What’s Bred in the Bone tct-2

by Robertson Davies

  There was a small collection of old movie magazines, now crumbling and yellow, over which he had once gloated with the ignorant lust of an adolescent boy. The beauty queens of an earlier day showed their knees daringly, and peeped from beneath grotesquely marcelled hair. There were some pictures cut from Christmas Editions of The Tatler, the Bystander, and Holly Leaves that his grandfather had brought home as part of the seasonal celebration, and in these were drawings of coy girls of the twenties in “teddies”, or transparent nightgowns, or (very daringly) playing with a dear doggie whose body concealed the breasts and The Particular—but not quite. He saw these now as part of the pathology of Art, the last gasps of the school of erotic painting that had flowered under Boucher and Fragonard. Kitsch, as Saraceni called it.

  What he was most anxious to find and destroy was a small bundle of rags—odds and ends of silk and chiffon—in which, in his adolescent days, he had absurdly rigged himself up as a girl, in what he believed was the manner of Julian Eitinge. He now knew, or thought he knew, what that had meant; it was the yearning for a girl companion, and for the mystery and tenderness he thought he might find in such a creature. He had even some intimation that he sought this companion in himself. Browning’s lines, written when he was still very young, came to mind:

  And then I was a young witch, whose blue eyes,

  As she stood naked by the river springs,

  Drew down a god…

  But even Ruth had not been that young witch, and Ismay, who so completely looked the part, was a sardonic parody of its spirit. Where was the young witch? Would she ever come? It was not as a lover he wished for her, but as something even nearer; as a completion of himself, as a desired, elusive dimension of his spirit.

  Thus Francis came to terms, as he thought, with his strange boyhood, in which there had been so much talk of love, and so little to warm the heart. He did not feel lonely in Blairlogie, even as he sat for long evenings in the hotel, rereading—how many times had he read those pages—his favourite parts of Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. He did not feel lonely when he visited the Catholic cemetery, and found the marker for Francis the First, the Looner, the shadow of his boyhood and, if Uncle Doctor was to be believed, still an unexploded bomb in his manhood—the secret, the inadmissible element which, as he now understood, had played so great a part in making him an artist, if indeed he might call himself an artist.

  But had not Saraceni, that stern judge, called him Meister, without irony and without offering an explanation?

  He could not visit the grave of Zadok. Not even Victoria knew where it was, except that it was in that part of the Protestant cemetery which was called, with Blairlogie harshness, the Potter’s Field. But Francis was not by nature a hunter of tombs, and he did not care. He remembered Zadok tenderly, and that was what mattered.

  So St. Kilda was put up for sale at auction, as was also Chegwidden Lodge, which had been on rental for several years. A local speculator bought them both, cheap, and there was the end of an old song, as Francis told the family in Toronto, wondering if any of them would understand the reference. From his childhood home he took nothing, except the picture that had hung in his bedroom. No, not the remarkable picture of Christ that opened its eyes when you looked at it, but Love Locked Out.

  In the manor near Cardiff, in 1946, there was much to be done, many files to be digested and put in order, and hundreds of photographs to be catalogued. Francis needed an assistant who knew what was in the wind, and Aylwin Ross, not long out of the Canadian Navy, was sent to him.

  Aylwin Ross was not at all the sort of young man Francis had come to associate with the work of MI5 and MI6. There was no hint of the snoop about him, and he had some trouble concealing his amusement at the cautious, official way in which Francis explained what had to be done.

  “I get you, chief,” he said. “We’ve got to know all these pictures well enough to recognize them, even if they reappear somewhat hocussed to deceive the eye, and so far as we can we’ve got to get them back to the people with the best claim to them. I’m pretty good at recognizing pictures, even from rotten black-and-white photographs like these. And if any ownership is in doubt, as will certainly be the case, we’ve got to nab as many as we can for the people we’re working for.”

  Francis was shocked. Of course, what Ross said was true, but that wasn’t at all the way to phrase it. He protested.

  “Oh come on, Frank,” said Ross. “We’re both Canadians. We don’t have to kid each other. Let’s make it as simple as we can.”

  So, when at last the Allied Commission on Art moved into action, and the sector of it in which Francis and Ross were to work assembled in Munich, that was indeed the way they worked, and Ross had so far loosened Francis from his official persona that he greatly enjoyed himself.

  Their part in the Commission’s work was a large one, and there were many familiar figures in the splendid room—a section of a palace—before which pictures recovered from the enemy were deployed for identification and reclamation. Francis and Ross were by no means the whole deputation from the United Kingdom. The formidable Alfred Nightingale was there, from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and Oxford was represented by the no less knowledgeable John Frewen. From the National Gallery and the Tate there were, predictably, Catchpoole and Seddon. But Francis and Ross were the experts on what paintings had gone astray in the war years, and what paintings might have vanished beyond recovery in the New World.

  Saraceni was there, wearing conspicuously on his left arm a black band which Francis interpreted as mourning for the Signora, although it was fully three years since she had been obliterated in her South London refuge of pickled oak and cheery chintz.

  “I shall never forget her,” the Meister said, “a woman of the greatest, most tender spirit, even though we did not see eye to eye on matters of taste. While I live I shall not cease to mourn.” But grief had in no way clouded his fearful vision—could it really be the Evil Eye?—or diminished the ironic mirth with which he treated the opinions of colleagues who disagreed with his judgements. The chief of these was Professor Baudoin, from Brussels, more evil-smelling than ever and not mellowed by wartime sufferings. From Holland Dr. Schlichte-Martin was present, and with him Hausche-Kuypers, who had been in a resistance group and lost an arm, but was merry as ever, and greeted Francis with a shout.

  “Aha, the Giant-Killer! Poor Letztpfennig! How you polished him off!”

  “Ah yes, the young man who knows so much about (sniff) monkeys,” said Professor Baudoin. “We shall have to keep our eyes open for any zoological problems that evade our mere connoisseur’s estimations.”

  “Who’s the old bugger with the charnel-house breath?” whispered Ross. “He’s got it in for you, chief; I can see it in his eye”

  The German members of the commission were not Frisch and Belmann; their eagerness in the matter of the Führermuseum had discredited them. Germany was represented instead by Professors Knüpfer and Brodersen. From France came Dupanloup and Rudel, and there were men from Norway, Luxembourg, and a number of other interested states. From the U.S. Francis was glad to see Addison Thresher, who would certainly be a voice of reason, as his country had lost no art in the conflict, though what it might have gained it would not be tactful to inquire.

  “One of the problems I have had to face is to find some way of preventing high-ranking Air Force officers from sending home planes packed with art loot. They don’t know much about art but they certainly know what they like, and they’ve heard that hand-painted oils fetch big money. I needn’t tell you I haven’t solved the problem. Still—it’s the nature of fighting men to loot.” Thresher was a cheerful cynic.

  In all, fourteen states were represented, usually by two experts and a secretary, who was aspiring to be an expert. Ross was one of these. An Englishman, Lieutenant-Colonel Osmotherley, who was not an art expert but a redoubtable administrator, acted as chairman.

  “What an array of bof
fins,” said Ross. “I feel totally out of my league.”

  “You are out of your league,” said Francis. “So keep your trap shut, at the sessions and everywhere else. Leave everything to me.”

  “Am I not even to have an opinion?’’ said Ross.

  “Not out loud. Just keep your eyes and ears open.”

  Ross’s cheerful estimate of the Commission’s work showed total lack of acquaintance with the way in which such things are done. After a war in which art had not been a first consideration, the experts were determined to assert its importance. After years of serving as air-raid wardens, standing in queues for coffee made of tulip bulbs, watching powerless as the invaders snatched their dearest treasures, being snubbed by Occupation forces, and being in most cases made to feel the weight of their years, they were once again men of importance, to whom their governments turned for expert advice. After wretched food, shortages of tobacco and drink, cold rooms, and no hot water, they were lodged in a hotel which, if not functioning at pre-war standard, was the best place they had known in years. Best of all, they were once again in that world of scholarship, of connoisseurship, of hair-splitting, haggling, wrangling, and quarrelling which was their very own, and in which they moved like wizard-kings. Were they going to hurry, to cut corners, to compromise, to take any steps whatever to hasten the evil day when their work would be done and they would have to go home? As Francis explained to Ross, only a dumb-bell Canadian, fresh out of the Navy, could suppose any such absurd thing.

  Of course, he knew long before they went to Munich that Ross was no dumb-bell. He was brilliant; he had, in terms of his years and experience, extraordinary knowledge of art. Best of all, he had flair. His perception was swift and sure. But what especially endeared him to Francis was that Ross was light-hearted, and thought that art was for the delight and enlargement of man, rather than a carefully guarded mystery, a battleground for experts, and a treasure-house to be plundered by the manipulators of taste, the merchants of vogue, the art dealers.

  Ross was self-educated in art, but a graduate of a Canadian Western university and later of Oxford (he had been some sort of Commonwealth scholar), where he had studied modern languages. Like many young men from the prairies, he had been drawn toward the Navy, where he was fairly useful, and very ornamental. Ross was that unusual creature, a male beauty, fair but not a Scandinavian blond, fine-skinned, fine-featured, and with a good, though not markedly athletic, figure. There was nothing epicene about him: he was, quite simply, beautiful and knew it. Among the commissioners, and their serious secretaries (most of whom were already gripped by the premature age of the intellectual), he glowed like a rosebush in a forest of evergreens—a rosebush that had not already succumbed to the acid, evergreen soil.

  “You preserve my sanity, Aylwin,” Francis said one night in the Munich hotel, when he had drunk rather too much. “If I have to listen once again to Schlichte-Martin and Dupanloup hashing it out about whether a canvas is a Rembrandt or simply a Goveart Flink, or if what looks like a Gerard Dou is really a Donner, I may scream and froth and have to be led from the room and plunged in a cold shower. What does it matter? Get the things back to wherever they came from.”

  “You take it all too seriously,” said Ross. “You’ve simply got to hang on and not care too much. Do you realize that there were over five thousand of these pictures, most of them nothing more than classy crap, in that salt mine at Alt Aussee where so much of the Führermuseum stuff was stashed? And what about all the stuff that has turned up near Marburg? Not to speak of Göring’s immense personal loot. We shall have to consider them all, and if we did fifty a day, how many days does that make? Why don’t you relax and stop listening? Just look at the pictures, the pictures we do look at. Wonderful! How many Temptations of St. Anthony have we seen already? And in every one of them an old geezer nearly dead of starvation is being tempted by a few pesky demons but chiefly by meaty girls over whom he is in no condition to throw a saintly leg. If I were a painter I would show him being offered a lobster à la Newburg. That would have tempted him! Temptation works in the place where the weakness is greatest.”

  “You speak with a banal wisdom beyond your years.”

  “Always have. Born wise. You weren’t born wise, Francis. Not wise and not banal; you were born with a skin too few.”

  Saraceni was not so greatly taken with Aylwin Ross as was Francis. “He has talent,” said he to Francis one day when they met over lunch, “but he is at heart a careerist. And why not? He is not an artist. He creates nothing, preserves nothing. What has he?”

  “Insight,” said Francis, and told him what Ross had said about St. Anthony’s temptations.

  “Shrewd,” said Saraceni. “Commonplace, but it takes shrewdness to see the wisdom in the commonplace. The temptation gets us at the point of weakness. What is your weak point, Corniche? You’d better take care it isn’t Aylwin Ross.”

  Francis was offended. Of course, he was usually seen in the company of the beauty of the Commission, and he had not quite understood that some of the other commissioners, for reasons best not examined, interpreted this in their own way. In 1947 homosexuality was not so easily accepted as it became later, but for that reason it was much on people’s minds.

  Because Saraceni was still the Meister in his world, Francis faced what he had said. Of course he liked Ross. Was he not a fellow-Canadian, and one for whom it was not necessary to make apologies to people who saw Canadians as a pseudo-nation of beaver-skinners? Was Ross not witty and merry in a group where wit never arose except as a weapon with which to strike down a rival? Was he not comely among the swag-bellied and the wrinkled? And—Francis did not face this quite honestly—was he not the nearest thing he had ever met to the elusive figure, apparently a girl, who was needed for the completion of himself? To make a friend, and a close and dear friend, of Aylwin Ross was the most natural thing in the world. In this association Francis did not feel himself a pupil, as he was aware that he had always been with Ruth, nor was he a gull, as he had been with the desirable, treacherous Ismay. This was, he told himself, a relationship in which emotion played as little part as it can play in anything, and kinship of mind and friendship were everything.

  Nevertheless, he thought he ought to tell Ross what was apparently being said. Ross laughed.

  “ ‘Helter-skelter, hang sorrow, care kill’d a cat, up-tails all, and a louse for the hangman’.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ben Jonson. I did a lot of work on him at one time. Full of excellent good sense, expressed with a trumpeting masculinity. It simply means, Screw ‘em all! What does it matter what they think? We know it isn’t so, don’t we?”

  Did they? Did they know that? Francis thought he knew it, but Francis’s conception of what was being hinted at was to be seen in the bold-eyed, painted youths who hung about in the shadows of the Munich nights. Of the subtler sodomy of the soul he knew nothing. As for Aylwin Ross, he knew only that he often got what he wanted by enchanting those whose lives had been poor in enchantment, and he saw no harm in it. And indeed, could there be any harm in it?

  It would have been absurd for the Commission to examine every picture that had changed its ground during the war. Its job was to concentrate on treasures. Francis recognized in the lists that were distributed pictures by Nobody-in-Particular of Nobody Special which were certainly from the Düsterstein studio where he had worked with Saraceni; they were in the Führermuseum group, and nobody wanted them, so they were allowed to stay where they were. Because it was known to a few experts and had caused some sensation in London just before the war, Drollig Hansel appeared before the Commission in person—that is to say, exhibited on an easel—and was admired as a pleasing minor work, but as it had no known provenance, and was clearly marked with what looked like the Fugger family Firmenzeichen, it was decided that it had better go to Augsburg. This decision sat well with Knüpfer and Brodersen, and was firm evidence of the Commission’s desire to be fair.

 
Francis felt no emotion he could not dissemble when Drollig Hansel was on the easel, and he was pleased that Ross thought highly of it.

  “There’s a kind of controlled grotesquerie about it I’ve never seen before,” said he. “Not the rowdy horrors of all those Temptations of poor old St. Anthony, but something deeper and colder. Must have been an odd chap that painted it.”

  “Very likely,” said Francis.

  It was a different matter, however, when unexpectedly, on a November afternoon, The Marriage at Cana was carried in by the porters and put on the easel.

  “This picture is something out of series,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Osmotherley. “No provenance at all, except that it comes from Göring’s personal collection, if you call that robber’s cave a collection. But it’s thought to be important, and you must make a decision about it.”

  “The Reichsmarschall knew a good thing when he saw it,” said Brodersen, who ought to have known, for the Reichsmarschall had taken all the best things from his own gallery, leaving behind cynical receipts, saying that the pictures had been removed for their own protection. Brodersen had not been a Nazi, and only his reputation, and his unstained Aryanism, had kept him in his appointment.

  It was a good thing. Seeing it after almost ten years, Francis knew it was a good thing. He said nothing and left the superior experts to say their say, which they did at such length that the light faded and the chairman adjourned the sitting until the following morning.

  What the experts said was flattering and alarming to the Calvinist side of Francis’s conscience. Could this possibly be a hitherto unknown Mathis Neithart? The vigour and brilliance of the colour, and the calligraphic line, the distortion of some of the figures and the grotesquerie (that word again!) supported such an attribution, but there were Italianate, Mannerist features that made it unlikely—indeed impossible. The experts plunged into an orgy of happy haggling, of high-powered knowing-best, that filled a whole day.