The Stand-In

by David Helwig

  One of my favourite of Brassai’s photos is of two women in a bar, the bartender seen in the mirror at an odd angle, and for me, it evokes Manet’s great painting of the bar of the Folies-Bergère, a painting which is now in the Courtauld Institute. One can read essays about Manet’s painting, and what we can or can’t see in the mirror behind the lovely-looking young woman who is tending bar. The reason he is a great painter is that the questions he asks are not the same as the questions he answers. The portrait of the barmaid was the first in which he used a mirror, though Ingres and Degas had used the device earlier. Here the observer is struck by the oddity of the reflection which appears to be an angled view though seen in a straight mirror. You will all have seen prints of the painting, and I will not tell you what you already know, except to say that if he had used the mirror in a mechanical way, what we would see is the artist at his easel, but in this case the painter has disappeared, and his absence is powerful as the unspeaking voice at the other end of my phone call.

  I will come back to a painting where the artist is seen in the mirror. Perhaps you can guess what I’m referring to. We are all, of course, thrown back on memory by my absent-minded loss of the slides, and while some have a capacious and accurate visual memory—I have tried to train my own—others have only a few vague impressions, and those who have never seen copies of the pictures I refer to can only take my word for what is there. As easy as to imagine Tarrington’s sturdy body lying dead in the steam. As easy as to imagine Madeleine standing beside me on the shore in the dark as the soft lap of the rising tide moved over our bare feet. As easy. . . well, you take my point.

  Until I came to this university as a young man, recently married and a father, I had never lived near salt water. I was raised among long streets and flat country, bicycle rides and baseball, slow dusty summer evenings. From the window of the house we rented when we came here, a house we purchased two years later, you could see a narrow stretch of water some distance off over the marshes. It is still there, that big frame house. Some of you will know it. It was too big for the three of us, but when we arrived, it was for rent, and Anne wanted it. When we first examined it, she stared out the window at the water, which was blue that day, reflecting a blue sky, and the marsh the drying green of late summer, and when she turned from the window, I could read the expression on her face and see that she wanted to live here. I was not always able to read that face.

  Difficult to read the face of Manet’s woman, the one behind the bar, in front of the long, deceptive mirror. As a model he used, not a professional, but a woman who actually worked at that bar, though who is to say why? He had a complicated way of confronting reality, not quite one thing or the other. If you study the original, you will find that the painting moves in receeding levels. The effect is lost in reproductions. Manet asked, as I have said, one question and answered a different one. The music of no mind.

  One of the women who came to last night’s reception enquired if, given my title, I would be making reference to the history of music in these lectures, and I explained that although I mentioned music in the title, I would not. I understand the sound of music only when it is overheard, in fragments, perhaps in another room, or from a passing car. That is music, the momentary haunting of the air by fascinating sounds, but the continuous scratching of fiddles is meaningless. Words too are best when overheard. Behind my back, just at that moment, as I was discussing music, a voice was saying, She was never seen again. My ears are not what they once were, all the senses growing dull, but I did hear that, a sentence summing up a life. She was never seen again.

  The window of our house looked over the salt marsh toward that tongue of sea, and I kept binoculars hung close by so that I could watch the birds that appeared there. Birds to come in my third lecture. Below the window was the lawn where Anne and I would sometimes play a sort of badminton with no net. Yes, I know what Robert Frost said about free verse, though I’m not sure of its application to marital badminton. Our daughter Sylvia was only a little thing in those days, and while she was a charming child, she was a child, and Anne was alone with her for long hours while I prepared classes and marked assignments and attempted to finish my doctoral thesis. Never did. Tarrington, of course, had completed his before arriving, a year after we came here. Years later he referred to my difficulties in another of his early essays, “Night Baseball: Rules of the Academic Game.”

  Young, we all were, and recently married. Wedding photographs on the bedroom dresser. The long article on the symbolism of wedding photographs is one of the pieces of writing I did finish, as your president told you when he introduced me yesterday. Got that one right, rushed as you were, Mr. President.

  In fact that essay was meant to be the start of a book. I had in mind a companion piece about the most famous of all wedding portraits, the van Eyck oil usually called the Arnolfini Wedding, which always made me think of my own wedding photograph. If you look in the indexes, you will find a long list of articles on van Eyck’s picture, but for our purposes, the matter at issue is one small section in the upper half. The convex mirror. A favourite device in the Flemish artists of the period, Campin (or whoever it was painted what is attributed to him), Petrus Christus, Memling, Quentin Matsys, they all show their skill by rendering the glossy surface of the mirror and the odd corner of reality it catches. Of course we know little about those old Flemish masters, and among scholars there is a rage to name artists who might better be left anonymous so that we are invigorated by our ignorance, rather than stifled by what we believe we know.

  Was she pregnant? A great belly brought into being by that long-faced expressionless man beside her. It’s easily enough done, or was in the days before the pill. I gather, of course, that we are now in the days after the pill. Dangers to health of one sort or another. My friends in the second row will enlighten me later on. If I were as prolific as the lamented Tarrington, I would write an essay on the shaved head and new standards of female beauty. Yes, my dear, I have a shrewd suspicion that you are differently inclined, but the shape of your scalp is very appealing, and though not a professional lecher like DT, I have never been able to keep my eyes off certain women.

  And that is how my wife became my wife, quite against her better judgment. She didn’t wish to marry me, but she did.

  The convex mirror in the wedding portrait: look closely, though of course you can’t because I-the-dolt lost the slides, but look closely at your memory, walk up close to it in a certain room in that building on Trafalgar Square, while outside, your friend who hates art is waiting impatiently to go for a cream tea, and what you see in that reflecting fish eye is the backs of the happy couple and two other more distant figures, behind the plane of the painting, invisible except in the mirror, and one of them is the artist himself. Johannes de Eyck fuit hic. Kilroy was here, that ubiquitous phrase from the days after the Second War, originally a soldier’s joke perhaps. The painting is the world’s fanciest marriage certificate, some would tell us, but of course it is not evidence as a photograph might be, for it would have taken months to paint, and the details are all thought to be symbolic—imagine a dog as the symbol of sexual fidelity all you who have found one humping your knee—but like the tourist’s photograph of himself standing in front of the Pietà, the painting is offered as proof that the event took place, all of this in the face of the multiplicity and evanescence of what occurs. Bang, zip, gone. We hear a voice singing as we walk away down the street. The semen spurts and nine times out of ten the whole thing is lost in the next thing to happen. Now and then, the belly swells.

  Giovanna Cenami might not have been pregnant. It may be the fashion of the dress, the long train that she holds against her front. The orange on the table symbol of something. The fruit of marriage. The vegetable of adultery—that is a whimsical, if private reference to the occasion when a woman handed me a carrot whittled into the shape of an erect penis. Never offer to help in the kitchen.

  T
he other convex mirrors in paintings of the period are more indirect in their reference. The primary reason for their use in the painting was, I imagine, to show off the painter’s skill, like all those empty wine glasses, brass vessels, the sort of gear that allowed the exploitation of illusion. Look what I can do in showing the gleaming surface of the world. Look how I can paint a mirror.

  Max Beerbohm possessed a convex mirror. His father bought it at the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, and it was in the young Max’s nursery, then stayed with him all his life. There is always a fascination with such things, the way they reach out and bring the whole room to a focus in the watcher’s eye. It was suggested that Beerbohm intended to write an autobiographical novel about that mirror, but it never happened. The idea is an intriguing one but misses the point of course. The mirror reflects everything and sees nothing. It has no mind. We know what he means by no mind, don’t we? I will remember that wisecrack.

  Beerbohm’s convex mirror showing the curve of life, the man in old age, dry and astute. One of the other essays I once planned was to be about artists in their last days. Matisse still drawing when he couldn’t rise from bed. Saying he wasn’t sick, he was injured, and calling himself un grand mutilé. Monet’s colours getting brighter as his vision went until he was making neon scribbles of the Japanese bridge. In my first lecture, I told you a story about Maugham’s senile rage. Perhaps I am ready to write that essay now.

  Artists growing older, and I am at the age when, inevitably one looks back. I still have a copy of the wedding photo that sat on the dresser of our rented house, and when I look at it, I think that we were young and knew nothing—which means, of course, we knew the insistent truths of eager selfishness and animal appetite. I had a smuggled copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover—it was legal a few years afterward—and we read it aloud to each other with the predictable effect. We slapped the little feathered shuttlecock across the lawn at each other in the summer evening while a hawk hunted over the marsh and our daughter slept in her bedroom upstairs, and as the sun went down, it flashed in my eyes until I couldn’t see to play the game.

  When we decided to buy that house, I did some research on its history. The documentary material I came up with is in the archives of the local historical society, and Janice Baglioni will make it available to you if you are interested. The builder was William Smithson, who is recorded to have built a number of houses here in the period from 1890 to 1905. He had an interest in Doggett’s mill, and the wood from the houses was milled there. He seems to have worked from a pattern book he got hold of somewhere in New England, and the houses often look as if they belong in Massachussetts or Connecticut. Isabel Smithson, his daughter, was still alive when I was doing my research, and though she had a reputation for being strange, perhaps even mad, she knew things, and if you had the patience, information could be obtained. I spent some hours sitting at her kitchen table with a cold cup of tea, running my fingers over the checked oilcloth while I waited for her to remember, or perhaps only to agree to tell me what she remembered. She lived, as we say, in another world, and talking to her, you went back in time into the previous century. When I told Denman Tarrington about her, he was convinced that she had been sexually misused by her father in the years when the two of them lived alone together, and that was why she could not pass the year 1900, but I was not convinced. Another of Tarrington’s vulgarities. Not everything can be explained by what’s between the legs, I said to him, and he laughed, but I am here and laughing last.

  The wood was hauled from the mill by a horse and wagon, and as the men unloaded it, Smithson would scribble patterns in the dirt, imagining the shapes that were to be built, and then he would give orders to the other carpenter who worked with him and to the apprentices, and they would set the wood on sawhorses and begin to cut the framing members. Behind the hole in the ground where the foundation was to be built, the red-winged blackbirds were loud at the edge of the marsh. I can’t explain why, but I always thought of that big frame place as The Summer House, even when January blizzards were swirling past the windows. It held summer in its memory, and I could never bear to leave it until I retired and decided to go away altogether. Peaceful out there by the salt marshes, in the empty house, and it was not easy to grow used to the noise of life, all the radios and television sets and babbling newspapers and signals arriving from all over the planet. The gibbering of the eternal spaces frightens me, to abuse a familiar quotation. You will allow me my little games.

  Petrus Christus, he of the odd name, is the next on our list. Peter Christ. Another craftsman going carefully about his work. Scholars battle about dates and influences, though the facts are few and all awash in suppositions. The painting we’re concerned with is dated, so we can be certain that it was done fifteen years after the van Eyck wedding picture, and can perhaps assume that he got the idea of using a convex mirror from van Eyck’s work, though there is no proof he ever saw it. Perhaps he received a suggestion from a gossipy visitor.

  The subject of our painting is another couple, lovers, perhaps about to be married since they are visiting the jeweller, to get a ring we may suppose, though in this case the jeweller has a halo, picked out in delicate pale lines about his head as he weighs up a bit of gold on a balance in his hand and looks upward. That makes him St. Eligius, the patron saint of gold and silversmiths. Not easy to tell whether he is looking beyond the lovers to some heavenly wisdom or whether the painter’s draftsmanship was faulty. Certainly, as I recall the painting, the eyes of the lovers are fixed on the gold.

  The climax of courtship, the moment when the ring is chosen: not perhaps a scene to be found in every wedding album today, but interesting enough, and in this case its importance is guaranteed by the sainthood of our jeweller. A marriage made in heaven and at the bank, just as it should be, and documented by an expensive painting done by one of the best in Bruges.

  Our point here is the mirror, and when the young couple saw the image, one wonders that they didn’t send the painting back, for what is reflected there, by the magic of optics and the curvature of the device, is a street scene somewhere outside the jeweller’s shop, quite possibly a cheat on the optical inevitabilities since it’s not clear whether we are looking through a door or a window—a large doorway perhaps—in order to see the houses across the way. In front of those houses are two other figures, tiny commentators visible only in the upper body, the one, who seems to hold a large bird, perhaps a bird of prey, turned to the other with the sly vile expression of a malicious gossip. He’s only marrying her for the money, you know. That baker’s girl in the square is with child and he’s the one who set the loaf to rising. I’ve heard the things he says about her, what he will do with her money, and how he will keep her silent and obedient. She’s got a bad one in him. Perhaps I misread the painting, and if we had the slide, you might form your own opinion, but as it is, you are left with mine. Perhaps some of you know the painting. It is in the Met in New York and not out of reach. I looked at it on a recent visit.

  The irony of van Eyck is gentle, a whimsical joke by which he places himself in the painting and shows himself as witness to the important ceremony, which, even if the bride is up the stump, is treated in a serious way. He loved painting the texture of the clothes, of course, and the symbolism may be taken as a pedestrian labelling, but still the technique is perfect, and the event is placed in time as a crystal wine glass might be placed on velvet.

  Mr. Christ, however, had none of this delicacy. No doubt he was paid a goodly sum to show the two lovers just when they should be seen, as good protestants, guaranteeing the union with an investment in gold, but I have always wondered what he told the purchasers of the painting they were seeing in the mirror. Maybe it was other members of the family. The two mothers-in-law, the price of the painting adjusted upward for each extra figure included. They have the look of the conventional mother-in-law, snide and disapproving.

  Myself, I never had a mother
-in-law, for Anne had been orphaned—an accident then a heart attack, the two perhaps related—before I met her. She had a kindly aunt who came to the wedding and smiled, though she can’t have been entirely pleased with the situation. It had not been easy to convince Anne to give in to necessity and accept me, but I insisted. I wanted her quietness, her lovely skin. She never put her reservations in words. Perhaps, the figure in our convex mirror was Anne’s other face, as sly and disapproving as those two gossips.

  We could, while on the subject of mirrors, take a step to one side and lob the bird, look, there it goes, a little white object against the summer sky, into the territory of literature. There’s the Lady of Shallott, virgin evader, and some nice lines of Auden’s about Ferdinand and Miranda in his poems from The Tempest. “My dear one is mine as mirrors are lonely.” Very pretty, though I’m not sure I could explain what it means. Virginity again, that white thing that we no longer understand. A strange obsession to make virginity sacred. Prudence on the subject, well yes, whether at the level of health, self-respect or commerce, none of them a romantic or holy matter, we can be sure, and I wouldn’t knock anyone’s choice of prudence even if it means keeping your legs crossed for a long time, but the sacredness of the hymen is another matter altogether. I suppose Freud got it right. Sex had become undervalued in the Roman empire and the pendulum swung the other way. Asceticism made it a Big Thing. The metaphors are having their way with me.