A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

  “Think it’s any good?” he said, his speech slurred as he rocked from foot to foot and pointed with his drink.

  “I do. I love the energy of it. There’s a nursery rhyme core to the painting but the use of vibrant colour and the break with object form suggests that there is something raw and elemental and almost absurd about the cow and the moon and the distant earth which is almost the colour of the moon. It says something about where the imagination can take us.” I wanted to sound knowledgeable, but I had the feeling I had just blown it and that my poseur pretentions to artsy talk had been revealed. He stood back and glared which unnerved me.

  “Ha! That’s my man. You’re right. You’re brilliant!” He hollered across the room, “Jary, this boy is a genius! He loves my painting. See how lucky you are to own it?”

  I knew Rooney cringed because his shoulders went up but he did not turn around. He was deep in conversation with a white-bearded man named Earle Birney to whom I was introduced later that evening.

  ‘You painted that?” I asked. He must have been amused at the note of incredulity in my voice.

  “I, young sir, am not only a painter. I am a genius as you have more or less approximately pointed out.” His voice grew louder. “This young man, ladies and gentlemen, knows the value of a good work of art. He is worth a stack of all you two-bit little sonnuvabitch critics who can’t tell your ass ends from a railway station!” He leaned close to me and whispered: “They can’t tell what’s coming and going and it’s a good thing they aren’t asking for dinner.” He laughed loudly and put his arm around me. I laughed too because it was a funny line and it said something that seemed true to me. Critics should watch what they eat.

  Jary’s wife came over to us, likely with the intention of quelling the storm she thought might break at any moment. She spoke to me. “Pat has you admiring his work. I like it too.”

  “What do you know about liking it?” he asked her, his arm now heavy around my neck and beginning to squeeze me too tightly.

  “I have it in a special place in my household,” she replied with tact and dignity. She turned to the painter. “Someone called for you a little while ago and said they needed to see you downtown this evening.”

  “Was it you?” he asked, leaning into my face.

  “No, I just got here and met you.”

  “That’s right. I have no idea who it would be. My friend here and I are just discussing what makes that painting brilliant. Tell her.” I repeated my explanation as best as I could remember it.

  “See!?” he said, his head rolling back as he stared down his nose at her. A tweedy professor from Jary’s gathering broke off and came over.

  “I’m heading your way, Pat, and I’ll give you a ride but you’ve got to come now.”

  “The bother of it,” he said, squeezing me tighter, “just when I make a new friend, a good friend, a fine friend, a friend who knows a good work when he sees it and isn’t comparing me to Riopelle, what do they do? They shuffle me off.” He downed the contents of his glass. “Hey young sir,” he said as he raised my hand into his and shook it until I thought it would come away from my wrist. “Don’t forget me. Promise? That’s a pal.”

  As he was escorted out by the professor, I turned to Jary’s wife and introduced myself and explained what I was doing at the party and that I was Sheila’s new author.

  “Of course, I know who you are,” she said and hugged me warmly. “I’ve already read your book and you have to autograph it.”

  “And who was that gentleman painter?”

  “He’s wonderful when he’s not drinking but a terror when he is. That was Patrick Eden.”

  Young men are hardwired to want to go in search of paradise. It is the one thing that reassures them that the perfection they possess at that uncertain age might last forever. Paradise when one is twenty-one and full of the impetuosity that comes from having just completed a bachelor’s degree can be a grail that appears and entices in many forms: women, curiosity, drink, places, leader-figures, and even, though I hate to say it, profitable occupations. None of those things, of course, last; but don’t tell that to a poet when he is young.

  As I got older, I continued to maintain a passionate liaison with poetry but was constantly pulled in the opposite direction by the need to earn a living. I chose the bank. Banks will always be there even if my intense dislike of them is shared by just about every other human being. And I thought that banking wasn’t that different from poetry. Both are about organizing abstract concepts, and both are about using systems. T.S. Eliot worked in a bank. So had Robert Service. So had Raymond Souster who I got to know through poetry circles in Toronto. Banking was the perfect place to hide the social imperfection of writing poetry.

  I got married, had children, and rose in the eyes of my financial peers to the point where they could trust me with my own branch. But when the economy started to tank and client after client in my office complained to me about the drop in their savings, I became very jaded about money, especially about investment funds. I began to write more poetry, not that it helped, but it gave me a release. I also started taking what little I had left over at the end of the month and buying art in on-line auctions as an investment. The prices for such things dropped as people became more desperate.

  One evening I bid on two small canvases that caught my eye. They were by the painter I had met that evening at Jary Rooney’s home. The item description read: “Own a little piece of Eden.” I liked that. It said something Blakean to me. The starting bid was laughably low. No one bid against me.

  In one canvas, an old man with a sombrero stands outside an adobe house. He is leaning on a cane. His face is a smudge, but he is staring directly at the painter, as if challenging him. What is even odder is that the protruding beams of the house, the tree in the garden behind the dwelling, even the rocks that clutter the street, are casting shadows. The man is not. The painter is saying the man has no soul.

  The other canvas is more brightly lit. An adobe home sits front and centre in the frame. There is a yard, and walking across the yard is a woman, perhaps a young girl. She is carrying a basket, but it appears to be a heavy load. She is wearing a bloused white top and a blue skirt. The painting was sold under the title “The Girl in the Blue Skirt.” The girl’s back is turned to the artist. She is walking away.

  I bought these paintings because I knew their story. The night they arrived in the mail, I set them up on my desk after the kids were in bed and my wife was taking a long bath with candles and a bad novel. I wanted to stare at them. I wanted to look into those two canvases and try to understand just what happened in the Pueblo village more than seventy years ago. The girl in the blue skirt has turned her back on the artist and is walking away. I want to look into her indifference to see whether it is rejection or suffering that makes her shun him. Eden has taken great pains with the brushwork in that one painting; such pain of detail suggests that the moment is more than real. It is a mirror in which the future can see the past. And the other canvas with the man in the sombrero and his smudged face? I can almost see a fingerprint where his face hovers in the bitter midday sun of that small village. I can hear the crickets screaming out their pain in the dry silence that is penetrated by a dreadful longing, a dreadful desire to shout until that silence is broken. What the artist is painting are two almost coincidental moments that transformed his life. Those moments also transformed Canadian painting.

  Reference books on Canadian painting tell Patrick Eden’s story with typical dispassion. Born in Montreal into a wellto-do family, he attended university there in pre-law studies before dropping out against his family’s wishes to become a painter. (Some of the books say he was disinherited for his refusal to follow their plans for him.) In Montreal, he studied with a number of well-known painters of the time, among them Arthur Lismer of the Group of Seven.

  One summer in the Thirties, he packed a few canvases, his oils and his brushes, and hitch-hiked to the American southwest where he ho
ped to fall in with the painters of Taos New Mexico and the community of artists there, the most notable members of which had been Frieda and D.H. Lawrence and Dorothy Brett. He never made it to Taos. His money ran out about sixty miles from his goal after he had taken a ride down the wrong road. In a small Pueblo village he set up shop, hoping to paint and sell enough canvases to make the final leg of his journey. The southwest adventure failed, though the books do not say why. One source stated that he was retrieved and brought home to Montreal by a cousin after he suffered a nervous breakdown. On his recovery he refused to do object painting again until he painted the flaming cow that hung in Rooney’s dining room. He fell in love with a noted Quebecois actress who introduced him to Jean Paul Riopelle and the revolutionary Quebec painters of the Forties who turned their back on the old ways of seeing and decided to invent an artistic and political destiny all their own. Refuse Global. Eden, at first, joined them in their cause but later fell out when bouts of drinking and violence led to more hospitalizations for depression. Each time he was admitted for treatment, he emerged a newer, stronger artist, almost as if the period of incarceration and care was a living death from which he would be reborn.

  He relocated to London, Ontario, when an offer came to him to teach at the university. London in the early Fifties was a strangely provincial city that had collected one of the greatest gatherings of creative minds Canada has ever seen. Greg Curnoe and Jack Chambers were among the painters, and they were joined by an English professor whose love was poetry: Jared Rooney. London of that period was Canada’s Concord, Massachusetts. At first, in this Thoreau-like environment, Eden was right at home. His canvases were selling for increasingly higher prices. His use of colour, texture, and a refusal to let form dictate the emotional power of his paintings made him a celebrity with the art crowd in Toronto. Everyone who was anyone had to have an Eden hanging in their home.

  And then, suddenly, it all stopped: the celebrity, the appearances as the subject of CBC documentaries, the camaraderie with the local artists. Eden was suddenly alone in the place he thought he could call home. And as the gathering of energetic minds aged, as Chambers and then Curnoe met their ends, London became less and less the centre of ground-breaking work. The references declare that, after several alcohol-induced breakdowns, Eden found himself single, friendless, and unemployable by the university. Yet he continued to paint. As is the case with so many artists and writers, a great silence fell upon his life. There are two responses to such a moment in an artist’s life. The artist can crumble and wallow in his loss or he can reinvent himself. The latter is what Eden did.

  In the Nineties when I was still a hack banker counting out fives and tens for old Italian women at a branch on College Street West and listening as they waved their hands and complained about the cost of produce and how their children did not come by enough to see them, I had a membership at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I bought the membership because someone told me it would be a good way to meet women — women who usually ran from me the first moment they heard I wrote poetry as a past-time — but they were all out of my league. Rich society girls do not want to hang out with bank tellers and they were even more disappointed if I told them I was a fortune teller. Still, I loved the art, spent many winter afternoons wandering among the Renaissance masters, and the gala show openings had great food and free wine.

  A card arrived in my mail one day to invite me to the opening gala for a retrospective of the work of Patrick Eden. He had been rediscovered again. I stood on the top tier of the central court of the AGO. The Roman feeling of a sunken garden surrounded by stone arches clashed with the names of Canadian Indigenous peoples written around the cornice. A microphone came on and the gathering fell silent. The Director of the gallery said some of the typical plaudits about the greatness of the artist and what a privilege and honour it was to host a major retrospective of Eden’s work. Then a famous novelist who was known more for the suffering tone of his sonorous semi-English voice spoke at length about Eden’s hardship and travails and how he had bled, yes bled, for his art for so many years, and how that pain and torture had charted a new vision for those on the Canadian arts landscape. After a woman spoke glowingly about the wonder of the sponsors for the evening’s events and for the show, the proceedings were handed over to the painter.

  There was a moment of silence. He began to speak but his voice faltered after the “Good evening ladies and gentlemen … I am honoured to be here …” Several people among the assembled coughed nervously. His hand went up to his bald head and he looked at the Director and the novelist who offered no assistance to his trembling efforts.

  He began again. “Okay. I’m not a genius. But there is one question I am tired of answering. Two maybe. I can’t stop painting. Only my death will stop me from painting. I hate painting as much as I hate answering questions about what art means to me. It is an addiction and I can’t stop, so please don’t ask about that anymore.” There was a burst of cautious laughter from the art-goers. “No, it’s not funny. It is tough. I can’t paint objects anymore. And here is my answer to the second question which I am continually asked and I don’t want to talk about anymore after this evening. Why do I paint abstract paintings? I’ll tell you.

  “In the summer after my first year of studies at the art college where I had studied with Arthur Lismer, I decided I would go off and try to find my way in the world as a painter. I hitchhiked through America. It was the middle of the Great Depression and I saw some terrible things. Poverty. Suffering. Desperation. But I also saw light and I followed that light westward until I reached a place where I ran out of money and where the light was good enough to discover things by. The place where my money ran out was a small village of adobe buildings. It wasn’t Taos but it was good enough for me and I decided that not having other artists around might be a blessing. I’d have air to breathe.

  “I found a room and started painting the town — both literally and figuratively. I was in the market place one day — it wasn’t much of a market … just a couple of women and old men with blankets and wares spread on the ground. I bent down to examine some tomatoes and when I stood up I was looking directly into the deep brown eyes of a beautiful woman. Her name was Vincenta. Just about every artist has a Vincenta in his life. That type of woman is what artists live and die for. They suffer for her. As Robert Graves would say, she is their goddess. Every day I would go to the market and speak with her and eventually she spoke back to me. She told me she lived on the edge of town and I walked her home one afternoon. She also told me I should be wearing a hat. The sun in that part of the world is unmerciful and aside from the headaches I didn’t think about having to wear one. She took pity on me one day and brought me one of her father’s. I’d have to say I was in love.

  “One evening I came home and found that my landlady had seized my canvases. They were all I had. She said I owed her money, and I did. I told her that I would sell the canvases and pay her but she would have no part of it. I watched a few days later as her husband used some of them to patch the roof. I had nowhere to go, but at least I had Vincenta and I had some card stock that came from a sketch book I tore up so I continued to paint on those. Vincenta let me sleep in a shed behind her house and she would smuggle out their leftover bread and other things for me to eat. An angel is someone who will be there to help you, someone who will listen to you and appreciate your ideas even if they don’t completely understand them. It’s patience. Maybe the most pure form of patience one can know.

  “One night I took Vincenta for a walk. It wasn’t far from her house, just out in the back forty of her father’s property. She told me her father was a very stern man, crippled in one leg, easily angered, and very possessive of her. My Spanish wasn’t very good but I told her how much I loved her and that she had to be mine, somehow she had to be mine. She asked me how much I loved her and I responded that I would jump over the moon for her. Like the cow, I added. She didn’t understand. I told her I wanted to run away
with her and this frightened her. She had never been farther than her village. I was about to kiss her. I was looking into those beautiful brown eyes when she heard her father call. She turned and ran.

  “The next day I was walking through the town and an old man on a cane came up to me shouting something I did not understand. He knocked my hat into the dirt and spat on my shoes. He seized my box of paints and opened them and flung them into the dust. Some of my work blew away, swirling on dust devils in the midday sun. He broke into English momentarily saying I, Augustino, curse you. You will not have my daughter! Diablo! That was all he said. That was the end of it. I ran after him trying to plead my case, but he just kept walking and without looking at me, blocking me with his cane.

  “I had nowhere to go, nothing to eat. And no hat. I picked up my colours and the two remaining cards and reassembled my box. I immediately sat down in the dirt and painted a small study of the old man with the cane, a pueblo building in front of which our dramatic moment had taken place. I finished it. It was the only thing I could say. As the colours set I put the tip of my finger on his face and said: Silence old man. You have forgotten what love is.

  “Then, for the remainder of the scorching afternoon I stood in front of Vincenta’s house. I felt my brains boiling in that merciless sun. I thirsted, God how I thirsted. I was determined that I would die for paradise if need be. I painted Vincenta’s house, but not with the rushed brush strokes that I had used to paint her father but with my finest brush, detail by detail. Suddenly Vincenta walked by me. I called to her and pleaded to stop and turn to me but she did not return my gaze. She was carrying a heavy load, bent over. I don’t know what it was. The wind came up and her white blouse billowed and her blue skirt waved back at me in the breeze as if the tips of her garment were reaching out to touch me just one last time, and it broke my heart. I stood there and painted and painted until my eyes went blind in the sun and I collapsed, gasping and writhing in the sand. I don’t remember anything after that.