by David Helwig
Quentin Matsys: The Banker and His Wife. This banker, we assume, will not find that his records are being sifted by forensic accountants. Double entry book-keeping has just been invented in Italy, and it is possible that this banker possesses the two books, journal and ledger, that allow a systematic assessment of profit and loss. In our day, of course, there is something called a spreadsheet that is produced by a computer and creates the illusion of knowledge. In fact, this particular banker may only keep a pile of gold in a locked chest and judge his riches by the weight of the chest. Notional money, a trust in paper, has yet to come, and so he and his wife sit at a table while he examines the coins in front of him, weight and texture, congratulating himself on their value. There are, as you will remember, pearls on the table, and they allow the painter to show his skill is rendering shape and iridescence. The portrait of the banker, who paid for the work to be done, is an excuse for the painting of a still life. His wife, as all commentators note, has in front of her an illuminated book of prayers, but her eyes are on the pearls. That was her reason, surely, for marrying a banker. But that woman in University City is about to leave a successful accountant for the love of some adventurer in California. Love, love, love.
I am forgetting the mirror. Once again, almost a century after van Eyck’s wedding portrait, there is a small convex mirror, and once again it allows the artist to show his consummate technical mastery, a perfect slice off the side of a sphere, the gleam of the texture of what is seen, the view of a window, its lines slightly distorted by the curvature of the mirror and beyond the window a corner of a building against the brightness of the sky, and below all this, in the corner of the mirror, the head of the other woman.
The Other Woman. Oh goodly melodrama of domestic life. Sacred adultery, the holy act of modern times. The shuttlecock husband, the shuttlecock wife. Of course in this painting, we only know that it is some other woman, and it is impossible to comprehend the meaning of this face. As with the two reflected women of Peter Christ, the meaning is for us to add. Perhaps this face is a maid, a mother-in-law, or perhaps it is another view of the banker’s wife in a different hat. She couldn’t make up her mind which hat to wear in the picture, so he offered, for a couple more gold coins from the pile on the table, to include her in the picture wearing both hats. Artists are ingenious and inventive creatures, and they can be tempted by gold.
The badminton bird floats down. The real bird soars. The Piping Plover is an endangered species, more and more rare as its breeding grounds vanish. Their nests can be swept away by storms. The tide is always rising somewhere. Brassai’s Parisian mirrors always offer another angle, the face of a detached observer. The accountant from St. Louis hears the phone ring and leaps up to answer it, hoping that it will give him the news he seeks. Just as he picks up the phone, he is aware that the water has been turned off in the room next door to his. Though he doesn’t know it, he has been responsible for the official discovery of Denman Tarrington’s body. Nor does he know that only a week later, I will be here, in Tarrington’s place, offering you a few thoughts under a title which you may have found obscure at first, but are by now surely coming to comprehend.
THREE
AS I LOOK down from this bare platform at the little loyal group of you gathered for the last of my lectures, I wonder whether there is among you the person who phoned me last night. A cruel prank. I was asleep, exhausted after a long day, dinner at The Boat Shed with your President—and thank you sir, it was a great kindness—and I was roused from sleep by the telephone ringing. Not the first time of course, and I stumbled from bed, my pyjamas tangled, and lifted the phone, though perhaps I should have known enough not to, but I did it, I lifted the phone and spoke, and there was that long painful resonant silence, and then something. I can’t say exactly what it was, a voice, I suppose, but it seemed far off and blurred, the voice itself cracked and uncomfortable, as if speech was a great effort. It’s true that I am growing a little deaf, that it is more difficult to separate voices from the surrounding noise and I’m sure that the highest pitches are gone, but it was more than that.
Back in bed, damp with sweat and yet shivering with cold, I tried to understand who it might be and told myself old stories all over again. The fire of driftwood in the middle of the August darkness, the sound of the waves as I walked back along the beach alone from the place where I had left her standing at the water’s edge. Soon enough they were gone, all of them. Very late in the night, I remembered that I had mentioned to this audience the mysterious calls, oh not that many really, over the years, but they go on. It was then I realized that it must be a cruel prank, created by someone who has been sitting here listening to me. Now I look at every face staring toward me and wonder who it was.
To business. You will of course remember from our first hour J. W. Morrice living on the Left Bank, painting and drinking. It appears that in the 1890s he was in touch with a number of American artists, Maurice Prendergast, Robert Henri, William Glackens, and for a short while, there was among the group another Canadian artist. Probably you will know the name, though it is now more obscure than in the days of my boyhood. A man who was, among other things, the founder of the American Boy Scouts.
There is an astonishing story about this man’s youth. He had a plan for what he wished to do with his life, and his father dismissed it, saying No, become something important. Become an artist. That in Toronto in the late nineteenth century. It sounds unlikely enough doesn’t it? The father appears to have been an unlikely character.
The man who was there in Paris, though he was out of place and knew it, was Ernest Thompson Seton. One of the studies tells us that he was still calling himself Thompson at this time, but I think that is wrong. Thompson was of course his name. Ernest Thompson, born and brought up under that name, but his father, an Englishman who emigrated to Canada to fail at just about everything, liked to brag of their family’s connection to the noble Scottish Setons, and eventually, his son took that name, and it was under that name he became known as a naturalist who wrote stories about animals and illustrated them with his own drawings and paintings. As a boy I collected his books, and my copies, some of them very early editions, are now in your library here. Unless they have been stamped Library Discard and tossed out. I didn’t check.
When he introduced me two days ago, your president mentioned my little book, The Carol of the Birds, and I don’t intend to repeat here all the things I said in that book about the specialized artists following Audubon. The great Audubon, who did portraits in order to make a living and find the time for his first love, the painting of birds. I once aspired to own an early edition of his book, but I never got beyond the Book of the Month Club reproductions. I still have a couple of them framed on the wall of my apartment. The snowy owl is a favourite since it takes me back to a great moment of my boyhood. A lovely memory.
My dog was named Jim—I can’t remember why—and this is a story of a boy and his dog. I wonder whether boys still have dogs, and whether they still attend Boy Scout meetings in church basements and learn to tie knots. It seems unlikely, but that is the world I grew up in, and I used to take my dog Jim for walks in the fields and woods on the edge of town, and we would chase rabbits and set grouse into noisy flight among the trees. In the summer, we went fishing.
When I moved here, after my years in the big cities, I began to watch birds more systematically, keeping a checklist, spending hours on the beach observing waterfowl and shorebirds. Anne was used to my habit, and it was always easy to pick up the binoculars and announce that I was driving down to the water. The pastime of a summer day, and an easy lie to tell when I began to need one.
The print of the snowy owl hangs over the desk where I work or try to work, as it has for years, as it did in the months when I was working on The Carol of the Birds, slides arriving, books on interlibrary loan. It wasn’t an academically respectable pursuit—wildlife art is thought of as the art of the dep
artment store—but it had its roots in my early life, and it helped to assuage my loneliness in the years when I was alone in the big frame house.
Jim and I had come through a patch of woods that afternoon and through a small valley where Jim had chased a rabbit and barked at a noisy red squirrel, and on the far side of the valley was an empty field, one that was not farmed, for some reason, just long grass growing wild, with a few hawthorns here and there. Jim was far ahead of me, but I knew that when we came to the next road, we would meet up. I can’t remember the season of the year, and it’s not clear to me why the owl should have been there, late going north, early coming south, but suddenly and silently there it was, a large white bird, not pure white but flecked with traces of grey like shadows on snow, and it lifted itself into the air just in front of me, and I stopped, astonished and breathless. I swear there wasn’t a sound as it came up in front of me, so that it was like a spectre, close to me, then gone, over the grass, into the trees and vanished.
That is a story that I tell myself, about a world where I once lived. When I got home I tried to draw a picture of the owl, but I couldn’t get it right, and I’m not sure that I have got it right now, describing it to you. The very rhythm and contrivance of any sentence or paragraph is misleading. When I was young, I admired the animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton, but if I try to read them now, they appear to me mannered and false. As an artist he is neither Morrice nor Audubon, and yet there is something touching about his survival in the face of an unpleasant and unhelpful father who lived in a world of boastful falsity, about the way he endured an unhappy marriage until his daughter was away from home.
When he was in Paris, he spent his time at the zoo, studying the animals there, those that had been bought to replace the former stock, all eaten during the siege of 1870 when the Germans blockaded the city and there was no food. The only reasonable thing to do with our feathered friends is to eat them. That was Tarrington’s comment in a review he wrote of The Carol of the Birds. We were not otherwise in touch in those days, and the review was an act of malice.
It was back in those years, just after a graduation ceremony, that one of our former students appeared in my office door, one of Tarrington’s regulars from his nights in the barroom. We spoke of nothing much, and then the conversation turned around and I found that he was telling me how Tarrington had paid him to keep an eye on Madeleine when hubby was away. While DT was in Paris screwing whatever he could get, this student played detective with the abandoned wife lest anyone else discover the silky texture and pearly iridescence of her skin. One of the questions I was never able to answer about Madeleine was how much of her was own nature and how much was what Tarrington’s acts had made of her. After that conversation in my office, I knew a little more about how it had all happened, now it was too late to make anything of the knowledge. The enduring question: was it always too late? The artist’s blindness makes possible the artist’s vision.
Seton, who once was Thompson, is not in anyone’s eyes an important artist, but just as the convex mirrors are an image of one moment of Flemish art, so his animal pictures, along with the stories they illustrate, embody a moment in the developing culture of North America. He did some fine bird studies, but his illustrations have all the annoying false drama of their kind, and in fact they are demeaning to the animals. The most impressive things, in many ways, are the incidental drawings, the illuminated title pages. In the introductions, Seton gave credit to his wife for her design of the books. He is eager to tell us that she suggested to him what to illustrate. Though there was some deep incompatibility between him and this young American woman that he met on the boat on his way to Paris, he struggled to be a devoted husband. That saddest of struggles.
Imagine a mirror not merely convex but spherical, catching everything at once. We were in a nursery where Anne wanted to look for black currant bushes. It was that last summer. Anne was just back from her extended visit to her aunt, and we had met Madeleine in a supermarket. She didn’t drive, and when Anne chose to offer her a ride home, she accepted and invited us to stay for dinner. On the way, we stopped at the nursery, and while Anne looked for her black currants, Madeleine and I affected to ignore each other and wandered aimlessly. The nursery sold not only plants but garden decorations, and one of them was a little stand with a spherical mirror on top. I suppose it was intended to go in a pool or amid the flowers and to catch the bright colours and reflect them back.
I stood at one side and looked at the shining sphere, and I noticed how it showed Madeleine’s figure, some distance off on the other side, reflected it back to me only a little distorted, and as I watched, she turned and looked at me intently, and as she was studying me, the mirror showed Anne, who appeared from the door of a greenhouse and stopped to watch Madeleine watching me. Madeleine was wearing a very short dress that day and those Indian sandals—water buffalo, weren’t they?—and her pretty legs were bare. Tarrington was still absent. The three of us were about to go to her house for dinner, and the moment hovered over those three figures, caught in a shining globe. The mirror focussed all these things to a point in my brain, and I half understood the meaning of it. What I thought I understood was what I thought was freedom.
I would like to forget that telephone call last night, that voice. This morning, wanting to discuss it with someone, I tried to call Annabelle, but she was unavailable or refuses to speak to me.
He heard voices, you know, Ernest Thompson Seton. One voice, mainly. It gave him instructions about how to live his life, and he called it his Buffalo Wind. Well, he had to call it something. If I put it to you as a question, if I put it to you, Mr. President, still here loyally listening, whether it seems likely that the man who founded the American Boy Scouts heard voices speaking to him—before I had told you this story, of course—I doubt that you would have expected it. That may simply go to show that we expect too little. It was also a period when many people were fascinated by these things. Spiritualism answered some need. It never dies, I suppose, that longing. There’s nothing new about the New Age. Charles G. D. Roberts, who was a professional acquaintance of Seton’s—they both wrote animal stories—liked to play with ESP and horoscopes and was once visited by the ghost of a little girl.
Who had committed suicide. Some choose to return, others don’t. Some bodies are never found.
In the next few years, I hope to return to the magic of my childhood, to write more about the use of animals in art, from the religious allegories of the medieval period to the work of our time, scientific in its details, escapist in its meaning. It is only as we have begun to wipe out the animal world that we have chosen to put it on our walls. We can see the meaning of anything only when we are threatened with its loss. Animal art has gone from a reflection of a new scientific taxonomy, to an expression of the earliest conservationist ideals, to sheer nostalgia and will go beyond, soon enough, to the hysterical fear and hatred of the animal rights activists.
As I was telling you that story about Jim and the snowy owl, I reflected on how that boy became a university professor and found himself here in front of you. All accident, really, but representative. I am at one with history. My father was in charge of purchasing for a large store in a middle-sized city set among fertile farms. It would never have occured to him or his brothers to attend a university, but by the time I completed high school, it was becoming a common thing, and so off I went. Too lazy to work, I suppose, and I did a Master’s degree instead and got a fellowship to go somewhere else and begin a doctorate. As the universities went on expanding, jobs fell into my lap. Tarrington was able to exploit all this, to become an adjunct to the new ruling class, while I was prepared to settle for a quiet life. I remember that when John Kennedy was elected president of the United States, Tarrington noticed that Harvard was moving to Washington and began to show an interest in all things American. His mother was American, of course, so he had one foot in the apple pie.
My
favourite recipe: mixed metaphors on toast. Tarrington is toast. DT is a Library Discard. It was a couple of months ago and I was idly pressing the button on my remote and watching pictures appear and disappear when I recognized his face. It was one of those pretentious cable channels, and Denman Tarrington was generously offering his views of just about everything. A new book was being written, it appeared, about his heart attack. This was clearly a lie as Tarrington had no heart. There was a direct wire from his brain—a capable one I admit—to his penis, which, as he made clear to the deep-browed man conducting the interview, was still in a flourishing state. The book was to be called Heart Murmurs and was to encompass all the great themes of his oeuvre. He actually said that, and the man actually listened to him. As I watched I kept hoping that he would have another coronary infarction right there on the air, but of course, for all the fake spontaneity, the interview was taped and edited and Old DT was alive or dead somewhere else. He was about to appear, we were told, to deliver the opening public lecture at an important conference in New York.
Some of the problems in Seton’s marriage were inherent in who each of them was. She was a city girl; he was a country boy. His earliest days were on a pioneer farm in southern Ontario, and when his father moved them to a poor area of Toronto, the small, innocent, cross-eyed boy was miserable. Birds and animals were always his greatest love, and he built himself a little cabin in the Don Valley to escape. So of course he married a woman who loved city life, and when they moved to the country imagined that their house was haunted. The ghost of a murdered musician was the story.
Anne never succeeded in meeting the ghost in our house of the edge of the country, much as she wished it. Perhaps no one had been murdered there. When we arrived, the house was still bloodless. It was, I feel sure, something less than mere chance, that when I moved out of that house, my daughter Sylvia got back in touch with me. At last she felt free to do it, and I met my grandchildren, the little Greens. She had stories to tell about the years between, about Anne’s hard fate, and as I watched Tarrington’s heavy, confident face smiling at the world, famous on television, I willed the clogged arteries of his heart to contract, and his body to fall from the chair to the studio floor, the producers cutting quickly to some other image. We all need someone to blame. Recall the rage of mad old Maugham.