does Wintersen get into this act, anyhow?”

  “Dean of the Graduate School of Music,” said Darcourt. “I think he sees himself as richly seminal in this whole project. Did you know that Al and Sweetness have been to see Penny Raven?”

  “As a collaborator with you on the libretto?”

  “A fat lot of collaboration Penny has done. Those Trojans had better have a word with me, when they are learning about work. But Penny is an old academic hand. She strung them along with some high-sounding nonsense, and when she phoned me about it she could hardly speak for laughing. Quoted from The Hunting of the Snark, as she always does.”

  “That Snark again,” said Arthur. “I really must read it. What did she say?”

  “It’s an astonishing poem for descriptive quotes:

  They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care,

  They pursued it with forks and hope;

  They threatened its life with a railway-share;

  They charmed it with smiles and soap.”

  “Sweetness provides the smiles and soap,” said Maria. “I wonder if I shall manage not to kill Sweetness in some ingenious way. How does one get away with murder?”

  “Exactly how does Sweetness come into this?” said Arthur. “Are they combining on this awful assessor game?”

  “Hollier has the answer,” said Darcourt. “They visited him, but they got nowhere. He examined them with great care, however, and he says that he sees Sweetness, in anthropological-psychological-historico terms as the External Image of Al’s Soul.”

  “A terrible thought,” said Maria. “Imagine looking into Sweetness’s teary eyes and saying, ‘My God, that’s the best of me!’ Al doesn’t want to do anything important without her, she tells me. I’m not sure she didn’t say she was his Muse. I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “I wish I didn’t know The Hunting of the Snark,” said Powell. “I am up to my neck in producing this opera and I keep thinking—

  The principal failing occurred in the sailing,

  And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,

  Said he hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,

  That the ship would not travel due West!”

  “You haven’t got cold feet, have you, Geraint?” said Arthur.

  “No colder than usual, at this stage in a big job,” said Powell. “But I do see myself as the Bellman, when I wake up in the night, sweating. Everything is ready to go, you see. Got the score, got the cast, got the designs, got everything, and at last I must start on what Al would certainly call the seminal part. God grant that I am sufficiently seminal for the job. And now, with the greatest reluctance, I must leave this snug retreat, and go back to my desk. A million details await me.”

  He pulled himself out of his chair, with some effort. He still has a lame leg, thought Darcourt. It goes well with his generally Byronic personality. He h
as developed a sliding walk, to disguise his lameness, just like Byron. I wonder if it’s conscious imitation—Byronic hero-worship—or if he can’t help it?

  With Powell out of the way, there was nothing for it but to plunge into his news about The Marriage at Cana. He told the tale as convincingly as he could; he wanted to open a new world to his friends, not frighten them with an explosion. For the first time, he spoke to them of his visit to Princess Amalie, to confirm that her Old Master drawing was, in fact, a portrait of herself, done in girlhood by a man on whom she had had a youthful crush. He did not think it necessary to speak of his thefts in the University Library and even in the National Gallery; these were, he now assured himself, not thefts in the ordinary sense, but adventures on the journey of the Fool, guided by intuition and governed by a morality that was not to everybody’s taste. If everything worked out as he hoped, what he had done justified itself, and if he were not lucky, he might find himself in jail. With gentleness, but determination, he told of his astonishment when, in the Princess’s drawing-room, displayed among a number of convincing Old Masters, and in itself convincing to any eye but his own, he saw The Marriage, and with shocked astonishment recognized the faces as belonging to Grandfather McRory’s Sun Pictures, and to Francis Cornish’s numerous, neglected sketchbooks. There could be no doubt about it, he insisted: Francis was The Alchemical Master, and the great picture was not yet fifty years old.

  Arthur and Maria heard all this more or less in silence, though now and then Arthur whistled. It was necessary to come to the real point.

  “You understand what this will mean to my biography of Francis,” he said. “It is the justification of the book. The climax. It establishes Francis as a very great painter. Working in the mode of a bygone day, but a great painter none the less.”

  “But in the mode of a bygone day,” said Arthur. “He may be a great painter, but that makes him unmistakably a faker.”

  “Not at all,” said Darcourt. “There is not a shred of evidence that Francis meant to deceive anybody. The picture was never offered for sale, and if it hadn’t been for the war, he would undoubtedly have taken it with him when he left Düsterstein, and nobody will convince me that he would have tried to palm it off as a sixteenth-century work. The Princess knows about it. The picture was stashed away in a store-room of the castle, and when the castle was taken over during the occupation of Germany it disappeared with a lot of other stuff. It was restored to the Düsterstein family after the war, by the Commission that dealt with such matters, of which Francis was a member. That’s a bit fishy, but we don’t know the details. And the family—that’s to say Princess Amalie— has it still.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” said Arthur. “Why did he paint it in this sixteenth-century manner? And look at this article in Apollo, that explains it all. If it wasn’t meant to deceive, why paint it like that?”

  “That’s where we come to the point that is going to be the making of my book,” said Darcourt. “You don’t remember Francis in any detail. But I do. He was the most inward-looking man I have ever known. He turned things over and over in his mind, and he reached conclusions. That picture is the most important of his conclusions. It represents what he thought most important in his life, the influences, the cross-currents, the tapestry, as Al Crane would say if he had a chance. In that picture Francis was making up his soul, as surely as if he had been some reflective hermit, or cloistered monk. What you see in the picture is the whole matter of Francis, as he saw it himself.”

  “Yes, but why in this mock sixteenth-century style?”

  “Because it is the last style in which a painter could do what Francis was doing. After the Renaissance do you see any pictures that reveal all that a man knows about himself? The great self-portraits, of course. But even when Rembrandt painted himself in old age, he could only show what life had done to him, not how life had done it. With the Renaissance, painting took a new turn, and threw away all that allegorical-metaphysical stuff, all that symbolic communication. You probably don’t know that Francis was an expert on iconography—the way you discover what a painter meant, instead of just what anybody can see. In The Marriage he means to tell his own truth, as clearly as he can. And he wasn’t telling it to someone else. The picture was a confession, a summing-up, intended simply for himself. It’s a magnificent thing in several different ways.”

  “Who’s the peculiar angel?” said Maria. “You left him out when you told us who all the characters were. He’s obviously somebody of the greatest importance.”

  “I am virtually certain he was Francis’s elder brother. Only one of the sketches is labelled, but it is identified as Francis the First, and I can only guess that he was a very deep influence on Francis the Second’s whole life.”

  “How? It looks like an idiot,” said Arthur.

  “Presumably it was an idiot. You didn’t know your uncle. He was a deeply compassionate man. Oh, he had the reputation for being a curmudgeon, and he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and often he seemed to have no tolerance for people at all. But I knew him, and he was far beyond what people mean when they say tender-hearted—which can mean cabbage-headed. He had a sense of the profoundly tragic fragility of human life that I have never known in anyone else, and I am as sure as I can be of anything that it was the knowledge of this grotesque creature, this parody of what he was himself, that made him so. He was a romantic in his youth; look at the way he has painted the girl who became his wife, and let him down so painfully. Look at the dwarf; Francis knew that poor wretch, alive and dead, and he did what he could to balance the scales of Fate when he painted him. All the portraits in The Marriage are judgements on people Francis knew, and they are the judgements of a man who had been rudely booted out of a youthful romanticism into a finely compassionate realism. Now Arthur, for God’s sake don’t ask me again why he painted this summing-up of his life in this bygone style. It was the only style that would contain what he had to say. The Old Masters were deeply religious men, and this is a deeply religious picture.”

  “I never heard anyone suggest that Uncle Frank was religious.”

  “The word is greatly misunderstood in the turmoil of our day,” said Darcourt, “but in so far as it means seeking to know, and to live, beneath the surfaces of life, and to be aware of the realities beneath the superficialities, you may take it from me that Francis was truly religious.”

  “Uncle Frank a great painter!” said Arthur. “I don’t know just how to cope with it.”

  “But it’s bloody marvellous!” said Maria. “A genius in the family! Aren’t you thrilled, Arthur?”

  “There have been some rather bright people in the family, but if they were geniuses, or near it, they were financial geniuses. And don’t let anybody tell you that financial genius is just low cunning. It’s the real intuitive goods. But this sort of genius—For a financial family a painter is rather a skeleton in the cupboard.”

  “There is something about a cupboard that makes a skeleton very restless,” said Darcourt. “Francis Cornish is loudly demanding to be let out.”

  “Your problem is going to be these people in New York. How will they like it when you reveal that their treasured Old Master—the only known work of The Alchemical Master—is a phoney?”

  “It isn’t a phoney, Arthur,” said Maria. “Simon has been telling us what it is, and phoney is the last word to use. It is an astonishing personal confession in the form of a picture.”

  “Arthur is right, though,” said Darcourt. “They will have to be approached with the greatest tact. I can’t go to them and say, Listen, I have news for you: they must want me to come, to hear what I have to tell them. It’s the difference between ‘Come in, Barney,’ and ‘Barney, come in.’ ”

  “I suppose that’s one of your Old Ontario gobbets of folk wisdom,” said Maria.

  “Yes, and a very wise one, when you think about it. I can’t just tell them what I know, and stop short. I must give them an idea about where this discove
ry might lead.”

  “And where would that be?” said Arthur.

  “It certainly can’t be the devaluation and destruction of the picture as a work of art. It must point a new way.”

  “Simon, I know you. I see it in your eye. I see it wriggling up your sleeve. You have a scheme. Come on—tell.”

  “Well, Maria, I wouldn’t say I had a scheme. Just a vague idea, and I feel rather embarrassed about bringing it out, because it is sure to sound stupid.”

  “This modesty is just camouflage for some real Darcourt craftiness. Out with it.”

  So, diffidently, but not artlessly—because he had been rehearsing what he would say for several days—Darcourt told them what he had in mind.

  There was a long silence. After a while Maria fetched drinks; whisky for the men and for herself a glass that looked like milk, but was of a rich, golden colour. They sipped, amid further silence. At last Arthur spoke.

  “Ingenious,” he said, “but I mistrust ingenuity. It’s too damned clever.”

  “A little better than just clever,” said Darcourt.

  “Too many intangibles. Too many things that cannot be controlled. I’m afraid the answer must be no, Simon.”

  “I’m not ready to take that as your final word, Arthur,” said Darcourt. “Please think about it for a while. Forget it and then think about it again. Maria, what do you think?”

  “I think it’s very foxy.”

  “Oh, please! Foxy is a nasty word.”

  “I didn’t mean it nastily, Simon. But you must admit that it’s a poopnoddy scheme, if ever there was one.”

  “Poopnoddy?” said Arthur. “Is that one of your Rabelaisian words?”

  “Go to the head of the class, Arthur,” said Maria. “Rabelaisian in spirit, though I don’t know quite what he would have said in French. Avalleur de frimarts, or something like that. Intending to deceive the unwary, anyhow. I must have a few Rabelaisian words to counteract Simon’s cataract of Old Ontario folk-sayings, about Barney and all the gang.”