The Portrait

by Iain Pears

  He failed with Evelyn, though, and as completely as you did. She found his charm absurd, his blandishments all too easily resistible. He, in turn, found her to be cold, devoid of emotion, frigid. She was too locked in herself, would never amount to anything until she let go—by which he meant, I imagine, until she submitted to him. Well, maybe there was something to that; certainly her caution was her best defence, and must have been hard learned. She wanted an artistic liaison, and turned away without hesitation when it became clear he had something less subtle in mind. He should have asked me first; I could have saved him the price of a few expensive meals.

  Anyway, in they came and joined us for the last course. Do you know, it was the most delicious dessert I have ever eaten? Every mouthful made the more sweet by the possibility that, once it was swallowed, one of us was going to say, “Do you know who’s paying for this meal . . . ?” Then the story would be let loose from its cage, and we would see it take wing, and flutter around London, leaving gales of laughter every time its shadow fell on the ground. But we didn’t; that was the real joy. We exchanged many glances of complicity, came close to choking, on occasion, but we hugged it to us. You were our prey, not anyone else’s. We did not need our triumph to become a public one.

  And, yes, perhaps there was a little fear as well. I remember all too well how much you hate being talked about. I remember what you did to take your revenge on poor Rothenstein when some harmless comment he made about you came to your ears. You isolated him, humiliated him. Never let up; more than a decade later you went out of your way to exclude him from your exhibition. You forbade me, and anyone else close to you, to see him, talk to him, have anything to do with him. We were a little group before you arrived to reorganise us, we English speakers in Paris, companionable, trusting, easygoing. We weren’t close, but naturally gravitated towards each other, learnt from each other, helped each other out.

  We split into friends of Rothenstein and friends of yours, those who thought Evelyn was pleasant enough and those who delighted in making fun of her. Those who liked one painter, preferred another, this school or that school. You made sure little preferences became matters of principle important enough to cause bad feeling and rancour. Was Rodin a better sculptor than Bernini? David better than Ingres? Pissarro or Monet? It didn’t matter which; I heard you argue on both sides. Divide and rule, the first principle of the despot.

  Even I said you were being ridiculous, but always I treasured those walks, the conversations along the Seine or in the parks. I didn’t want to risk too much, lest I lose them. My protests were muted.

  “Are you with me or not?” was your only response. “Whose side are you on?”

  “Is it a question of sides?”

  “Yes. A few friends, the rest enemies. That’s the way the world is. If you don’t destroy them, they’ll destroy you. You’ll learn that eventually.”

  Then you went on a tirade about all those people—most of the world—you did not trust. It was a side of you I had never seen before; until then I had only seen the kindness, the generosity, the warmth. But all that was reserved for your loyalists; the punishment meted out to others showed something very different. Where did it all come from? Where did you learn to think that the world was a battle, with only winners and losers? Where did you learn the need to destroy your opponents before they destroyed you?

  So my budding disloyalties remained hidden. You were my friend, after all, and I believe you should forgive friends their failings. It made me begin to think, though. I am not generally a nasty person, as I hope you will agree. And yet, underneath the surface of that little piece of cleverness over the Gauguin there was something decidedly unpleasant. I would not have enjoyed it so much had the painting been foisted on anyone else, however great their reputation, however skilled their judgement. It was because it was you that I so enjoyed my triumph. It took some considerable time before I figured out why doing that to a friend, my best friend, made me feel so good.

  It is taking shape nicely now; I can do without you for the rest of the day. I am no Whistler, I do not like to torture my sitters, drive them to an early grave with my demands on their patience. When I need you back I will send a message. I will work in your absence for a couple of days on the toning and the light, which I can manage just as well in an empty room. Better, in fact, as you won’t distract me. I can enter into your soul through the canvas and the paint, and make sense of you the better if you are somewhere else. I must paint what you were, and what you will become as well. Having you here in person is a complete nuisance.

  I THOUGHT I would find a loophole in the rule I set. I don’t intend to let you see the picture I am doing now; not least because I know you will not leave until you see it. It is my best hope of keeping you here until the bitter end. Someone who hates not being in the know will never leave until he has seen something so personal as his own portrait. I am surprised you have managed to contain yourself so far. I half expected you to hurl yourself across the room and grab the canvas. I wouldn’t, if I were you. I could push you away easily, and it would merely make me more secretive. You do not give your subjects an advance look at the reviews you write about them, do you? So you can’t expect a glimpse of something that is not even half completed. But I suppose there can be no harm in showing you the one I began eight years ago. It’s yours, after all; paid for but never delivered. I’ve often wondered if you were irritated by the way I took the money and never gave anything in return for it. You can’t complain too much; you offered far below my normal price, and I said at the time you might have to wait for it to be finished. Many a client has waited longer, as you know.

  Here it is; what do you think? No; don’t answer. I don’t care what you think. It is incomplete. Not as a picture; it is more than finished, not another brushstroke needed. But as a portrait it is rather limited. I almost burned it a few years back, but I’ve always been reluctant to go for that sort of grand and wasteful gesture.

  An autocritique, then. It is a portrait of a friend, and that is its fatal weakness, one which I have finally solved not by reworking it or burning it, but by continuing it into this new one. Do you know that I remember every moment of painting it? Even looking at it now fills me with a strange melancholy. It was—what?—1906, July 10, a Saturday, one of the most glorious days in God’s creation. You’d suggested painting it in Hampshire, as you were spending the summer there, and I was more eager than I thought to get out of London. So I took the train from Waterloo at eight in the morning, with all my bags and easels tucked around me. God was in His heaven that day. My exhibition at the Carfax gallery was a success, not least because of your review of it; the money and commissions were beginning to come in handsomely, the house in Holland Park was slowly moving from being a dream to something that might shortly turn into solid reality. I had travelled far from Glasgow, and was nearing what I thought was my destination.

  We had made it, you and I. You first, of course, with your wealthy wife, the books and articles, your place advising those American bankers, your trusteeships of museums, all the rest of it. But I, with my gruff Scottish manners convincing sitters they had an authentic artist on their hands, was on my way too.

  So what could be more comfortable than to spend a week with my old friend, basking in mutual self-congratulation? Life cannot get much better than that morning. There was nothing that was not perfect, from the cup of tea I drank in bed before I left home, to the glass of cold wine that awaited me at your house with the view over the downs to the sea. Even the train was all but empty; I had the compartment to myself, and sat smoking my pipe in a dreamy content.

  But. The worm of discomfort was there. Will it last? What if it doesn’t? I wasn’t thinking of any of that, of course, but it was in me, nurturing itself and waiting for its chance. The various elements that would bring me here were already forming around me and in me. What was I, after all? A painter, on the cusp of becoming successful, with two careers which I juggled incessantly. The
portraitist and the other. The commanding figure with the long brushes, photographed for fashionable magazines, and the man who would spend his time sketching old dockers, poor refugees, tired shop girls, young men getting drunk in pubs and collapsing in the mud outside. Dreaming of the hopeless and the ill and the dead. They were increasingly my obsession, although I never showed them in public. They were dark pictures, unsellable. But that was not the reason I hid them. They were not very good and I knew it. It wasn’t misplaced self-doubt, either. There was still too much of the magazine illustrator about me. I painted with passion and energy, and the results were mediocre, condescending, and full of contempt for the subjects. And not the sort of thing anyone would want in their drawing room.

  So I painted my society portraits, and went to more and more fashionable parties and knew more and more interesting people, and dreamed of Holland Park. How tempting, how glittering it all was! And how easy this success is, as well. All you have to do is give people what they want, reflect themselves back into their own eyes, and they will fall over to crush money into your outstretched hand. I was becoming a businessman, and began thinking like one. I wanted particular commissions because of the exposure they would give me, the contacts I would make, not because they were interesting people with complex personalities or difficult faces.

  I came to your house and began to paint you in your study. This picture, the critic as a young man, which I am now complementing with the critic in comfortable middle age. It intimidated me, that place. Those books, those precious objects of such variety. The Chinese porcelain, the wall hangings, the sculptures. The careless profusion of learning, the effortless ease of position. It was as natural to you as breathing, and you used it to bend others to your will. Don’t pretend you didn’t. And that had its effect on the portrait I painted as well. You imposed yourself on me; it was in every brush stroke. I painted not what I saw but how you wished to be seen.

  Did you notice how I became more ill-humoured as the days wore on? You could scarcely have failed to. I behaved abominably, even by my own fairly tolerant standards. I played the artist, but badly, and without humour or grace. I was not like Augustus John, who can charm a woman as he seduces her daughter, amuse a man as he steals from his drinks cabinet. Nor did I want to; the more I stayed, the more I wanted to offend. And succeeded brilliantly, I think. Even I was surprised at my rudeness, my sneering remarks, because they were not normal for me. I am a well-mannered, polite little Scottish boy at heart, wanting to be well thought of by his betters. Did I really stay in bed until noon every day? Reduce your maid to tears with my ill-natured complaints? Say your daughter had better be clever because she’d never be pretty? I’m sure they were not all improvements I added on to the memory later. I was hoping you would throw me out, tell me you never wished to see me again. That you would let me free of your grasp.

  But you do not let go of people so easily. You saw all too clearly what I was doing, better than I did. A look of long-suffering pain in your eyes, a smile of indulgence. A suggestion that perhaps I should spend the afternoon on my own. That was all I got in response. Because you knew I would not leave without your permission, just as you will not leave now without mine.

  In truth, I should thank you, though. That trip to Hampshire brought my worries to the surface, set me on the road to France and the embrace of God in his most Catholic variety. Because I realised, as I unpacked my paints and brushes, and got myself ready, that I was doing your bidding. You don’t remember the moment, I am sure. I chose the position I wanted, and in my mind’s eye I knew how I wanted you to sit. A stark portrait, it would be, head and shoulders, with nothing else to attract the eye. A bit Titian-like, I thought, the background so dark that it would be almost black, just a faint hint of a bookcase.

  And what did I begin painting? The sunlight. I wanted to please you. No bad thing in a portraitist, of course, but the skill lies in making your own vision pleasing. I tried, many times over, to force myself into painting what I had imagined as I travelled down, but every time, the desire to please overwhelmed my instincts. And then I realised the truth: I was merely a hired hand, no different from the fat old woman you employed as a cook or the skinny little consumptive who served as your maid. They, at least, were under no illusions about their position, whereas I had persuaded myself that all these society women and gentlemen farmers who were fast becoming my stock in trade were something other than my masters. That I was their superior and your equal.

  Not that I minded the clients so much; with them the relations were clear. They wanted a portrait making themselves looking grander, more respectable, more human than they were, and were prepared to pay for it. I obliged; and as I was able to turn flattery into art—decent art as well; I never became a hack—they were happy to pay more than usual. That was why I was a success, and in truth I am not ashamed of it. I did much good work; the problem was that it was not the work I wanted to do.

  No; the problem was not my clients, who at least gave something in return for my subjection. They paid well and when the relationship came to an end—the money paid, the portrait hung—their power over me ended as well. The problem was you, who gave nothing and whose power never ended. The critic is a demanding god, who must be constantly appeased. You make your offering, then have to make it again, and again.

  I lost my contentment during that trip to Hampshire. The sun had gone on the journey back to London; I felt every lurch of the train, the other people in the compartment irritated me. One stupid woman kept on trying to strike up a conversation, and I was extremely rude to her. I scowled at the ticket collector for no reason. Well, a very good reason, in fact.

  THIS MORNING, I want to go for a walk. No; nothing subtle. It’s not as if I want to get the colour into those pale aesthetic cheeks of yours, or make some point about bodily exercise and spiritual insight, so I can translate it into a portrait in some masterful way. I merely feel like a walk, and I am prepared to have your company. I walk fairly often, I’ll have you know. There is something always a little unsatisfactory about it, mind. It is too enjoyable to walk here, except in deepest winter. One does not suffer; there is no sense of triumph in the experience. I remember once going for a long walk along Ardnamurchan shortly after I came back from Paris. I went up to Scotland, just me and my sketch pad, to draw anything and everything that took my fancy. I went back to see if I could live in my homeland again; I really wanted to, but knew the moment I got off the train it would be impossible. Do you know there is no Scotsman who lives in England who does not feel slightly guilty? Not about living in England, but about not wanting to go back. I have discovered that coming to France does not have the same effect.

  Anyway, for three weeks I tramped over the land of my forefathers. It was in my etching days, when all the world wanted to be the Scottish Whistler, or the Irish Whistler, or the Tunbridge Wells Whistler. Any place at all, as long as critics like you made a comparison to Whistler. The whole country, I believe, was awash with earnest young men of middling talent, clutching little sheets of metal in their hands, hunting for that perfect aspect, that moment in the doorway, so they could capture it and transmute it into copper, then gold, then fame.

  It eluded me, of course; there is something about the Highlands that cannot be fixed down. Not by me, in any case. Look at the Highlands and you see suffering—if you can see at all. It is a ruined landscape, denuded of trees and people. There animals and men and forests have perished, and the weather reflects it. It is melancholy even when the sun shines. But not for everyone. You have to be tuned to the resonances to see the sadness, pick up the despair in the purple of the heather, the anguish in the wind as it whips up the waves on a loch surface. And if you are not, all you see is a landscape, and all you imagine is men in kilts with a bottle of whisky in one hand and a set of bagpipes in the other.

  No one has ever picked up that misery in line; David Cameron picks up the spiritual side, but misses the human dimension. I tried; I came close, indeed, b
ut not close enough and I didn’t want them to be misunderstood. Can you imagine how it would have felt to have made pictures out of the landscape of human suffering and had them seen as pretty views of Highland scenes? That is what would have happened; I know, because I showed you some of my sketches once. You misunderstood them entirely because your eyes are forever turned towards the continent. The transcendental in your own backyard is of no interest to you. But you have never been to Scotland, never stood at the head of a glen with that wind nearly knocking you down, hearing it echo all around you, and listening to the generations who once lived there.

  They talk, you know, the dead. Not in words, of course; I am not losing my sanity. They talk in the wind and the rain, in the way the light falls on ruined buildings and dilapidated stone walls. But you have to listen and want to hear what they have to say. And you do not; you are a creature of the present. The modern. Well, right enough. Savages and wild men they were. And now, it seems, rich savages, living off the fat of the land in America and Canada. Best thing that ever happened to them, leaving Scotland. What would that Carnegie have been, had he stayed in Scotland, eh? A poor weaver, all that boundless energy going into setting up illicit stills and drinking himself paralytic on a Friday night.

  I can’t hear the dead of this island. Not that they are not talking away; they are. Sometimes, late at night, I hear a sort of chattering in the wind as it rattles round the rooftops; occasionally a conversation almost starts up in the light shining through the puddles after a summer rain. But it never really gets going. We are on neighbourly terms, them and I; we nod to each other, smile occasionally as we pass, but have no desire to take our acquaintanceship further. I am a stranger here, after all, and they do not wish to burden me with their stories. And if they did, what could I say? I would listen politely, but could do little more.