by David Helwig
Earlier in my lecture, when I mentioned the inaccurate rumour of Morrice’s death, I failed to mention the odd fact that this is an echo of a book, Arnold Bennett’s Buried Alive, a book in which the character of the hero, Priam Farll, is derived in some small ways from Morrice. In that story, an artist still alive is believed to be dead. It is all a shade farcical. The incorrect reports about Morrice’s death were spread partly because of his vanishing acts. Especially later in life, his friends often had no idea where he was. He would pack up and go at the slightest provocation. Léa Cadoret, his mistress, was accustomed to receiving a card mailed from a railway station announcing that he was off to Cuba or Morocco or Canada. He must have known that his health was failing near the end, for he bought her a house in the south of France. Not many years later he died in Tunis, alone.
We prefer, of course, to remember him in Paris, in his chair at a café, his paints in a little box in his pocket, to be taken out for one of those sudden tiny oils, the work punctuated by absinthe or whisky. Sometimes, when he needed a figure in one of the sketches, just there, a punctuation, he would send Léa over to stand in the right spot, and she obliged. She was clearly devoted to this curious lovable man, and he treated her well in his absent-minded, occasional, evanescent way. She had first come to him as a model, and it was easy enough to stand on the cobbled street, the kiosk in the backgound, the evening life of Paris going on around them, sudden dabs of black in the picture. A love story of a sort. There are so many. I called Morrice the prince of all the greens, but he was also king of the blacks. Never such speed and suddenness as the picture of figures and pigeons in the Piazza San Marco. Everything is there and flying. Black figures, black feathers in one of the golden cities.
Once such things were in private collections, hidden on the walls of great houses and high apartments, and some are even yet, but more and more, they are in museums. If you own an important painting, you are caught between the thieves and the company that insures you against their depradations. Maugham, in his later days, growing anxious and irritable as old men do, was at last so terrified that his paintings might be stolen that he sold them all, even those he had given to his daughter. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Denman Tarrington fell down in that small bathroom. It might have been the subject of one last essay. “Dying in the Steam: A Mist that Never Rises.”
The café where we met: I had walked along the Seine on my way and I had puzzled over his appetites and the ease which which he satisfied them. That summer, his first essay had appeared in Partisan Review, and he had been invited to New York to meet Philip Rahv. At least half of that essay was derived from conversation between the two of us, and I no longer knew which ideas were mine, but some of them were. He took them without so much as a by-your-leave, as he would always take what he wanted. If I had written the essay, it would have been more coherent and less successful. I looked down at a barge passing along the Seine, laundry hung across the deck behind the cabin, and I half imagined the life lived on the boat, a boat just like one of those passing by the Quai des Grands Augustins in the Morrice paintings I loved even then, though I had seen fewer of them.
As I walked toward the café, I saw Tarrington seated at one of the tables, making notes in a small book. When he saw me, he put it away. At the end of the summer, he would be leaving us for a more prestigious university, and there would be no more badminton games. No more Ovaltine on wintry nights, no more feeling sorry for Madeleine. Much more than that to be lost, though I couldn’t know it then. As we met in Paris, Madeleine was back in their little house organizing the move, beautiful, awkward, unhappy. Anne was away, visiting her aunt, but I expected to find her at home when I got off the plane a few days later, though when I got there the house was empty; she had extended her visit. I sat down at the table with Tarrington and ordered, and it was only a few minutes before he was telling me about the pubic bouquet—both senses—of his American girl, and the cleverness of the French one. It was a mystery to me then and is to me now how Tarrington gained the belief that everyone loved him, and that he was excused in advance for all the wanton acts he might care to commit, that women would adore him in spite of his faithlessness, that the world would open its doors at his approach, that his lies would become truth once they were spoken, or if not become truth be found necessary and right in some other way. The blood that was shed was never his responsibility. Could I, one day, learn to shed blood?
I told you about the conversation I overheard about tattoos. One of the young women reported to the other that her boyfriend wanted her to put roses on her butt, as she phrased it. Tarrington would have made that sort of demand, and possibly some woman would have acceded, would have been willing to be branded for him. The secrecy of secret marks, a part of intimacy. Perhaps after the lecture, the clever young women academics in the second row will discuss this with me, and I can pass on their wisdom in the next lecture.
Astonishing. The last striped tie is gone. I wonder if their departures are carefully timed, and with an obscure significance that I have been unable to work out. There are those who believe that everything in the world is significant, that a pattern exists, whether or not we can perceive it. It has been noted that patterns are full of peril. My wife Anne was known to read the horoscopes. She suspected that forces were moving outside the bounds of our awareness. As if the three men in old school ties might be gathered somewhere in the dark corner of the physics lab, listening to the humming of the cyclotron and comparing notes on my lecture, to make sure that between the three of them they have an accurate record of what I said.
Anne had a secret mark on her lower back. Sometimes I would stare at it, and try to describe it to her. It is like an Egyptian hieroglyph of a bird, I would say. It is like a tarragon leaf. It is like a dark and slender insect, perfectly still, waiting for its prey. It is the precise shape of your immortal soul. She flushed easily, blood mantling her skin. When we played badminton, her face grew pink and damp, and she had a way of pushing her hair back with her left hand.
That is what I recall. Once I thought of writing a work of fiction about the early years here. A question, of course, as to how a work of fiction can be about a real time and place. The reading of literary biography is unsettling in the way it shows us how writers mix experience, gossip, and lies and call the whole gallimaufry a novel. Arnold Bennett’s Buried Alive, as I have said, tells a long and unlikely story about an artist who is alive though believed dead. A note on influences: the painter’s wife in that book strikes me as quite possibly the source for Joyce Cary’s Sarah Monday. Books are made from other books, as a critic observes. And paintings from other paintings. Lectures from other lectures. Of course both Bennett and Cary are out of style, and no one is likely to care how one book was made out of another book, one wife out of another wife. Late on in Bennett’s novel, when his hero has gone back to painting, Bennett attributes to him a painting which is exactly an oil done by his friend J. W. Morrice—though he says it is a painting of London, when in fact it is Paris. The painting is now in Ottawa in the National Gallery. On the very next page, whether as a joke or an apology, Bennett mentions Morrice, side by side with his contemporary Bonnard. This is not imagination so much as a set of gossipy games. Everything is connected, but not by the force of the stars.
My copy of this Bennett novel, now long out of print, came from a secondhand bookstore like so many of my books. I have fewer now, of course, having left many of them with your library when I moved to Montreal. I hope the library has not tossed them all out. Library Discard. Library Discard. I didn’t check when I was there, though I did pick up a copy of the recent library newsletter with its story about the early manuscripts given to the institution last summer by Denman Tarrington, probably when he was asked to inaugurate the Jakeson lectures. I asked to see them, but they are not yet catalogued, and so are inaccessible. I don’t know how much of a saver he was, our DT—I used to refer to him as Professor Delerium Tremens—but
if he was a saver of everything that touched his important life, as I suspect he was, there are letters of mine in the hoard. Letters from long ago, threats and explanations. Perhaps he never opened them.
Arnold Bennett, Somerset Maugham, Clive Bell, the three literary blokes who moved through the bohemian world of Paris and met the charming, brilliant alcoholic Canadian painter, and then of course went on to other lives. Maugham became, among other things, a spy, married in odd circumstances and later complained to Glenway Westcott that his wife’s physical demands were intolerable, inexcusable. The myth of nymphomania, a word that was current in my youth, though I think it is now gone out of common usage. Later on, intemperate desire was advertised as both common and exemplary. Witness Denman Tarrington’s fame. Then came disease and a return to prudence.
More often than uncontrollable female appetite, a joint madness, nymph and nympholept in a state of demoniac possession for reasons beyond our power to express. The one tireless, the other insatiable. Nothing to do with love, but many have known what it was like, a woman possessed and needing to be possessed endlessly, for beyond was a vacuum, merest nothingness. Maugham’s wife knew she could not have him, a cold man and a homosexual, so she would have his services, would insist on being filled. That he was horrified was only partly his misogyny. It was a terror of what lay beyond, the emptiness that could not be filled. Yes, it was like that.
I am stopping too frequently now for these sips of water. My throat grows dry, and my legs are aching from the time spent here at this lectern. I am coming toward the end of my allotted time. The three striped ties have vanished, and that is a signal. It is regrettable, perhaps, that the slides were left in that taxi, for those of you who haven’t seen Morrice’s paintings will be left with only my verbal evocations of them. There are books available in your library. I checked, when I was not listening to an essay on tattoos, and those of you who are interested may go there and see the only barely adequate reproductions. Or you may also get yourselves to the collections in Montreal and Ottawa. I recommend it.
I was a young man when I first became aware of some of those paintings. I was a young man. That in itself is a surprising thing, for I am now as you observe me, but once I was lean and quick on my feet, racing backward and forward on the badminton court, wrist and arm tireless, sweating only a little from the exertion as I dodged about, Anne’s figure, sturdy and pink, as quick as my own. On the other side of the net, Denman Tarrington’s sharp-featured, bearded face—I wonder how often the beard smelled of a recent student—Madeleine’s tall somehow helpless body reaching out, and sometimes, with her long reach, she would catch one of our shots, against all likelihood of its being caught, and lift it over the net, and I was aware of a kind of shudder of relief going through her body. Outside, always, the snow.
Apparently Morrice’s winter scenes were mostly painted in his studio in Paris from pencil sketches and oil pochades done on the spot. His back turned to the window over the Seine, he studied the Canadian landscape in his mind and gradually, each morning adding a few more strokes, he made it real on canvas.
I will keep you from the important duties of your lives only a moment more. Indulge me just a little. You remember our friend in Ottawa, working for the Canadian Committee, filling out order forms for copies of the biography of J. W. Morrice, though in fact he has never seen the painter’s work but has read a review of the book and believes that it is important, and it is among those he will see distributed to the army, navy and air force, a testimony to the importance of the country they serve. Then as he sits at his table in the small office, doing the work for which he is paid very little—though it is better than the hopeless idleness that came before it—he thinks of his wife, at home, waiting for him in the dim November afternoon, and he tries to imagine her as she was before he met her, tries to reach that ghost of the future, and is aware that he cannot.
Tomorrow afternoon, I will offer the second lecture in the series. I trust you will all be here once again.
TWO
IT WAS KIND of you to offer that little reception for me after yesterday’s lecture, even though a number of those invited took flight after five minutes, and I did overhear one or two remarks that were characterized more by irony than comprehension. We know what he means by no mind, don’t we? That sort of thing, tossed off by those who have learned all too well that worst academic habit, sly condescension. Even as an undergraduate, I was aware that a certain kind of thing that passed for wit was the anxious cruelty of the uncertain.
Your president, who has bravely come back for my second performance, was generous in the face of my cavilling at his introduction and its inaccuracies. Little enough time for research, as he observed. We were both forced to speak on little notice. I had three days to prepare, he little more than three hours, he told me. So we have agreed that we both did our best in the circumstances. I do confess that it was dim-witted of me to lose the box of slides, though I had only a limited number prepared which were appropriate to my subjects. I hope they turn up. Most were slides I had used in my undergraduate lectures at this very institution.
One of the brisk and skull-shaven young women in row two—and I notice you have all come back, very good of you—said that she felt wholly unable to predict what I would choose to talk about in my second lecture but there you are, back for more. I could have claimed to have no idea myself of what I would say next, but you will see that there is a pad of notes and sketches here, places to start, obiter dicta that may be offered and glossed. Here, for example is a note that says: The homogeniety of time, the condition of waiting. I’m not sure we’ll get to that one. I’m certain that when I scratched it down, I had something in mind. Is time homogeneous? Perhaps some physicist in the audience will let me know.
Our last lecture got us to Paris, and another of the quotations in front of me is about Paris, written by Walter Benjamin, about the city’s mirrors, the immaterial element of the city, he calls them, and you will recall how often in a small café or restaurant, you look up from the table, and a mirror will show you those who stand by the bar, and behind them, the buildings on the street outside. You may be familiar with the photographs of Brassai, how we catch the sense of ongoing life in the mirrors of the bars where he took pictures, two lovers, his face in one mirror, hers in another mirror at right angles to the first. Love is this and this, but also this and this, and the mirror holds it without comment.
After the reception yesterday, I walked back to my room in a pleasant motel just down the road, and as soon as I was inside, one of the mirrors caught me and showed me myself. As I looked, I thought about that old trick of exposition, found in bad fiction, where the main character looks in the mirror and the author is able to describe the long pale face, the white hair combed straight across, the pattern of wrinkles beside the eyes, the thin mouth that might be about to smile. A face that a woman, in the grip of whatever madness, once called beautiful. You know the sort of thing. The mirror gives us an author’s eye view of ourselves. When I walked into the bathroom, there was yet another, larger mirror, as there was in that hotel room in New York where Denman Tarrington would admire his naked body before stepping into the shower.
No one who wasn’t a thoroughgoing narcissist could have lived his life. Each morning, he stood there, a little heavier, the face giving the impression of solid slabs of flesh with slight declivities where the slabs met, the long arms hanging from the sturdy body, a little ape-like perhaps, but effective for seizing the ripe fruit of life. Once he had those arms round a woman’s body, there was no escape. Still pretty well-hung, he would think to himself, as he observed the thing in repose.
I reflected as I stood in the bathroom of that motel, that if he had survived to come here and speak, he would have looked in the same mirror, stood where I was now standing. The two of us were there for a moment, side by side, as if washing up after a brisk hour on the badminton court. Then I turned my back, sent h
im once again to the underworld.
We are accustomed to mirrors by now, but once they were rare and expensive. The first mirrors were polished metal disks, hand mirrors that showed only the face. Before those metal disks, men and women had only the surface of the still pool, but that was enough for Narcissus. Fell in love with himself and that was the end of him. Perhaps the mirror changed history. Brunelleschi began his studies of perspective by drawing what he saw in a mirror, and it was only in twentieth-century art that his mirror was shattered.
For now I see in a glass, darkly, Paul says, in a passage we all know, and I suppose the reference is to an early mirror of poor quality, glass of limited transparency, full of flaws, backed unevenly with silver, but now the mirrors are perfect and the flaws are in the face observed.
I was in the middle of these reflections last night when the telephone rang, and I picked it up, for once unthinking, wondering if perhaps it was someone who had been assigned to take me out for dinner at the Boat Shed, always my favourite restaurant, but the instant I lifted the phone, I could hear the silence, and I said Hello, and Hello and Hello, and there was nothing, and I hung up. Beyond the motel window it was snowing. The calls had stopped, or so I believed. One or two after I moved to Montreal. Now another. Looking into the audience I search among your faces for the half-forgotten face, come here to watch me, to listen and then late at night to make a call, but there is nothing to be found. Are you there? No.
When the phone rang again, later on, I found it hard to answer, but I did and it was my daughter Sylvia calling from Victoria to ask how the lecture had gone. Now that we are back in touch, she tries to be good to me. I described the lecture to her, but of course she thought I was joking. Perhaps I was.
I see you, Belle, slipping in the back door. Hello. A little late. Well, I was afraid you had abandoned me. Tomorrow after the last lecture, we must get together and bring back old times over dinner. I have been speaking, while you were struggling here through the snow, of the mirrors of Paris, the mind of the city which watches, unmoved, the little adventures of life. The mirrors on the walls of the brothel where the act is seen and then the empty room is unseen. As if the rooms might expect our coming, that room in the motel anticipating my return, my apartment in Montreal full of familiar shapes and smells although I am not there. The mirrors on the brothel wall offer a doubling or, with facing mirrors, a tripling and then a projection of the act to infinity, a hint that we can know the unknowable. He knew her and she was with child, as the Bible would have it, but of course he knew nothing. He stirred the nerves.