The Stand-In

by David Helwig

  Be patient. I will get to the point. I’m sure I will. Last night, as I lay awake after that phone call, the mind racing, as if everything in my life had to be accommodated, put in order, comprehended and forgiven in the next five minutes, I recalled that in my first lecture I had not mentioned Morrice’s war paintings. Lord Beaverbrook was responsible for getting him commissioned. It wasn’t his kind of subject, but he worked steadfastly enough at it. Met Augustus John, I believe, who was doing the same things. Under conscription. We all know that experience, from time to time, of being under orders from another place. We hear the orders of a voice, even if we don’t call it Buffalo Farts.

  Art began with animals. You have all seen versions of those cave paintings from France and North Africa. Men and women hiding in holes in the earth, suddenly felt a need to mix up red mud with water or urine or or the sap of a tree and to make the world’s first steps at interior decoration. If we don’t count the bower bird, and that is not quite the same thing—though for all we know the man in the cave was doing it to persuade a woman huddled in a corner that he was a clever geezer, much smarter than Ugh who lived in the cave next door and was making eyes at her. It’s difficult not to make jokes about people who live in caves. I grew up with a cartoon called, if I remember, Alley Oop, in which the characters were oddly shaped figures dressed in hanks of fur.

  I’m not sure if they had fire in the caves, or if the drawings were done in darkness or by a little glimmer of distant daylight. A blank, unmediated life, and scholars try to understand what was in the mind of the person who felt the need to record the shape of bison and antelopes. A way to control them, magic to put the prey in their power—that’s one of the standard explanations, but I’ve heard it suggested that it was something more detached, an impulse of awe and wonder, the impulse behind all art. Not to eat it, but to know it.

  Yesterday, before your president kindly took me out to dinner, I had a few minutes free and I spent them in your library, glancing at a few books on animals in art to prepare myself for today’s effort. I was startled to find on the same shelf as all the beasts a book called Woman as Sex Object. I suppose the cataloguer was working in categories like Art, Subject Matter Of, and women and birds went to the same place. English slang, 1960s. And Jerome Bosch gave us lots of feathered friends in his sexy garden of earthly delights.

  Everything is connected to everything else. The falcon god of the Egyptians prefigures the hawks I saw hunting over the marsh behind The Summer House. From the window where I stood at the end of that long night, watching the pale grey light that comes before dawn, when the luminescence comes up out of the ground, slowly, slowly, while in another room, my daughter was sleeping, and far off the tongue of water was luminous as pearl, the sky was empty, no hawk, and for the moment the birds were silent. I had passed the night—from the coming of darkness through standing by Madeleine watching the distant fire to more darkness, and driving from street to street searching for Anne, finding nothing. And nothing here when I returned. Everyone was gone, and I knew it would all be changed, but I couldn’t see how, not yet. Though I stood in a well-built house, I might as well have stood in a cave or on the bare desert earth worshipping animal gods, eminent and careless. Alone, we are as bare as critters huddled in a cave, making lines on the rock face.

  Ernest Thompson Seton lived to be a very old man, settled in New Mexico, married to a second wife. He sired a child when he was somewhat older than I am now. A terrifying thought and not entirely credible. You can’t, I’m certain, imagine me the father of a red little thing, screaming out for the comfort of its mother’s breast. I am a grandfather, after all, a retired professor.

  There is an entertaining story about Seton in Paris, trying to get rid of the carcass of a dog he had been dissecting. You know the sort of thing. Police searching for a murderer who may be throwing pieces of his wife’s body into the Seine. Seton is trying to do the same with the body of the dissected dog. Perhaps he made it all up. Perhaps it was a dark dream. You must see what I mean.

  Since animals can’t be paid to hold a pose, animal art depended, at least until the invention of the camera, on the infinite patience of dead models. Audubon would wire freshly killed birds to a grid in order to produce a lifelike rendering. The illustrators of bird books all too often had to work from skins and stuffed birds in museum collections, and the colours, especially of the unfeathered areas were not always perfect. Audubon worked at a large size and with great precision and of course always put his birds and animals in a small landscape, but there is a strange mock-eternity to his portrayals, something of the magic stillness that catches us in naïve art. His landscapes have all the ghostly precision of Henri Rousseau.

  Art stops things dead. The truth shall make you free, but the facts shall make you nervous.

  Over the doorway of Victoria College at the University of Toronto, it says The Truth Shall Make You Free. I noticed it when I stopped in there many years ago to visit an old friend. I had been just up the street at the Royal Ontario Museum where there was a show called “Animals in Art”. It was during the days that I was working on my little book, and the trip to Toronto was enlightening. It was a surprise to discover how many artists from how many countries were painting birds and beasts.

  That trip was also the only occasion in my life when I found myself in intimate circumstances with a complete stranger, a cheerful young woman I met on the train. It’s hardly a matter to be discussing from a public platform, but Victoria College says the truth shall make you free, and I’ve always wanted to express my gratitude. Auburn hair. Thank you, my dear. You see life doesn’t end when we believe it must. It is only art that brings everything to a standstill, the fox unmoving in the snowy landscape, as if he might be that charming stuffed dog in the Victorian exhibit at the museum. When the dog passes to his reward, have him done by a taxidermist, and set him up next to your favourite chair, send him to the dry cleaners now and then.

  When I was young, popular magazines offered courses in taxidermy, something you could take by mail, the ads right next to those for Charles Atlas who guaranteed to produce muscles by dynamic tension. I wonder how many young men were haunted by the fear of being the skinny goof who had sand kicked in his face by a bully, the one who would never get the girl.

  You might have had Tarrington stuffed, you know, and added him to the material in the archives. The corpse would have been fresh enough, kept damp by all that warm steam from the shower. A remark in poor taste, perhaps, but it would have been in the spirit of his best work. He was after all the man who called a book Geographies of Standing Flesh.

  He was missing from that image in the spherical mirror at the garden centre, still off in Paris, doing research. The three of us are small in that gleaming reflective surface round as the earth, and the curve of the mirror makes the sky above look like a whirlpool of cloud spinning downward, a bright flash to one side, the suddenly revealed sun. The clouds are flying by, but we are motionless as models posed for the artist to catch and record. Johannes de Eyck fuit hic. Kilroy was here. Tarrington was in Paris. Somewhere behind a tree, his student, the spy, watches it all, like the eye of god. Madeleine had caught him at his spying one day that summer, he told me in our later interview, and invited him into the house, and one way and another, she got the truth out of him. When I came back from Paris, I knew that something about her had changed, but I didn’t know what it was. It led her to demand an account from me of Tarrington’s activities in Paris. Thinking that I had my reasons, I told her.

  We keep returning to Paris. When I was in New York, something strange happened to me. I had flown into Newark, and now I was in a cab, going from the Port Authority bus terminal to my hotel, and I discovered that I was speaking to the cab driver in French. Natural enough I suppose, since I had flown from Montreal, but I believe that I thought I was in Paris, though the cities don’t resemble each other in the slightest, and the cab, which appeared to be f
alling apart and had a thick grill and glass separating me from the driver, was a dead giveaway. I spoke to the driver in competent French, he replied in what I took to be demotic Spanish and we lapsed into an appropriate silence until I reached my destination.

  Nobility, perhaps ersatz nobility, is one of the features of animal art. The Monarch of the Glen. We portray them as noble creatures, the horses, lions, dying stags, though in one period animals got into art mostly when they lay Dutch and dead, a heap of game ready for the pot, piles of ducks and hares which must have stunk to high heaven before the artist was finished with his delicate and perfect rendering of the fur and feathers. A kind of still life, which in French is, appropriately, nature morte. Dead nature indeed. Still, the ospreys, nearly wiped out by DDT, are coming back. My last day here, before I moved to Montreal, I drove down to the river mouth, and then walked over the rocks to the high point that you all know, and I saw an osprey, hovering there, and watched him plunge into the water and then lift himself into the air again, and of course I saw nobility in the creature’s eagerness and power.

  He got the job, you know, the man in the room next door to Tarrington’s corpse, and that was some small consolation for the loss of his wife and children. When he picked up that ringing phone, the voice on the other end was, not the office secretary, but the chief accountant himself, asking him if he was free to come back for another talk that very afternoon, and he said that he was free, and as they made the arrangements, he thought what a good thing it was that he had told them from the first interview about his marijuana conviction. They had accepted it, with a joke about all the ones who didn’t get nabbed, glances from one to the other, all knowing that some of them had smoked up and probably indulged in other recreational drugs, and they were not going to punish him because he had the bad luck to get pinched. The conviction, after all, was for simple possession. Perhaps they considered that his first-hand experience of a correctional facility would give him insight into the criminal mind.

  I wonder if there is such a thing as the criminal mind. The inability to postpone gratification: that’s the sociologists’ phrase for it. The middle class gets to where it’s going by waiting to have children, by saving for a house. I am tempted to say that Tarrington never postponed a gratification in his life but that can’t be true, can it? He wrote those books when he might have been drinking or chasing women, and I have wondered from time to time if his relentless appetite wasn’t a pose, tough talk from a good hard-working Canadian boy. Perhaps he lied to me in Paris. He might have been spending all his time at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and I passed on the lie to Madeleine, and she opened the vodka bottle and prepared herself for revenge. The truth shall make you free.

  There is a terrible animal painting by George Stubbs, terrible in the old sense, instinct with terror. Lion Devouring a Horse, it’s called, and it’s found in the Tate Gallery. The lion is on the horse’s back, its teeth and claws sunk into the flesh, and the horse, a powerful creature, white, with a pure white mane and tail, twists its neck in desperation, its big teeth trying to reach toward the cat that is destroying it. The scene, of course, comes not from anything seen—though there are rumours that Stubbs observed such an unlikely event in Italy—but from artistic precedents and the mind of the painter. Stubbs was a painter both workmanlike and brilliant who started out as a student of anatomy and lectured on the subject to medical students and made his living as a painter of horse portraits for the aristocracy. Stubborn and self-assured, a north country workman, yet he must have had terrible dreams. Perhaps it was the love of horses that made him wish to see one in such a moment of extremity, the throat strained, the mouth open, the eyes wide. Such things occur in the imagination of every man.

  My young friends in the second row are back—all but one—and they are questioning that last word. I said man and meant man. I cannot imagine that a woman would paint such things, though perhaps you have your own vision of terribilità. I have caught glimpses, but it is not the same, or not yet. Perhaps men and women will come to share the same nightmares. I look down at all the faces that watch my performance, and I have no idea what lies behind them. Setting out the menu for dinner. Making plans to write a book review already overdue. Wishing I would finish so you can get to the nearest toilet. Wondering what your lover is up to at this moment. At least no one is sleeping today. The dozy have departed, gone to nap elsewhere.

  In my first lecture, you will remember, I reflected on the flavour of the Edwardian world and the figures who populated it, not quite Victorian, not quite modern, and Ernest Thompson Seton was another of them. A decent upright man, no doubt, who thought that woodcraft could keep boys out of trouble, and idealized his picture of the Indian brave. He proved to his wife that the ghost in their isolated house in the country was only the sound of wind through broken glass—that was the song of the murdered musician. He went for long walks in the country, and the sickly boy who heard voices lived on into his eighties and sired a child not long before the end. Yet he liked to draw wolves, was drawn to the ferocity of predators, the sharp teeth and the snarling over the bare bones of what they devour. The natural world lives on flesh, and the hawks I watched crossing the marsh were hunting for what they could kill. There is something a little theatrical about the wildness of his wild creatures.

  Anne and I stood in the yard with that marsh beyond us and beyond that the sea. We stood on the lawn that was full of dandelions and small clover flowers and swatted the badminton bird back and forth, pretending there was a net. We had been to the beach that day, and Anne’s legs—her pale pink skin very sensitive to the sun—were reddened with a sunburn that would keep her awake during the night, and in the dark, I would get up and find a bottle of baby oil and rub it tenderly into the burnt skin, my fingers noticing the gentle curve of the flesh, the whiteness of the round belly. Pink roses and the white.

  Whiteness, the white horse being devoured by a lion, the white swan, the captive unicorn in a field of flowers. When Anne looked in the mirror in our bedroom, hoping to draw what she observed, she couldn’t see herself. The mirror was empty. It was fastened on the inside of the closet door, and when I sold the house I left it, but it has no mind to remember what it saw.

  I sip water and reconsider. There are medieval manuscripts with accurate drawings of birds, and the illuminations in many of them show what appears to be accurate observation of the natural world. The commonplace would have it that the world was entirely symbolic in those days, an allegory of faith, every creature in the bestiary a myth complete with inaccurate biology, the phoenix, the pelican wounding its breast to feed its young, and yet in the middle of this, some monk had looked at a chaffinch and knew what it was like, so that the little bird in the corner of a manuscript is as lively as any on a branch in the woods. Pisanello and his circle produced birds in the same loving detail as Audubon. Observation preceeded taxonomy and curiosity is always with us. Seton raised young prairie chickens and found that the dance they do was innate, hard-wired as we would say now. The Hard-Wired Prairie Chicken Dance. Sometimes I have thought that Tarrington’s essays began as titles and he then had to invent material to go along.

  In New York recently, I stood in the Metropolitan Museum and looked at a remarkable horse painting by Rosa Bonheur, purchased in 1887 for a goodly sum by Cornelius Vanderbilt. Yes, I will come back to Rose Happiness.

  I had intended to mention that the earliest known work by George Stubbs is eighteen plates illustrating a book on a new system of midwifery, the artist intruding on the privacies of parturition. He was always fascinated by anatomy, having that earnest application to fact and enquiry that came along in his time and brought us the Spinning Jenny and Josiah Wedgwood. Stubbs produced figures for Wedgwood, and in spite of all his seriousness and hard work, he ended his life in want. I have not seen those plates of women torn open to give birth. Nowadays every father observes the thing he put in there being expelled into real life, but I didn’t.
I was presented with Sylvia when she had been licked into shape. The bestiary again.

  “Applied Anatomy: The History of Sexual Advice.” You will all have read that one, I’m certain. That one got him on the television to boast about his own sexual prowess. I tried to avoid hearing about it, but for a few weeks, Tarrington was ubiquitous, and I was forced to imagine what he did and who he did it to. Lies, all lies, as likely as not, or so I persuaded myself. All the business about Tantric yoga and female submission.

  I have a plan for the money I am being paid for giving these lectures—yes I am being paid, and handsomely too, I must confess, though I suspect they sliced a little off the original offer made to the Great and Famous. You needn’t look embarrassed Mr. President, it’s only to be expected. Save a little from this year’s share of the endowment and next year you can go to the very top. My plan is to go to Paris and to spend my days in the Louvre, to document, for my own purposes, every picture of possible use to me. The horse paintings of Delacroix, for example. It is some time since I have been to Paris, and I understand that the city is plagued by an epidemic of upscale boutiques. You might as well be in Toronto, people say, but I’m sure the river is still there, and the trees and the gold stone of the old buildings. I will sit by the Medici fountain and watch the lovers. I am too old to postpone gratification.

  My voice is growing a little hoarse, as you can hear. Three days of shouting in the acoustic horror that is Madden Hall. I remember when concerts were held here, but the musicians objected and finally they were transferred to St. Paul’s, just down the block. There the musicians complained about the smell of incense. Musicians are chronic complainers. Men and women are chronic complainers. Things are never what they were or what they could be. A kind of vision, I suppose, to be stricken by possibility, an appetite for life expressed in dissatisfaction. A No which is a Yes, and better to be articulated, set out in vivid words than stifled into a mere energyless silence, though every complaint is beside the point, is only the approximate notation of what is missing.