It was easier for me to see after my brother’s death – and then easier again after my mother’s – how much she had watched over his painting. How she inspired and nourished his artwork just as much as she did my poems and stories. Clearing out the family home following my father’s death I found numerous letters from my brother to ‘Mummy’ (as he called her all his life) in which he writes about the photographs he has been taking and the pictures he is painting. And about all the materials – oils canvas different kinds of cartridge paper brushes drawing pens and so on – which he needs and which she then helps him obtain. My mother also did everything she could to get him a place at art school in London. In a letter to my cousin Mike (written around July 1978) she writes: I took Simon up to St Martin’s Art School in Charing X Rd to give in his ‘portfolio’ and await results but we were both rather horrified by the sordidness of the place. At the Slade Sch of Art – part of University College we looked around & had a chat with an elderly professor who emphasised the importance of doing A levels so I’m hoping Simon took it all in & will change his attitude. In the barn owl and jackdaw newspaper story about him at the age of fifteen my brother is quoted as saying: I don’t really like school. I can’t stand living around built-up areas. I don’t care what I do for a living as long as I live in the country. Maybe I could work as a freelance artist.
Wallace Stevens entitles the second part of one of his poems ‘The Westwardness of Everything’. It has to do with Ireland. But for me this phrase is about my family’s relation to the West Country. At the age of fifteen my brother seemed to know just what he wanted to do. The Cotswolds were not quite the West Country but they were westward enough to be going on with. His yearning to live in the country was bound up with our Cotswold cousins – just as it was aligned with my parents’ increasing determination to move out of Greater London and head west. He never did A-levels but on the basis of his portfolio got a place at Taunton Art College. He moved down to the West Country a couple of years after our cousin Mike had moved to Bristol to study medicine and a year before our parents – and Marion and John – left Surrey and moved to Devon. But Simon was not to be institutionalised. He got kicked out of Taunton (for possession of cannabis) and started another course back at Kingston in Surrey. And then the illness began. At which point he dropped out of Kingston and moved west again.
What might have become of my brother’s art? His life was so short and he left behind little. But he was very gifted. All the drawings and paintings that survive have such life and humour. Such accuracy and strangeness. My parents’ bedroom in Devon always seemed more my mother’s domain than my father’s. It had windows on three sides – as well as an en-suite bathroom looking out over the valley. This was where my mother took her baths. (My father would always shower in the downstairs bathroom.) This was also the room in which she locked herself when my brother died. This bathroom was her domain. Here she would stand smoking a Silk Cut at the open window early morning or evening and watch the house martins weave and shoot about the air. (Or after dark the bats.) She always kept both bathroom and bedroom very well ventilated. Windows wide open for extended periods of the day.
Walking into the bedroom always gave me the sense of stepping aboard a boat of light. At the furthest window was a small white Formica dressing-table on which she kept various trinkets and jewellery. Behind them on the window-ledge stood a couple of my brother’s paintings. One was a painting of an alligator. He had painted an inner frame for this sinister-looking beast: its head seemed to be coming out of the picture. The other was a night-scene of a badger minding its own business pattering down a moonsplashed lane. Then on the wall of the bedroom there were a couple of watercolours. One of a nuthatch. Another of a lamb playing in a field of green – with rather childlike and implausible ruins in the background. Although we never spoke of my brother after his death I know she cherished these little paintings. Sometimes as I came upstairs or along the passageway from my own bedroom I saw my mother in the company of her lost son’s pictures.
Once she was sitting at the dressing table with her back to me. I advanced towards her. She didn’t turn around. She was looking at the badger in the moonlight. Tears were flowing down her cheeks. Neither of us spoke.
You go to an art gallery and might spend a minute or two looking at a painting. My brother’s last painting was in another category of existence. We all knew it was his final painting. (In fact he began another but this was the last completed.) He was working at it for months. Sometimes he had no time. At no instant was there enough. Sometimes he was too debilitated smashed up washed out by medication and the cancer’s advances. Other times he could work with care and patience for several hours. We all lived with this painting. Throughout the final months when my mother and Cris were nursing him my brother worked on at this picture about which nonetheless none of us ever said anything. Nothing besides some vapid remark such as Looks wonderful… or Amazing colour…
No one asked So what is it? because it was obvious what it was. It was his last painting. It is a painting of his last painting. A painting of his life. It is within a ruined building in broad daylight. Timber-framed. Gray stone. Dilapidated and open to the sky. In the centre is a porthole window without glass. Like an eye. The suggestion of some kind of torture chamber is clear. A thick rope descends from a beam in the background. A black metal chain from another. Beyond the doorway are grasses and sand reminiscent of the beach at Farr Bay in northern Scotland where we had stayed the previous summer. (Farr was the limit. As far as we could go. Farr Bay was the unspeakable ‘terminal point’: the furthest point of our Scottish adventure. From the moment we left the inn there with its desolate quicksandy beach we were on the road home. The terrible fifteen-month final straight.) In the foreground of the painting like a misshapen mouth below the porthole window are stone steps leading underground. Sitting at the top with one foot on the second step and the other dandering on air is a sylphlike spectre-thin young man with ears like an emaciated Captain Spock. He is looking off. Awry. Away from the viewer but also away from the bulking principal presence in the picture – a man with gray hair and moustache. Dressed in a blood-red cassock fit to die for his faith. Light sandals make his feet match with those of the forlorn being on the steps. He has a benign expression but wears dark glasses and holds one arm behind his back. The sinister. Under his right arm is a gigantic dreamlike snail. For all the apparent emphasis on the male I see it as a painting about the mother. Not only the mother who had in March 1986 brought my brother a son but the mother who had brought my brother himself into the world. As if wrapped in the swaddling clothes of a snail. This was the painting that accompanied my mother and the rest of us through the worst months of our lives.
Speechless
My father never talked much. Except on the phone to his brothers. The occasional old school friend or work colleague. He could be very loquacious on paper. But he spoke little to me or my brother. Just as he didn’t dream at night so he refrained from speech by day. His not being able to remember any of his dreams seemed a get-out clause for the very idea of having an unconscious. His self-proclaimed status as non-dreamer infuriated me. How could he not dream? Or at least how could he not accept that he dreamt but could not remember what he dreamt? How repressed must he be!
Likewise I could be riled by his silence. I would become incredulous that he had nothing to say. Or that so often his one line in conversation was about the weather. This never altered. Even after my mother died and we were the sole survivors. Even then when he might have opened up he didn’t. Every morning he would be downstairs before me and as I entered the kitchen he would greet me (sometimes in a West Country accent: Mornin’!) then summarise his meteorological gleanings regarding the day. Drawn from the latest forecast on Radio 4. Compared with the previous day’s radio and TV and newspaper predictions. Just the weather. Then silence. Every day. As if there were nothing else to be said. But as the years passed I became less exasperated. More tolerant. Ev
en heart-warmed by his ritualistic formulae and expressions.
It was a great boon having a brother. We could share and verify the reality of our feelings. Our father’s taciturnity annoyed us both. He was a strange figure. Strange to all. Even to his own brothers. And of course to my mother. Freud coined the term ‘oedipal’ to refer to the welter of feelings – negative as well as positive – irradiating any so-called nuclear family. His contention that we should deploy this word to designate the fundamental tenor of a mother-son or father-son relationship always struck me as questionable. Why Sophocles rather than Shakespeare? Wasn’t the kind of psychic dynamic Freud claimed to have discovered more evident in Hamlet than in Oedipus the King? Was there not in any case something strange about basing life on literature in this way? And then again: why give it a general name at all? But Freud also understood the profound links between the name and magic: how a word can spirit up and spirit away. How a name can be a source of dispossession as well as power. How a name can affect the person saying it as much as the person named. And how these links can carry on beyond death.
In many respects our family was conventional. The unfab four. As in the photograph on the beach at Soar Mill Cove in Devon in 1965: a just-like-any-other-family snapshot. There’s no doubt that my brother and I felt aggressive towards our father for being himself. My brother and I fought one another and fought our father for our mother’s love and attention. If I was alone with my mother and my father came into the room the current of hostility that passed through me did not alter over the decades. As Walter Pater says: Each one of us keeps prisoner his own dream of a world.
I always thought it funny that there was a writer called Father. A writer moreover who seemed in many ways more a mater than a pater. Dreams are mother. From the mother and in the mother. They mother us. And in one’s own dream of a world there are also magical words like ‘maxwellian’. We do not dream in Sophoclean Greek. The charm of ‘maxwellian’ lay in its capacity to encapsulate the behaviour of a man in silent mode. To introduce laughter into the scene. And to make some gesture towards recognising the singular stamp of our father. Towards registering his own – strange because reputed dreamless – dream of a world.
Death releases among other things the banal but terrifying reality of writing. Private communications. Personal documents. Of course I did not read the letters my brother wrote to my parents. But after his death and after my parents’ deaths these letters came to me and forced me out of the absurd narrowness of supposing that my mother was my mother rather than my brother’s. Of making me at least a little more aware of how far my mother was my brother’s mother as much as mine.
Following my father’s death I had to contend with a certain faded light brown folder bearing the title Widworthiana. I had been aware of its existence. He’d told us that he was writing the thing and even gave occasional intimation of topics he was covering. But it was only after his death that I studied it in any detail. It is divided into some seventeen instalments dated between June 1985 and August 1990. My father’s graphic design company did a lot of business with a publisher in New Jersey. Over the years he’d become friends with a couple of the women who worked there. They exchanged Christmas cards and letters and had the occasional chatty phone call. He only once flew over – for a week in 1969 – to meet with them. At some point during that week my mother took me and my brother to a toy shop and said: You can choose anything you want. To my ears a horrifying repetition of what she’d said the day following her father’s death. I supposed my own had died. Falling from the Empire State Building. At any rate his time with the ladies in New Jersey must have cemented the relationship. For many years his company was reliant on this publisher for a steady flow of illustrative work. Widworthiana emerged out of my father’s interest in the local and particular and his American colleagues’ expressed interest in English rural life. This singular opus was not addressed to his New Jersey colleagues as such. But the obvious pleasure taken in describing aspects of English everyday life was not for home-grown consumption. Widworthiana was – in a curious fashion – for an American market.
While my father never spoke of his love for my mother and his children and grandchildren there was no doubt that it was deep and constant. Which is what makes his Widworthiana so unbearable to read. He writes it in periods when there’s little or no proofreading to do or when he has a few days’ holiday. On one occasion he makes reference to the fact that Kathleen (as he always calls her in the text) is away on holiday (doubtless visiting Scotland with Marion). There is no sense that this is a furtive document. On the contrary it is pitched towards a general reader. Like a whimsical cross-current to Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America: Widworthiana is a ‘letter to America’ in the form of notes from rural life. My father writes about the weather and the state of the stream that runs down (or has stopped running down) the garden. About his various pond-digging and related spring-seeking exploits. About his lawn-cutting and hedge-trimming and endeavours to make certain useful implements and other contraptions. Other humans make fleeting appearances but the main dramatis personae are three geese (Charles and Brownie and Griselda) and a fox. A black rabbit that turns up in the garden then disappears (feared taken by fox or crows due to its poor camouflage) but comes back (as if from a magician’s hat). Some white doves up the lane at Kitty West’s house for which my father constructs a dovecot. (He also details what transpire to be fruitless plans for establishing a dovecot of his own.) And the house martins that fly about the eaves through spring and summer and whose arrival and departure each year my father records with maxwellian precision. Interspersed through the seventeen instalments are a series of exquisite diagrams and line-drawings of the garden and the position of the cottage relative to nearby woods and fields and other houses.
Here is a paragraph from the first instalment (dated 4 June 1985):
Perhaps the most significant Widworthy item at present is the geese: we have two geese and one most ferocious gander. I have at last (I think!) come to an understanding with the latter, and can go freely in whatever part of the garden I choose, but unfortunately I am the only one who can do this – even Kathleen, my wife, will not by herself step over the fence into the half acre or so of garden that is goose territory, and any visitors who want to be shown round the garden can only do so if closely chaperoned by me. Sometimes I have to grab Charles (the gander) by the neck, and usher him away on such occasions.
It was always unclear to me how or why we came to acquire these birds in the first place. I imagine it was my brother’s idea and my parents were happy to facilitate. But my father’s description gives a nice sense of what Beckett might call how it is: the geese just are. Their arrival and the rationale for their presence in the garden are beyond anyone’s control or understanding. The ‘even Kathleen’ is a fine phrase. As if in tribute to her otherwise intrepid spirit.
It can feel uncanny to read something written by a loved one who is dead. It’s not so much (as in the case of the letters tucked away in my father’s wallet) the sense that one is reading something one shouldn’t be reading. It’s more how writing opens up and changes the past. One sees and is seized by unexpected thoughts. Unfamiliar perspectives and new insights. There is eeriness but also strange solace. There is the return or fresh emergence of a beloved voice. Speaking in a manner at once recognisable and unfamiliar. In Instalment XV (9–14 May 1990) my father writes:
Due perhaps to the alleged ‘greenhouse’ effect on our climate, the growth patterns in these parts seem to be changing somewhat. I had, for example, to mow all the lawns near the house on 22nd February this year, which is at least a month earlier than I’ve ever had to cut them before. Conversely, I have not yet been able to cut a large area of the grass beyond the stream at all, due to the fact that it has so many groups of daffodils, narcissi, primroses and bluebells growing in it. The daffodils and narcissi have now all finished blooming, but many of the bluebells are still in full flower and will probably continue
thus for another week or so, with the result that when I do finally get around to cutting these areas, most of the grass will be at least a foot tall. I hope my old tractor will be working efficiently when the time comes!
The house martins returned three or four days ago from wherever they’d been spending the winter, and we frequently see them swooping around with their usual grace and speed in the air at the back of the house, and then going up to the nests in the eaves that they had abandoned at the end of last summer. I think I’ll have to go out to the Small Pond soon, to make sure that plenty of the silt/mud that has built up in it lately is readily available for the house martins to use in refurbishing their nests; there isn’t much other mud available in this area at present, due to an exceptionally low rainfall over the last month or two, which has left everything very dry.
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