Bamboo

by William Boyd

  8. In 1948 during one of Hopper’s artistic blocks he and his wife went driving around Cape Cod looking for subjects to paint—in vain, as it turned out. “Nothing seemed to crystallize into a picture,” Jo Hopper wrote in her diary. Looking back over previous canvasses searching for inspiration, she added, “Only a few of them had been done from the fact. The fact is so much easier—than digging it out of one’s inner consciousness. It’s such a struggle.”

  9. For the last six years I have probably looked more closely at actual Edward Hopper paintings than the work of any other artist. In New York, the Whitney Museum regularly displays about half a dozen of its large Hopper holding in its permanent collection. When I’m in New York, about three to four times a year, I walk past the Whitney at least twice a day: on several of those days I pop in and look at the Hoppers. Their allure never dulls and their integrity shines with iconic force in that institution.

  What you immediately notice when you look at a Hopper oil up close (say six inches) is how laboriously the paint is applied and worked. There is nothing free-flowing, no agile brushstroking. There is a doggedness and flatness about the painted surface, a patient air of covering the canvas diligently. The effect, as I’ve mentioned above, is to make the paintings look almost amateurish in technique. If you look at how the grass is painted in Four-Lane Road no effort is made to render the blades of grass, to convey any tuftiness or differentiation in light and shade. He might as well be painting Astroturf. Similarly the trees in Gas are an amorphous lumpy mass with a lot of black mixed with the near uniform green. Time and again the great paintings illustrate this homogenizing, low-rent effect—the bleached grass in South Carolina Morning, the slab buildings in Approaching a City, the cow-pat hills in Western Motel. The technique looks clumsy, heavy-handed and homespun. It’s not quite paint-by-numbers but there is something automatic about the look: “grass is green,” “paint walls beige,” “shadows are purply-blue.” Hopper used a great deal of turpentine when he painted in oil. This simple parsimonious texture of his actual canvases explains why they reproduce so exceptionally well—nothing is really lost in the process apart from the evidence of how it is achieved.

  The same qualities apply to his figures. His wife posed for all the women in his paintings but there is no sense that a portrait of Jo is ever being attempted. The raddled stripper in Girlie-Show, the buxom secretary in Office at Night, the woman reading in Chair Car barely register as individuals—they are more mannequins than people.

  Why did Hopper subdue his manifest skills in this way? A glance at his preparatory sketches shows his tremendous facility, his confidence, his natural sense of composition. But everything in the finished painting seems designed to remove any indication of talent and ability. Faces are cartoonishly hybrid, poses are awkward, hands are badly rendered. It’s as if he wanted to be seen as a very average, not particularly gifted painter (he certainly convinced Clement Greenberg). He did not want his virtuosity to get in the way of the picture’s effect.

  10. The late painting Rooms by the Sea (1951) exhibits this tendency at its most emphatic. The sea looks like it’s bad trompe l’oeil. The door of the room seems to open directly and impossibly on to the water. There is no sense of receding distance in the sky or of the horizon. Through another door we glimpse some furniture as featureless as a dentist’s waiting room. A wedge-shaped block of sunlight lights the floor and wall, and in the room beyond another lucent parallelogram mimics the first. The plaster wall is roughly, almost carelessly painted, short brush-strokes clearly visible. Such mundanity, such absence of brio. Sun, sea and shadow are all we have to go on. So how do we explain this painting’s enduring power to move and affect us? What abstract nouns brew in this refulgent atmosphere? Eternity? Solitude? Bliss? Transience? Emptiness? I suspect the answer lies in the individual viewer, but nothing in the painting, or its title, makes any overt effort to provoke portentousness.

  11. One of the few remarks Hopper made about his work is very telling. Asked what made him choose a particular subject—a hotel lobby, a house in the dunes, a cinema usherette—Hopper said: “I do not exactly know, unless it is that I believe them to be the best mediums for a synthesis of my inner experience.” This is another way of saying that his paintings are all about mood.

  12. Wallace Stevens is a great American poet. He is “American” in the same sense that Hopper is “American”: they are both in their own way unique and uniquely a product of their country. No European poet is like Stevens even though Stevens’s work is replete with references to European civilization. Stevens, a deeply educated man who loved European culture, was even more stay-at-home than Hopper. He never left the USA at all.

  Stevens wrote an essay entitled: “The Relations between Poetry and Painting.” In it, he states, “No poet can fail to recognize how often a detail, a propos or remark, in respect to painting, applies also to poetry.” A few pages further on he says, “The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.” This, it seems to me, is what is going on when we look at a Hopper painting. The “world about us” of the subject matter—the couple in a hotel room, a group of people in a night-time diner, the secretary in the office—is pervaded and invaded by the “world within us.” Hopper’s simple paintings encourage that interchange, what Stevens calls the “migratory passings to and fro, quickenings, Promethean liberations and discoveries.” Strong stuff with powerful after-effects. To provoke such Promethean liberations and discoveries with such studious, careful artlessness makes Hopper the great American painter of the twentieth century. Perhaps it makes him the Great American Painter, full stop.

  2004

  Nat Tate

  The True Story

  The origins of “Nat Tate” go back a fair distance. In 1987 I published my novel The New Confessions which took the form of a fictional autobiography. Reviewing it, Bernard Levin said, “hypnotised by its autobiographical form I found myself riffling through the pages for the photographs.” “Photographs …?” I thought, “I’ve missed a trick there.” Then some years later I was invited to contribute to a book called David Hockney’s Alphabet, in which twenty-six writers were asked to provide a short text—of any sort—to accompany Hockney’s graphic depictions of each letter. I was given the letter “N” and wrote a biographical memoir of a wholly fictional francophone Laotian writer called Nguyen N, who had briefly flourished in Paris between the wars. I quoted a letter from N to André Gide and I cited his celebrated work of aphoristic philosophy, Les Analects de Nguyen N (Monnier, Toulon, 1928). At the launch party for the book I was engaged in protracted conversation with a guest who claimed to remember reading about N, and indeed had a French bookseller searching for a first edition of Les Analects. It was an awkward few minutes and I thought it best to leave enlightenment for another day.

  In both cases it was not the idea of a hoax that intrigued me so much as the ability to make something entirely invented seem astonishingly real. I began vaguely to formulate the idea of taking the fictional biography mode even further into the area of verisimilitude and, some years ago, started collecting discarded photographs—from junk shops, house-clearance sales, brocantes in France—with a view to one day writing a “life” tricked out with all the artefacts of a real biography—illustrations, notes, bibliography, index and so on.

  Thus when, last year, Karen Wright, the editor of Modern Painters magazine (on whose editorial board I sit), started talking to me about the forthcoming New York issue—and was wondering if there was a way of getting fiction into the magazine—I realized immediately that here was the perfect opportunity. “Why don’t I invent a painter?” I said, knowing I already had the raw materials to hand. And so I duly did and so Nat Tate was born, lived for three decades and died.

  I placed Tate in a period of twentieth-century artistic history that I was already fascinated by—namely the 1950s in New York, which saw the emergence of the New York School of artists and the birth of Abstract Expressionism. This was the era
of Jackson Pollock and Action Painting, of de Kooning, Kline and Motherwell. It was the first time that the full glare of hype and media interest transformed a group of impoverished, unknown artists almost overnight into national and international celebrities, and with that renown came the more destructive elements of sudden wealth, notoriety, groupies, drugs, booze, jealousies, acrimony and premature death. This background had everything I needed for Nat and as I began to evolve the details of his brief life I began to invent characters—his foster parents, fellow artists, gallery owners—whose personalities would fit the photographs I had collected.

  It was a complex process—but hugely enjoyable—and as it enlarged I started factoring real people into the Nat Tate story—the poet Frank O’Hara, Georges Braque, Franz Kline, Picasso and Larry Rivers amongst others. I began to feel like Dr Frankenstein. Nat Tate became my benign, doomed monster: I had his photo in front of me, I had put together all the ingredients of his short, tragic life; he seemed, even in manuscript stage, almost to live and breathe. The search for authenticity went further—some of Nat Tate’s drawings were created, and a large abstract oil. I approached Gore Vidal and John Richardson (Picasso’s friend and biographer), both of whom I knew, and asked them to “reminisce” about meeting Nat in the 1950s—which they sportingly and readily agreed to do.

  But at the same time as I worked to provoke immediate credulity I knew that the story could not withstand sustained analysis—far too much was invented. Indeed one of the key witnesses to Nat’s life—an English writer called Logan Mountstuart—was a character taken from one of my short stories published in The Destiny of Nathalie X in 1995. The book was, in the end, studded with covert and cryptic clues and hints as to its real, fictive status. For me, the author, this was part of the pleasure—a form of Nabokovian relish in the sheer play and artifice—and the fundamental aim of the book, it became clear to me, was to destabilize, to challenge our notions of authenticity. First would come belief—the thing looked so wonderfully genuine, beautifully produced, full of photographs—then doubts would set in, alarm bells begin distantly to ring. But then the reader would come across—say—Gore Vi-dal’s recollections, and there would be a picture of Frank O’Hara and a Frank O’Hara poem mentioning Tate and credulity would be established again for a while—before suspicions crept back in. What was created was a form of reverse propaganda. Not truth disguised by lies, but “Truth” peeled away to reveal the true lie at the centre.

  But we—the key conspirators and 21 Publishing—decided to present the book absolutely straight, deadpan. People had to be seduced—deluded—at first in order for the plan to work. The Sunday Telegraph joined the inner circle—an extract would be published, again in deadpan, orthodox manner, on the arts pages. Launch parties were planned, a week apart, in New York and London. We synchronized our responses and waited to see what would happen.

  My own expectations were that we would experience a form of slowly mounting scepticism ending, on our part, in candid confession. But in fact the projected slow burn became a loud detonation when a journalist on the Independent, who had overheard two conspirators’ loose tongues wagging, decided to blow the whole thing wide open.

  I wasn’t there. When the “hoax” was exposed I was in Paris promoting the French edition of my new novel, Armadillo, hearing everything at second hand. The unspooling of the Nat Tate story was always intended to be something far more subtle and intriguing, but I must confess to a strange frisson when I read, in Paris, an account of the affair in the Herald Tribune. There was the name “Nat Tate” printed in bold alongside other celebrities—Eva Perón, Jimmy Stewart, the Rolling Stones. Perhaps, I thought, poor Nat would, in a curious way, endure—and Nat Tate would have a sort of life, after all.

  1998

  Africa

  I was born in Africa (in Ghana) and for the first twenty years of my life regarded it unreflectingly as my home. I felt far more at ease in Ibadan, for example, the regional capital of western Nigeria, than I did in Edinburgh, the city nearest my family’s home in Scotland, where we went on two months’ leave each year—as the rainy season drenched equatorial Africa—to enjoy a showery Scottish summer. So, as I started to write fiction, it seemed entirely natural for me to set that fiction in the continent that, in a way, had both nurtured and fired my imagination.

  As a result of this I have found myself perceived as an expert or potential commentator on all things African and have been asked to review books on subjects as varied as the Fashoda Incident, the exploration of the Sahara, the apartheid regime in South Africa and the civil war in Sierra Leone. By and large I have readily complied, and in the process have learned a lot.

  But Ghana and Nigeria are the only countries I can claim to know well at first hand and Nigeria, where I spent my teens, provided me with most of the raw African material that I transmuted into my novels and short stories. It also provided me with a friend in the shape of the Nigerian writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and through him, inadvertently, to a saddening connection with ruthless Nigerian politics that I had never expected or sought.

  I wrote a great deal about Ken Saro-Wiwa over the years and the articles selected here reproduce the bitter trajectory of his life from contented and successful writer to inspiring political activist, to stubborn prisoner, to condemned man, to the executed victim of a repressive regime.

  Ken Saro-Wiwa (1)

  Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. The latest population estimate is 100 million and rising. Yet every Wednesday evening at 8.30, about a third of that vast population sits down in front of its television sets to watch a particular soap opera.

  They are enthralled, they are obsessed with it, and they laugh. This is a comedy, pointed and unsparing, scabrous and overtly moral. What makes the whole phenomenon singular and bizarre is that the audience is laughing at itself. This is not some sanitized, deodorized version of family or community life, or some farcical ad-man’s sitcom; this is a soap opera about corruption and graft, about idleness and self-delusion, about futile dreams and impossible aspirations. It is a soap opera about what not to do with your life.

  The man who created this is a forty-nine-year-old Nigerian writer called Ken Saro-Wiwa. When I mention the viewing figures he smiles wryly. “You wouldn’t think it an unreasonable conclusion to draw … that as the writer and producer of a television programme that has run to 156 episodes with an average audience of 30 million, I would have made a fortune,” he says.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Well, you’d be wrong.”

  “But you do break even?” I venture, somewhat amazed.

  “Not yet.” He shrugs, and smiles again. “Maybe one day.”

  Perhaps this is the most extraordinary feature of a most extraordinary enterprise: Mr Saro-Wiwa is not in this for the money. Mr Saro-Wiwa, and I say this with genuine admiration, is not bothered by being in the red. The forces that impel him to make and pay for his soap opera have nothing to do with the profit motive.

  The programme in question is called Basi & Co., and although there has never been an official assessment, viewing figures of that size must make it a contender for the world’s most watched television serial.

  The idea itself stemmed from a radio play Mr Saro-Wiwa wrote in the early seventies called The Transistor Radio, about an inept conman in Lagos who tries to rip people off by posing as a collector of fees for transistor radio licences.

  He was invited by the director of programmes of Nigerian Television to produce a television series of thirteen episodes. He took the characters from his radio play and assembled a troupe of actors to perform his scripts and went into production.

  The first episodes were screened in October 1985. Since then, Mr Saro-Wiwa has written the series, produced it, paid the salaries of the cast and crew and has sold the finished programmes to Nigerian Television and the thirty-five local television stations.

  Five years later, Basi & Co. has established a place in the national Nigerian consciousness as firmly a
nd redoubtably as Coronation Street or Dallas in other countries. As with any soap opera or sitcom, the central cast of characters inhabit a precise location, in this case Adetola Street in Lagos. The series features half a dozen key personalities, but the eponymous hero is Basi, or Mr B, as he refers to himself. Mr B is an idle, likeable rogue who is powerfully convinced that the world most definitely owes him a living. His personal motto which he has printed on the red T-shirt he invariably wears is, “To be a millionaire, think like a millionaire.” Basi’s dreams are always almost about to be realized.

  Almost, but not quite. True, Basi’s vulgar aspirations are timeless and perennial, shared by all lovable rogues, from Barry Lyndon to Basil Seal, but Mr Saro-Wiwa’s objective is not solely to entertain. For it seems clear that the series has succeeded so emphatically precisely because it holds a mirror up to Nigerian society. It is a soap opera fuelled and driven by vehement satire and moral indignation rather than the usual lures of vapid wish fulfilment, folksy low-life homilies or squeaky-clean fantasies of impossible communities. In five years, Basi & Co. has become a Nigerian phenomenon, as, indeed, has its only begetter.