But how much different is this from the complicated preconceptions I have carried with me? Had the potter visited Ontario, would he have been able to see past the fog of his fantasy straight through to the reality of swamp and muskeg, blackflies and bad weather? Would he have believed, as I believed, that nothing important would ever happen to a young man who sat in an apron behind the counter in a Canadian China Hall? Would he have valued the vulnerable skin of the art he created, and the real world that composed the earthenware ground on which it was based?
Would he have been able to accept the approach of happiness, of love?
Or would the elegant ladies, the romantic ruin, the nonexistent mountains have persisted, blocking his view, keeping him distant from his own life?
Despite the clear January weather that followed me south all the way to New York, my withdrawal from the north shore of Lake Superior was one of the most fatiguing journeys I had ever made. When the exhaustion became unbearable I would pull the Packard over to the side of the road and stumble into the winter woods, regardless of my stupid city shoes and the deep snow that often reached my knees. I would then become almost immediately alert because of the cold, and because I was so afraid of becoming lost in the forest. It says something about my state of mind, I suppose, that I had made at least a half-dozen forays before realizing that to return to the car I would only have to follow my own tracks.
It was on the second or third of these treks that I disturbed a deer that had been lying in the snow. She rose slowly, unsteadily to her feet and stared at me in terror. She was so thin her ribs were shadowed on her hide and her ears looked too large, too cumbersome on either side of her narrow face. Then, with a startling burst of speed, she pivoted and leapt away from me into the trees, clouds of powdery snow rising in her wake. I looked for some time at the soft shape her body had pressed into the snow, the steam of my own breath filling the space where she should have been permitted to remain.
I went back to the car. I wept.
Because, you understand, Sara had told me about winter-stricken deer, had described the delicate balance that keeps them alive when the season is unusually harsh. They have endured so much already, she had told me, so much scarcity and hardship, that their metabolism slows down to allow for survival. Any interruption of this, any sudden spurt of energy, causes damage.
“Don’t run,” I had shouted at the fleeing deer. “Please, please don’t run.” I stood yelling in the forest, causing the animal’s flight to intensify. Faster, farther, causing more harm.
“Often it is their last run,” Sara had told me. “This one final rush of adrenalin — no matter how minor — is just too much for them; the system can’t cope. You can see a serious amount of deterioration in a week. More often than not, after two weeks, they are dead.”
She had added that sometimes, walking in the woods in springtime, she had found carcasses.
I put my head on the steering wheel. I wept.
I live in this great white barn of a house with its sparse furnishings and few souvenirs. The current canvas leans against the wall, stretched and primed and ready for the hand that holds the brush. It is a flat white rectangle resting inside the walls and floors and ceilings of a cube, which is itself part of a series of cubes — the rooms I walk through, their generous allowance of natural light, their views of sorrow.
I remember that Rockwell, who loved the Nordic sagas, told me that Njal and his wife lay down on a bed in a burning house and covered their bodies with the skins of animals. The beams above them burst into fire and their enemies cheered beyond the blazing walls. Njal’s life had been one of frenzied transition; a history driven by wooings, slayings, voyages, and battles. His existence had been vehement, rough, and brief; there had been no passivity in it. Now with the hides covering him on the bed, he allowed experience to visit him for the first time, lay down with the bride of his heart to welcome it — this wild brightness, this burning, this atonement. There was one son called Kari who leapt from the roof of his father’s flaming house, his hair and clothing ablaze, and ran through the night to quench the fire he carried with him in a snow-filled valley he had played in as a child.
“There is not a trace of the house of Burnt Njal,” Rockwell told me. “Of course there is not a trace of that left. But to this day there is a ravine in Iceland called Kari’s hollow.”
A place to quench fire, lust, thirst: a place of rest. A valley in a northern country. A white canvas rectangle. A window overlooking a frozen Great Lake. All these views of snow.
Tonight I will begin The Underpainter, the last canvas of the series, a portrait of myself. In it, I will carefully detail both of my inheritances. Every piece of reconstructed china on the shelves that mar the famous modernist architect’s cold and empty walls. Each object and all the histories contained by Sara’s house. The views of the lake outside her windows. George’s treasured pigeons locked behind glass. I will add my mother’s mausoleums, her fictional skating parties, her music box, the look on my father’s face the afternoon he knew that he was disappearing into wealth, Augusta’s grey girl, snow house, mauve dunes. Her glorious brothers, radiant in fields of golden hay, Sloan’s Bar, Rockwell’s laughing face. I will even add Vivian, the boats on which she twice sailed effortlessly, brightly away from tragedy.
I will paint Sara’s skin glowing in the yellow light emanating from a thousand autumn birch leaves. Then I will paint myself with the love I could not accept coming towards me, despite my cloak of fear, the implacable rock man, the miles and miles of ice.
It will be full of beautiful dark shorelines, this painting, full of all the possibilities that we believe exist in alternative landscapes, alternative homelands. Hills and trees, gold-leaf birches, skies and lakes and distances. I am old, it is true, but I know that I will be able to finish it. And when it is finished, I will want to keep it close to me so that I may look at the images there, from time to time.
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without the encouragement and help of many people. I am most grateful for the information and advice given to me by Katherine Ashenburg, Mieke Bevelander, Nick Carter, Anne Hart, Stuart MacKinnon, Émile Martel, Ian Munro, Amy Quinn, Roseanne Quirin, Helen Quinn-Campbelle, Diane Schoemperlen, David Staines, Ken Snyder, Tony Urquhart, Bernie Weiler, and my mother, Marian Carter. At McClelland & Stewart, thanks to Heather Sangster and, as always, especially to my editor, Ellen Seligman.
Several books were important for research and inspirational purposes. Among these I would particularly like to mention Let Us Remember, a collection of letters from Northumberland County boys involved in the First World War, edited by Percy Climo; Nineteenth Century Pottery and Porcelain in Canada, by Elizabeth Collard; History of Number 1 Canadian General Hospital, 1914-1919, by Kenneth Cameron; The Materials of the Artist, by Max Doerner; and Rockwell Kent’s delightful autobiography, It’s Me O Lord. Some, though not all, of the statements made by Robert Henri can be found in The Art Spirit, a collection of his lectures, notes, and letters.
Although Robert Henri, Abbott Thayer, and Rockwell Kent did in fact exist, their characters are used in the text in a purely fictional manner, as are certain recognizable places and events, some of which have been altered slightly to fit the shape of the narrative. All other characters and events are fictional.
Conceived during a residency at Memorial University of Newfoundland, The Underpainter was completed at Massey College while I was writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. My heartfelt thanks goes out to both of these institutions.
Finally, a special thank you to Robert Gardner.
Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of five internationally acclaimed novels: The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; Changing Heaven; Away, winner of the Trillium Award and a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Underpainter, wi
nner of the Governor Generals Award and a finalist for the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; and The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor Generals Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Storm Class, and three books of poetry, I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan (I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace and The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan were published together in 2000 in a one-volume collector’s edition entitled Some Other Carden). Her work has been translated into numerous foreign languages. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award, and is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Urquhart has received numerous honorary doctorates from Canadian universities and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and, during the winter and spring of 1997, she held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She has also given readings and lectures in Canada, Britain, Europe, the U.S.A., and Australia.
Jane Urquhart lives in southwestern Ontario.
Her most recent novel is A Map of Glass (fall 2005).
Copyright © 1997 by Jane Urquhart
Cloth edition published 1997
Trade paperback edition first published 1998
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Urquhart, Jane, 1949-
The underpainter / Jane Urquhart.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-429-1 (Emblem Editions)
I. Title.
PS8591.R68U52 2003 C813’.54 C2003-906534-0
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
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