CHRIST PREACHING AT THE HENLEY REGATTA
Isn’t it lovely, the river, with its flags and barges and laughter and music carrying so far over the water? How curiously the tuba, bouncing like the Bessy in a Morris dance, comes through the windwash, while all the other instruments fade in and out of a deafness.
Henley on such a day has touches of Deauville and of Copenhagen, and the Thames through Oxfordshire gleams as if Canaletto, Dufy, and Cézanne had got at it. Flags of Oxford and Cambridge, Sweden and France, Eton and the United States, of Leander and Thames, Harrow and Bordeaux, rill and snap in our skittish English breeze.
Mrs. Darner’s sculpted heads of Thames and Isis look from the posts of the High Street Bridge at Scandinavians smiling and gathering to a clapping of hands before the chantry house and at a file of gypsies of the Petulengro clan moved along by the admonitions of a constable.
Above the noise of automobiles and motorcycles there are pipes and drums playing Leaving Rhu Vaternish as they swing with Celtic pluck over the bridge. A county fair at Olympia! And English bells above it all, a course of changes joyously in the air.
—Sex quattuor tris, quinque duo, Berkshire calls.
—Duo tris, quattuor, quinque sex, the answer falls.
—Twa threo fower fif six, six fower, threo fif twa, reply the bells of Oxfordshire.
Through a window, beyond the geraniums on the sill, you can see a photograph of the Duke of Connaught in a silver frame, wearing a leopard skin, head and all. Its jaws fit the duke’s head in a yawning bite. The skin of its forelegs drape his shoulders, its tail hangs between his legs, and its hind feet dangle at the duke’s tasseled kilt.
—Commander of a bicycle regiment, says Reggie to Cynthia after they have squeezed each other gazing at the duke’s photograph. He was returning a salute while wheeling along in review when he wobbled and crashed, engaging himself so intricately in the ruin of his machine that a boffin from the medics had to come and extricate him, don’t you know.
—Reggie old thing! screamed Cynthia. Sausage and mashed!
She was as shy and obvious as a rose, but she could stand on one leg, touch her heel to her butt, flip her scarf and laugh like a gasping halibut.
—Cynthia old darling! Pip pip, what?
Her scarf is in the colors of the London Rowing club. Curls crisp as leaves flourish around her neat tam. Having laughed, she skips and hums, and chucks Reggie under his chin.
They throw themselves into each other’s arms. The interested eyes observing them are those of the painter Raoul Dufy, who has come to sketch the Regatta. He wiggles his fingers and smooths his hand along the air to see English brick, the tricolor against ash and yew, panamas and blazers, the insignia of barges carved in oak argent and d’or, taupe and cinnamon. Not he but Seurat should be here. And Eakins and Whitman. And Rousseau.
regardez Georges Seurat ces verts
et ces azurs ces outriggers
si étroites et si légères
cette rivière plus bleue
que les yeux saxons
regardez cet homme si mystèrieux
He jumps nimbly, Raoul Dufy, out of the way of a Jaguar XKE nosing toward the bridge and gives it a manual sign of French contempt.
les coups des avirons les étincelles d’eau
ces épaules puma ou il y a en marche
des souris sous le peau
ô filles minces ô garces oiseaux en vol
mères truitées autruches milords et morses
ô gigue des parasols
rameurs grands insouciants et blonds
et delà en maillot rouge
près de la rive un brave garçon
les mains en conque et florentines
les joues gonflés et romanesques
un triton gosse au chapeau mandarine
qui trompete à travers
la lumière nordique des après-midis immobiles
un son peut-être imaginaire
que l’oreille soit la preuve
un air moiré et grec et dur
et musclé comme la fleuve
Isambard Kingdom Brunei, spanner of rivers and oceans, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
A man in an ulster and cloth hat searches the pavements and edges of gardens for the droppings of dogs, which, if the way is clear, he puts in his pockets, for later inspection in his room above the Swan and Maiden. He is, as Raoul Dufy does not know, Stanley Spencer.
A nanny across the street asks herself whatever is that man doing, and her charge, a boy in a sailor suit, reads her eyes and answers.
—Picking up dog shit and squirreling it away on his person.
—God save the poor sod, says the nurse.
—Now he’s pulling his pudding.
—Charles Francis!
An old woman in a plaid shawl has caught Stanley Spencer’s attention. She wears gaiters and a fisherman’s hat. The crop of white whiskers on her chin pleases Spencer. He imagines her as a girl, as a bride, as a woman getting fleshy about the hips, a woman who would cast her eyes upwards when she laughs. If only he could see her feet.
Dancing angels know a fire
makes this river wind and air
seem an iron snarl of wire
The pipe band returns over the bridge, playing The Hen Scratches in the Midden. The melody perplexes a poet who has been dreaming with open eyes. Was it the green of the girl’s eyes who was talking with British toothiness to a grenadier in mufti, or the gorgeous quiet of the gardens beyond these ancient walls that loosed his mind into revery? Louis Jean Lumière, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
Girlish, vivacious, and brash afternoon
That lifts with the wine of its wings
From the haunted seasons of yet to be
Summer’s blond and Illyrian winters.
Flat light shimmers on the Thames. An airplane drags a streamer through the air, advertising Bovril. A dowager aims her ear trumpet so that a constable can direct her electric wheelchair.
—If Mum will turn left at the pillar box just there at the chemist’s and then turn sharp left at the Bird and Baby, you will find yourself right at the royal enclosure. Can’t miss it, I shouldn’t think.
—Left and left?
Off and away, Spencer’s eyes on her Princess Marie Louise hat, she buzzes past tall oarsmen in a row, their fluent sunblenched windblent hair embellished in swirls by limber gusts, Danes in singlets and shorts, with long brown legs and eighteen blue eyes. Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Swans ride downstream midriver aloof and alone.
Spencer fixes the old lady and her wheelchair in his memory, the velvet glove at the tiller, the hat that might have been Jacobean, the lace collar spiked out from the back of her neck.
She steers between French oarsmen naked as snakes save for brief white pants and whistles on a string around the neck.
Bugles: a rill and snap of flags. Picnickers look up from their baskets. A couple with loosened clothes behind a hedge look out.
The poet from France adjusts his spectacles.
Launch the antique swan whose silence began
Under Babylon where the wisteria hung,
When he should have sung in the red pavilions
Passacaglia, toccata, and fugue.
He inspected shingles, brick, and windows. Bees stitched along the bells of a file of hollyhocks. Greatly comforted in God at Westchester, a voice came through a parasol. And ever so nice, ame shaw. And from a clutch of gaitered clergy, nothing but my duty and my sin.
There milled and trod and eddied a flock of little girls with the faces of eager mice, a family from Guernsey all in yellow hats, Mr. C.S. Lewis of Belfast in belling, baggy, blown trousers and flexuous flopping jacket, his chins working like a bullfrog’s, tars from H.M.S. Dogfish with rolling shoulders and saucy eyes, pickpockets, top-hatted Etonians chatting each other in blipped English, a bishop in gaiters regarding with unbelieving mouth a Florentine philosopher peei
ng against a wall, Mallarmé wrapped in his plaid shawl rapt.
The inward white of radiant space,
Cygnus and Betelgeuse and the Wanderers,
And swam instead but swan, exile and island and
Is now in this utter reality a brilliant ghost,
An archangelical, proud, fat bird,
Ignorant of what the stars intend by Swan.
River light wiggles on the ceiling of the Royal Danish Rowing Club locker room. Oarsmen trig of girth and long of shoulder suit up in the red and white toggery of their roningteam. The illapse of a Jute foot into a blue canvas shoe, the junt of hale chests under jerseys, boiled skridtbinder, Dorian knees remember, so transparent is time, a tanling foot into a sandal, lynx grace of athletes at The Shining Dog beyond the harness makers, potters, and wine shops on the angled and shady street that crooked from behind the Agora over to the Sacred Way those summers Diogenes made his progress in a wash of curs to the market along the porch.
How foreign and sudden these spare athletes seemed to old men who remembered William Gilbert Grace and Captain Matthew Webb. Longlegged rowers file to their boats, carrying oars like the lances at Breda in Velazquez’s painting. Signal flags rise on a mast frivolling. A trumpet, a pistol shot.
By Stanley Spencer tall oarsmen in shorts and singlets bear their boat above their windblent vandal hair. He is preoccupied with another, inward grace.
Wild Sicilian parsley
and wasps upon the pane!
Old Man Cézanne, he tells himself, was all very well for the French temperament, going at things logically, vibrating with a passion for the École Polytechnique, for ratios and microscopes, precisions and a constant polishing of everything with critical sandpaper. He was a Poussin run by electricity. But that woman there shaped like a bottle and her daughter shaped like a churn, they want to be seen by Cimabue, by Polish buttermold carvers, by eyes begot of the happy misalliance of stiff northern barbaric chopped wood sculpture, polychrome embroidery, and beaten gold with autumnal Roman giant stone: roundly ungainly, stubborn as barrels, solid as brick kilns.
A coxswain light as a jockey clacking the knockers swung around his neck whistles with Jacobean trills and sweetenings that some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules, of Hector and Lysander, and such great names as these. To Spencer he is a conceited ass from the continent, the pampered son of a Belgian manufacturer, but he excites the Petulengros who in a fatter time would steal him as merchandise negotiable on the docks.
There has not a minute been
in one thousand nine hundred years
twenty months or seventeen
But that one Christian or another
kissed his image in the mirror
standing on his slaughtered brother
A cousin of Vice Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett Ernle Erle Drax snubs a cousin of Commander Sir George Louis Victor Henry Sergius Mountbatten Lord Milford Haven. Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter bow in passing to Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. The aging Baron James Ensor of Ostend sweeps the horizon with his ear trumpet picking up the piston click of oars, the barking of coxes, and inflorescence of Scandinavian band music, Romany cheek, an indecent proposal in French to a vicar’s sister and her reply in the French of Stratford at Bow as to the pellucidity of the day’s air, the freshness of all the foreign young folk, and the silvery azure of the Thames.
Stanley Spencer pockets a nice yellow bit of dog shit and lifts off into a revery to the awful knees of Mont Sainte Victoire and the quarries at Bibémus, green wind awash in Cézanne’s trees, fiercely mean old man who orders God about, and shakes his mahlstick at Him, Seigneur, vous m’avez fait puissant et solitaire: laissez-moi m’endormir du sommeil de la terre. A shaken fist, a plaintive cry. I have not painted all of this, and until I do I refuse to die.
It is the Grande Jatte, is it not? There is a lady with a whippet on a leash that will stand for the monkey, and clerks from banks, and little girls in tulle and ribbons, and people picknicking and gazing at the river and lolling on the banks. And those fat women over there with parasols from Camberwell, they make a touch of The Feast of the Sardine, do they not? The touts in their candy-stripe trousers and panamas, how they contrast with Sir Charles Parsons on the arm of the Very Reverend Dean Inge, with Margaret Jourdain and Ivy Compton-Burnett in such an inexplicable mixture of purples and greys, toques thirty years out of date.
Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
Stanley Spencer anticipates with relish the droppings in all his pockets, the scorched stink of wheat bunt, the dark odor of blight, mealy mildew, the reek of fomes and juniper conk, of black punk rot, potato scald, bruised galls, and scurf.
What gnathion and gullet to the Finns! They sound like foxes talking, and they laugh with their eyes. The American rowers breathe through their mouths and keep their arms crossed, and walk on the balls of their feet.
Pablo Diego Jose Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santissima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
A roopy laugh and: I can’t help it I tell you, Alfie, whoops! Whoops! it’s the little pants they have on, you can see everything they have a plain as cups under a tea towel, I’ll die! And: Look it, he’s vomited all down his front, the poor sod, gorgonzola and beer it smells like. And: Dear chap, these noonings and intermealiary lunchings in air this electric brace me for excesses unknown at the parsonage. Would you believe that I got to pee next to one of those matelots with the pom-poms? His caution was, shall I say, ironic. Democracy is so exciting, wouldn’t you say?
Auguste Lumière, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
Spencer pulled his wool bell hat lower over his thatch, getting now onto fat women’s elbows, the wrinkles of the tuck, and the sway of loose biceps rolling. What silly treasure of heart and head I would come and steal, soft as the field mouse’s white-foot tread. Like the blind bone in Beethoven’s ear, I spoke, she spoke, and the drum spoke that could and could not hear. Under Mrs. Darner’s eyes of Cotswold stone the Cherwell marries the Thames.
India and Turkey were in her smile,
Madras her breasts, Izmir her hips,
That cross-eyed lady of Carlisle.
Cambridge, and Bob’s your uncle! A boy with a bloody nose stands defiantly by a lamp post, answering no to every question a policeman puts to him. A woman stung by a wasp is being helped into a pub by a Jamaican and a Hindu. A member of Parliament who has just exhibited his shrivelled penis to three Girl Guides has sunk to the sidewalk, dead.
The crew of the Club Sporting de Marseilles climbs from its boat, victors gasping, sweating, smiling. Cameras whirr and flash as they toss their coxswain in the river. A toothy official shakes their large hands and acknowledges their Mediterranean smiles with a rabbity scrunch of his lips.
—Good show! he says.
—Sink you! they reply.
Afternoon’s long shadowfall across the grass and the garden walls is like music at the end of a day of self-indulgence.
As the crowds milled to the banks for the last race, which was rowed in late level golden light, a peal of Stedmans rang out from churches roundabout.
—Sex quattuor tris, quinque duo, Berkshire calls.
—Duo tris quattuor, quinque sex, the answer falls.
—Two threo fower fif six, six fower, threo fif twa, reply the bells of Oxfordshire.
PERGOLESI’S DOG
Some dozen years ago, in the middle of one of those conversations which are apt one minute to be about Proust’s asthma and the next about the size of chocolate bars in these depraved times, Stan Brakhage, the most advanced guard of filmmakers, asked me if I knew anything about Pergolesi’s dog.
Not a thing, I answered confidently, adding that I didn’t know he had one. What was there about Pergolesi’s dog to know? There, he replied, is the mystery. Just before this conversation, Brakhage had been shooting a film under
the direction of Joseph Cornell, the eccentric artist who assembled choice objects in shallow box frames to achieve a hauntingly wonderful, partly surrealistic, partly homemade American kind of art. He lived all his adult life, more or less a recluse, on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, New York, sifting through his boxes of clippings and oddments to find the magic combination of things—a celluloid parrot from Woolworth’s, a star map, a clay pipe, a Greek postage stamp—to arrange in a shadow box.
He also made collages and what you could call sculpture, such as dolls in a bed of twigs; and films. For the films he needed a cameraman: thus Brakhage’s presence on Utopia Parkway. The two got along beautifully, two geniuses inventing a strange poetry of images (Victorian gingerbread fretwork, fan lights, somber rooms with melancholy windows). Brakhage was fascinated by the shy, erudite Cornell whose hobbies ran to vast dossiers on French ballerinas of the last century, the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, and the bric-a-brac of all ages and continents.
In one of their talks Pergolesi’s dog came up. Brakhage asked what the significance might be of the Italian composer’s pet. Cornell bristled. He threw up his hands in profound shock. What! Not know Pergolesi’s dog! He had assumed, he said with some frost and disappointment, that he was conversing with a man of culture and sophistication. If Mr. Brakhage could not command an allusion like Pergolesi’s dog, would he have the goodness to leave forthwith, and not come back?
Brakhage left. So ended the collaboration of the Republic’s most poetic filmmaker and one of its most imaginative artists. The loss is enormous, and it was Pergolesi’s dog who caused the rift.
I did the best I could to help Brakhage find this elusive and important dog. He himself had asked everybody in the country who he thought might know. I asked. The people we asked, they in turn asked others. Biographies and histories were of no help. No one knew anything about a dog belonging to, or in the society of, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. For ten years I asked likely people, and when my path crossed Brakhage’s I would shake my head, and he would shake his: no d. of P. yet found.
The Death of Picasso Page 24