by David Helwig
Notation: it’s been pointed out that every artist has a way of painting an eye, a nose, a mouth, his own shorthand of strokes. Stubbs painted his horses on a large scale, with a careful sense of the musculature, that love of anatomy and the ways things work. The man I began with, J. W. Morrice, saw horses as working creatures, part of the city, whether Montreal or Paris, and he had a quick, accurate way of painting a horse, a few strokes and the shape was there among the other shapes, a coloured object among the other coloured objects. He drank, perhaps, because the effect of alcohol was to make the sheen of the surfaces more intense, meaning and expectation gone, and what was left was pure notation, the love of paint. A kind of ontology, pure present. That’s the reason that music is only music in fragments, set free from time.
Have I made clear how very thin those pieces of wood are, on which Morrice did his sketches? Fragile, and sometimes very dark, as if the picture were half a secret. The little portrait of Léa Cadoret in the shade of trees, all shadowy greens: he would tell and not tell. Each time I leave the Musée des Beaux Arts after examining those small mysterious things, I climb on the homeward bus, number 24, and I am taken west along Sherbrooke Street. At certain times of day, the bus passes a number of schools, and adolescent boys and girls stand by the edge of the road and some come aboard. There was a day when I sat by the window, and looking out, I saw two girls in school uniforms, short kilt, long socks, white blouse, one of them tall and a little gangly, the other short, almost plump. Their faces were turned away from me, but I knew if they turned I would know them, Anne and Madeleine come back to haunt me, starting life again at the place on the great wheel marked Youth while I am trapped in the seat marked Age.
Say that with a long sweeping stroke I have lifted the bird so high over the court that it is hard to make out whether it is a shuttlecock or a chickadee flying from tree to tree. Watch its slow eternal descent.
Living here, you will all have watched the tide coming in, the moment by moment encroachment across the beach, or the slow rise over the rocks. The whole ocean is tilting toward you, with all the power of those tons of water, and you know that nothing can stop its arrival, nothing can hold it back. Far along the beach, we can see the fire of driftwood, and the shapes of men and women close by moving out of darkness and into darkness. Annabelle Disney was there somewhere, but today she is not available to give her testimony. She is an absent witness, if a witness at all. She was one of those figure far off by the fire as we stood by the edge of the water. She was never seen again. The night smelled of salt, and as we stood among the dunes, I felt the eyes watching us, turned away and walked back toward the burning driftwood.
I expect that the striped ties will return for the end of the last lecture, since they were here for the beginning of the first. Their pattern of presence and departure is unreadable, but all truth is unreadable until it is the heap of dead facts we call history. Sometimes I have flattered myself with the thought that all the best of Tarrington’s essays, the ones that made him famous, grew out of our conversations, and when I have that thought, I have to admit that I would never myself have written them. The ideas would have vanished into time. There was a balance of forces in the days when we were here, like one of those very close games of badminton when the bird sailed to every corner of the court, and as I stood off the back corner and drove it down the line, I could see Anne in front of me, leaning forward on her toes, her tidy sweet body all on the alert, Madeleine, her eyes wide, watchful, breakable, and Tarrington’s bearded face and simian arms coiled into a ball of ferocity ready to strike out. In later years, his essays were excessive, full of empty gestures as he went on from woman to woman searching for death or the perfect American orgasm.
North America is many things, none of them comfortable. Though Ernest Thompson Seton idealized life in the wilds, it was nearly the death of him when he was a boy. His health had collapsed and he was sent to spend the summer with a farmer near Fenelon Falls. The whole family came down with malaria, and in a state of hallucination he imagined giant snakes coming after him. Odd how these invalid boys live almost forever. He survived to become one of the important figures in the discovery of Nature with a capital N. It was in those years that the great parks were being created, Banff and Jasper, Yellowstone and Yosemite, imaginary wilderness preserved as the continent gave in to civilization.
Now the surface of the moon is covered with garbage. Every little picture store has prints of foxes and geese, perhaps an eagle or even a wolf. It has something to do with the nature of sentimentality, how we adulate what we destroy, like Ugh-the-caveman’s jealous neighbour scratching out an antelope in red ochre and then setting off to bring one down.
It was probably an attempt to escape any taint of sentimentality that led Audubon to draw birds at exactly life size, big big, small small. He had the scientist’s bugbear with regard to accuracy, and this must be the source of the haunted quality of his work. His birds symbolize nothing and they are both alive and dead. Corpses posing as living birds, as if Denman Tarrington had been stuffed and set up on the stage here in a chair to listen to my remarks about him.
Water, water.
To begin again. Strange stories cling to the reputations of the famous, and scholarship has the job, pleasing to the puritan, of scrubbing off the encrustations of myth. Audubon had the habit of inventing new biographies, especially the stories of his early life, not the first or the last artist to do it, for they all grow confused over what happened as opposed to what ought to have happened. Surrounded by memories as I stand here, I have given you gratuitous and probably tiresome glimpses of my own past life, and not being an artist, I have been limited to the events, but I might have invented a larger story, opaque and splendid, myself as hero or antihero. Concerning Audubon, somehow the tale got about that he was the lost Dauphin, Louis XVII, the King of France in disguise paddling down all the rivers of North America looking for rare birds.
There were a few Audubon prints in my now lost collection of slides. They used to be very popular. As I said, my copies came from the Book of the Month Club—my mother belonged—but they have been replaced in public favour by more contemporary animal pictures, slick silent things.
My slides are still, I suppose, lying on the floor of a cab somewhere in Montreal. When I return there, if I can remember the name of the cab company, I will phone and try to reclaim them, though what earthly use they will be, I can’t think. I doubt that I will receive another such invitation. There will not be another sudden death. Surely not. When the phone in my apartment rings, it will be the ophthalmologist’s secretary reminding me to come in for another test, or it will be someone who wishes to do a survey of my shopping habits or a young man speaking elegant French who wishes to sell me a subscription to Le Devoir. Or it will be another of the silent caller’s silent calls.
Last night was surely a prank or a delusion. Perhaps it was a dream. After all these years of waiting for a voice to speak, the obsession has gone deep and returns as a nightmare. There are periods of months and years when nothing occurs but the usual wrong numbers. It is possible to achieve a small moment of enlightenment from a wrong number. The Thérèse or Raymond who is being sought has a momentary being, something known, and it is not altogether unlike the moment—watch carefully now as I shuffle the cards—when I was in your library looking at a small shelf of books on animals in art and found myself looking at something called Woman as Sex Object. Of course you may take this, especially my friends in the second row—and I can’t help wondering why your other colleague isn’t here, whether she is the most easily offended, the most easily bored, or whether she has some personal tragedy to accommodate—you will take this as a typical inappropriate joke from an old sexist. Well so it may be, but the book was there, and whatever we legislate about the connection of man and woman, it is true that the cataloguer—another sexist perhaps—contrived to place the book on that shelf, and it is also true that artists h
ave stared at women and noted each detail, that they have liked nothing better than to undress female persons and record the texture of flesh, not beauty but the pure phenomenon. Tarrington observes in one of his essays that Delacroix’s Lion Hunt and Rubens’ Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus show a similar frenzy, a similar tormenting of the posed or imagined bodies. A note on historical iconography: in the movies I see these days, the act is mostly performed with the woman on top. Make what you will of that. The spirit of the time expresses itself in a myriad of odd ways. Who is not its master becomes its slave. Madeleine was ahead of her time.
We are coming toward an end. The usual signal, my dry mouth, the glass too often emptied and refilled. A lurching gait. I am watching for the appearance of a striped tie, which will be a signal. He takes the clip-on tie out of his pocket, bends as if to cough and fastens it on. That will be enough. The end will come. Some of you have been with me for all three hours, not just your president who must as a part of his official duties. I’ll set you free, dear Mr. P. Tomorrow you will be on your own, and so will I. After the lecture, I will return to the motel room, where Delerium Tremens would have stayed if he had survived to give this series of talks. Perhaps he would have taken back with him a fresh young thing he’d picked up in the course of his time here. Myself I will return there along the snowy road, and I will look in the mirror and fail to see, as always, the meaning of what has happened. It will be the same face, the face I deserve, as Orwell put it. In the unicorn tapestries at the Musée de Cluny, the young lady shows the unicorn his face in the mirror and he appears to accept it with a certain self-satisfaction. The unicorn may or may not belong in a consideration of animal art. Less animal, more symbol. Tidy, white and one-horned. I saw the horn of a unicorn once, in an English cathedral, part of the collection of wonders.
When I get back to Montreal, the cheque will go to the bank, and I will phone and make reservations for a flight to Paris. Where we began, Tarrington and I at one café, Morrice and Ernest Thompson Seton at another, or perhaps not, perhaps it was the same one, the mirror at the back catching both moments with its perfect equanimity. There ought to be a riddle about the mirror which sees everything and knows nothing. Maybe there is.
That young woman I overheard in the library may by now have made the decision about the tattoo her lover wants. Roses on her butt. The skin reddened from the piercing, as if from a sunburn. I understand that tattoos can be painful, but I suppose that is the point; the marks left by suffering have an extra meaning. That and the permanence, that you can’t change your mind and get a divorce from a tattoo. Sign for a tattoo parlour: Flowers That Won’t Die Till You Do—Something More Permanent Than Love. I never saw the young woman’s face, but I imagine her in a certain way, and when I do I think how very young she is. At that age I was still preoccupied by the death of my dog Jim, though I didn’t admit that to my undergraduate friends. We were all learning to be witty and untouched.
I hear the slow humming of the universe expanding all around us. I can posit, as everyone does now, an alternate universe in which I looked in a convex mirror and saw, close up, distorted, my own young face, and behind me at an oblique angle, just caught in the corner, someone else, a pale figure almost too small to make out, and seeing this, I understood it. A very different universe.
When he retired from the YMCA he took up gardening. He would work there in the little yard even on rainy spring days, coming in full of aches and pains, but consoled by the richness of the earth, by the way things grew where he planted them. It wasn’t a fancy garden, a couple of roses, flowering annuals—just like those the robbers used to stifle Uncle Pumblechook—iris and peonies and delphiniums, the usual old-fashioned things along with a few green onions and radishes for salads. He often thinks of the son who died at Dieppe, though the thoughts are momentary, stray memories, an awareness of a boy he once knew, a boy standing by a bicycle with a cigarette in his mouth, his eyes half closed against the smoke.
Back in Montreal, when I have rushed to deposit the cheque lest you change your minds and stop payment, I will hurry down to the Musée des Beaux Arts on Sherbrooke to make my homage to the Morrice collection, to reassure myself that the paintings are unchanged, untouched by my words. They will be there and just as before, but there is always the worm of doubt, the possibility that commentary has altered them for the worse, made them flatter, more obvious.
I said I would return to the horses of Rosa Bonheur. Rose Happiness kept a lion, wore trousers and smoked cigarettes. It all sounds like George Sand as played by Merle Oberon in that movie about Chopin. I was young when I saw that, and was quite smitten by her for a while. Trying to decide what a woman should be like, and here was a new version. Rose Happiness kept a lion. When I was in New York, just before I left, I stopped at the Metropolitan Museum, almost as if I knew I would be called on to come here and speak to you. I looked at a few things, and the last of all was her great horse painting. Eight feet tall it is and twice as long. Creating it must have been like painting the side of a house with a half inch brush.
The story is that she visited abbatoirs to see the bodies of her subjects flayed, and her love of horses and knowledge of them comes out in the painting on Fifth Avenue, the tremendous musculature of the shoulders and thighs, the wild eyes of the white one in the middle of the herd that is being directed into a paddock by a handful of men, the power of the beasts under their control. Rose Happiness sees their splendour but she is not maddened by it. Perhaps she knows why women and animals are on the same shelf. She kept a lion and her speciality was the painting of wild creatures.
Look, there it is, the first of the ties returning. Time to stop. One more glance at the vast canvas of Rose Happiness, that vision of great and mastered horses, and I leave the museum.
David Helwig is the author or twenty volumes of fiction and fourteen volumes of poetry, a Member of the Order of Canada, and former poet laureate of Prince Edward Island.