And yet, he wondered what good this powerful urge had done either him or the world in general. Artists, like anybody else, had a social purpose, which was … what? To increase the amount of beauty in the world? If this was what artists were for, then he was, in a sense, a mere decorator. Or did the creation of beauty have a purpose beyond the deed of its creation? Beauty and truth were linked, he had always assumed, and to create beauty was to state a truth. And if one stated a truth, one was revealing that truth to others and that, surely, was worth doing for itself.
As an artist he was committed to beauty, and yet what contribution to an understanding of beauty had he made? He thought of his portrait painting. When he painted a portrait he tried to capture something about the essence of the sitter. The perception of that essence might have an uplifting effect on the person who gazed upon the painting, but that, he thought, was rare, and was possibly restricted to portraits of beautiful sitters. It did not apply, he thought, to his unfinished portrait of Ramsey Dunbarton, the retired solicitor who had been so inordinately proud of playing the part of the Duke of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers at the Churchhill Theatre. His portrait of Ramsey, not completed because of the death of the sitter – in Angus’s studio – added nothing to human understanding. All that it said was that there was once a man who looked like this, who was painted by this particular artist. It was of no greater interest, Angus told himself, than an entry in an old telephone directory. Such entries say there was once a person called this who lived at this address and who could be reached at this number.
I must do something permanent, he thought. And then he thought of Italy, and of all that it meant for our sense of beauty. I shall paint something of great significance there, he thought.
He shivered. Something was upon him – filling him with a sense of power and possibility. A great painting, he thought. At last.
40. A Moment on Queen Street
Angus painted for two hours before pausing. The canvas on which he was working was an undemanding one – a group portrait commissioned by a bank of its board of directors. He had chosen to portray the directors in both standing and sitting poses, casually placed around a boardroom, with one even looking out of the window and caught only in profile. The commission had preceded the disaster that struck the bank, a few months before the howling winds of financial crisis had stripped away the clothing of centuries and exposed alarmingly shaky foundations. Angus had finished the sittings when this began, and had awaited instructions from the bank as to what to do. Several of the directors had gone: was he to paint out their faces in the way of official artists of the old Soviet Union, where discredited members of the Politburo found themselves over-painted with vases of flowers? No such instruction came from the bank, which, having agreed to pay his fee, felt obliged to honour the contract.
‘Perhaps I could paint one or two of them looking regretful,’ Angus suggested to the bank official who had made all the arrangements. ‘Would that do? It would be recording a particular moment in banking history, and might therefore be of greater interest in the future. What do you think?’
This had been greeted with silence. Then the official said, ‘I’m not sure if all of them are regretful. Some of them, certainly, but not everyone at that level seems to have donned sackcloth and ashes.’
Angus thought about this. There had been general calls for punishment and retribution, with eager tricoteuses taking up their station outside corporate headquarters, but this had left him feeling vaguely uncomfortable. There had been greedy bankers, but almost everybody else had been greedy too. Did those who rejoiced in the high returns on their savings stop to think that they were part of the problem, that they were rentiers? Did those who ran up high credit card bills stop to think that they were part of the mountain of debt that the reckless economic party was building up? Many first stones had been cast, he thought.
‘Or a paysage moralisé?’ asked Angus. ‘There’s a window in the picture. There could be a paysage moralisé outside.’
The official cleared his throat. ‘You must forgive me – that’s not a banking term.’
‘The landscape does the work,’ explained Angus. ‘One paints an allegorical landscape to make a point about life. A barren valley. High mountains presenting an obstacle to the traveller. Burning haystacks.’
‘How interesting. But somehow …’
‘No, I understand. Nothing disturbing.’
So now he stood before his easel, adding the final touches to a picture that he suspected would never be fully displayed. It was an act of piety on the part of the bank, recording the board in happier times, but its destiny would be to hang – if it were to hang at all – in some back room or corridor, away from the bright offices in which the real business of the bank was conducted. The prospect of his work being relegated in this way filled him with despair and made him all the more determined to do something that mattered. This brought his thoughts back to Italy. Italy was the solution, at least for artists. If there was any country that was the spiritual home of artists, then it was Italy, which had been succouring the artistic soul for centuries. Italy would recharge him, would provide him with the inspiration for a new phase in his work.
He put down his brush, not even bothering to wipe it or dip it in spirit; he would do that later. He looked at his watch. He could go to Big Lou’s for coffee, but somehow he wanted something fresh, something different. A walk perhaps and then … Yes, Italy … He had no clothes that would be suitable for Italy. Domenica and Antonia would be bedecked in large straw hats, no doubt, and cool blouses, whereas he had his Harris tweed and his moleskin trousers (with their paint stains), which nobody could wear in Italy.
‘Cyril,’ he said. ‘We’re going shopping.’
Cyril understood only one word of that: his name. But there was no mistaking Angus’s body language, and all dogs are expert interpreters of body language. Leaping to his feet, Cyril gave two enthusiastic barks to indicate readiness. The lead was fetched and the two made their way downstairs.
It was a walk of some fifteen minutes to the premises of Stewart, Christie & Co on Queen Street. Inside the shop, an assistant greeted Angus and had a kind word for Cyril. Then he listened to Angus’s request: a tropical jacket – linen, preferably – and a lightweight pair of trousers. Perhaps a few shirts, too, and a Panama hat.
Cyril watched as the garments were brought to Angus for approval. He showed no interest in the jacket and the trousers, but the Panama hat engaged his attention, possibly for its evident chewability.
Angus cast an eye about the shop as his purchases were being wrapped. He noticed a tray of large coloured handkerchiefs; one, a spotted red bandanna, stood out from the rest. He looked down at Cyril, who was gazing up at him with dark, liquid eyes. How would Cyril look, he wondered, with a red bandanna around his neck? He made his decision.
Outside, Angus and Cyril began to walk back along Queen Street. The day, which had been slightly overcast to begin with, had cleared. Now the sky of high summer was empty – so empty that blue had been attenuated into a shade so pale that it was almost white. The trees in Queen Street were heavy with leaf; green luxuriance as counterpoint to the grey-and-honey tones of the buildings.
Cyril trotted beside Angus, an undoubted spring in his step, the red bandanna contrasting nicely with the dark of his coat. He feels enhanced, thought Angus; and so too might all of us be enhanced – by a touch of red, by a fine day, by being alive in this splendid city, this heart-entrancing place.
41. Psychotherapeutic Matters
Most of us, if pressed, are made uneasy by change. We recognise its importance in our lives and there are occasions when we persuade ourselves that it is for the best – which, of course, it often is – but at heart we are concerned that, if change comes, it will bring with it regret.
This is particularly so when it comes to those who look after us. Doctors and dentists retire or move, much as the rest of us do. This is usually much regretted by those who are thei
r patients, who then have to get used to a new face and a new approach to the aches and afflictions to which flesh and bone is heir. And the same must be said of the disappearance of plumbers, who understand the idiosyncrasies of our U-bends and lesser drains; of mechanics, who remember our suspension as if it were their own; of postmen, who are familiar with the shed where we like our parcels to be left, or with quite the right angle at which to press our sporadically functioning doorbells.
The worst of all such changes, though, is a change of psychotherapist. The problem with this is that the narrative is interrupted; for months, perhaps years, the patient has discussed himself or herself with the psychotherapist. Now, quite suddenly, it seems that this discussion has been abandoned by one side. For the patient it must be like telling a long joke only to find, some time before the punchline, that the audience has changed and does not know what went before. Why were these three men in the balloon, may we ask? Would you mind going back to the beginning?
In psychoanalysis, the full-blown, long-drawn-out, daily unburdening that can take years, or decades to complete, the change of an analyst can be a disaster. Indeed, such is the dependence that may develop between analyst and analysand that many psychoanalysts simply cannot find it in themselves to retire, and continue to sit and listen to their patients until the very end, either for the patient or the analyst. Freudian lore is full of stories of analysts who have died of sheer old age in their psychoanalytical chair; or patients who have similarly succumbed while on the couch. The narrative falters and stops; the word-association suddenly becomes one-sided, with words hanging in the air unanswered.
This dependence, though officially discouraged in psychoanalytical circles, can be quite touching. In both Vichy and occupied France, psychoanalysis hardly flourished. There were, however, a few elderly analysts who were, on liberation, accused of collaboration. These had little alternative but to move to Morocco, where they established themselves in Casablanca. Their patients moved too. And when these elderly psychoanalysts died, their patients arranged, in due course, to be buried alongside them. Thus did the relationship continue beyond the grave, as if the analyst lay interred for all eternity, patiently listening to all the unresolved issues emanating from the next-door plot.
Six is not an easy age at which to change one’s psychotherapist, and indeed Irene was concerned that the experience would be so traumatic for Bertie that therapeutic support would be required for the consequences. This, of course, was not the case, as Bertie, who was an entirely normal little boy, had no need of psychotherapy in the first place. But she was loath to accept that, and when Dr Hugo Fairbairn, author of Shattered to Pieces: Ego Dissolution in a Three-Year-Old Tyrant, went off to Aberdeen, she was concerned that his successor, Dr St Clair, would be able to pick up the strands of the complex therapeutic process to which Bertie had been introduced.
For Dr Fairbairn, the offer of a chair from the University of Aberdeen had come at an opportune time. The chair in Aberdeen was prestigious, and it would give him the opportunity to write a book that he had recently been planning, The Psychopathology of the Over-Intrusive Mother, or Mater Dentata. But there was more to it than that, and had his own decision been subjected to the scrutiny that he gave to decisions made by his patients, it would have been apparent that Dr Fairbairn was running away from Edinburgh because of what he had himself termed his rucksack of guilt.
This guilt came from the fact that he had, many years ago, slapped a particularly trying young patient, Wee Fraser, after Wee Fraser had, in a quite unprovoked manner, suddenly bitten him.
Many years later, with Wee Fraser now fifteen or thereabouts, Dr Fairbairn had met him on a bus to Burdiehouse; Wee Fraser, dimly remembering the psychotherapist, but not to the extent of knowing who he was or how their paths had previously crossed, had, as a precautionary measure, head-butted him. Whereupon Dr Fairbairn had struck the boy, possibly dislocating his jaw, and run away. This, in guilt terms, had piled Pelion upon Ossa, or, in Scottish terms, Ben Nevis upon Ben Macdui. What could one do, in such circumstances, but flee? And in what direction to flee but north?
The choice of north was highly significant. Those who flee south flee to an imagined territory of forgiveness; they flee to Mother; to a place where whatever they did is no longer important; Mother forgives, she always has and always will.
Spain, Portugal, Italy – those countries where the Marian visions appear so unexpectedly in grottoes or olive groves – these are places to which those overburdened in the Protestant north go for solace or forgetfulness, to get away from the stern judgement of the north. Dr Fairbairn went north because he wished to appease reason.
He was replaced by Dr St Clair, who therefore became Bertie’s psychotherapist. He came without preconceptions and would have discharged his young patient more or less immediately, had there not been that unfortunate misunderstanding about wolves. This had made him decide to continue with treatment, and Bertie, as ever, acquiesced. What could he do?
One cannot divorce one’s mother, especially when one is only six. All one can do, really, is wait until one turns eighteen, that milestone at which adulthood and independence begin. But between six and eighteen is a gulf of years wider than an ocean, or a desert, or any of those features which, at the age of six, seem endless, seem infinite.
42. Life and Chance
Dr St Clair was younger than Dr Fairbairn. At thirty-two, a good twelve years separated them, but that was not by any means all. Dr St Clair was Australian, of Scottish ancestry, while Dr Fairbairn, who had been born in Selkirk, had never lived outside Scotland, apart from during a brief period – just over a year – when he had been a registrar at the Tavistock Clinic in London. But the differences did not stop there: Dr Fairbairn was inclined to accept the diktat of Vienna – he was deeply immersed in Freudian interpretations – whereas his successor, being the product of an eclectic training, was open to a wide range of explanations of human behaviour and, of course, misbehaviour. His approach was more philosophically inclined than Dr Fairbairn’s, stressing the role of thought and choice above that of emotional states and the dark promptings of the id. Indeed, had a coin once tossed on a particular summer evening in Melbourne fallen one way rather than the other, he would have studied for a degree in philosophy rather than one in psychology, and his whole life would have been different. That, of course, is a sobering thought, and it stayed with him; if the broad shape of a life can be determined by such a chance, then what claims can there be for freedom, for self-determination? We are putty, surely, in the hands of the gods, foolish to think that we are in control of the lives we lead.
And it does not stop there. It is salutary to remember how many of the features of our lives are not only not our own creation, but the result of events that took place even before we were born, sometimes several generations ago. And this applies not only at an individual level, but at a collective one too: what we are depends, to an extent, on where we are. That one is born in Aberdeen, or Chicago, or Gdansk – or wherever it is – dictates one’s culture and, to some extent, moulds one’s outlook on life. That is hardly a novel observation, but still bears reflection. For a long time being Scottish brought, for many, a particular view of the world: a resilience in the face of difficulty, a certain intellectual seriousness, a belief in individual responsibility and individual salvation – concomitants all of the Scottish Reformation. But had John Knox been more in touch with his feminine side, it might have been different; iconoclasm might have been less pronounced – and less artistically destructive – and rather than the nineteenth-century cliché of the Scottish ship’s engineer, one might have had the cliché of the Scottish interior decorator. It did not happen, of course …
That is all to do with the social self – the bit that is determined by the fact of being a member of a group rather than being solitary; when it comes to the family, how much more vivid is the impression that one’s fate is formed by the actions of others. Each one of us is a palimpsest on which our p
arents have written, and beneath their writing is the writing of their parents. Thus is family pathology transmitted, and although behavioural geneticists may argue among themselves how genes determine behaviour, the rest of us have no difficulty in seeing familiar traits being passed on from parent to child to grandchild.
This explains, but may not comfort. A child unhappy today because his father is incapable of showing him affection may not know that his father was similarly deprived by his own father, and, even if he did, would be unlikely to be consoled by such knowledge. To be doing no more than to repeat the past is rarely viewed as an excuse, least of all in the eyes of children.
And even if complete freedom of will is illusory, there are still crucial decisions we make that we might not have made and that reverberate down the years. In the case of Dr St Clair, such a decision had been made by his grandfather, who, reaching for one book in the library, had inadvertently taken another and found himself accidentally immersed in an account of life on a farm in Victoria in the late nineteenth century. That St Clair was a final-year medical student at the time, the son of a bank manager from Dumfries, and on impulse had decided to write off for information on medical careers in Australia. It was a cold, raw day in February, a month when anybody might be tempted to seek warmth and sunlight elsewhere; that undoubtedly affected his decision. Had it been a fine spring day, then the prospect of working in Aberdeen, which would otherwise have happened, might not have been so unattractive; but it was not, and the letter was written. Information came back, together with an invitation to apply for a post, and that letter determined the shape of several lives, including that of his grandson, Bertie’s psychotherapist.
The Importance of Being Seven Page 15