by Joe Moran
His hair was now white, but he still had the same lolloping walk and aura of oddness, and still dropped spare coppers for chasing children. A friend, the art critic Edwin Mullins, said he looked “like Jacques Tati impersonating General de Gaulle.”1 The painting of Lowry by his friend Harold Riley, of the old man’s back as he stomps off in his raincoat and trilby, head down and hands behind him clutching his glasses, gets him just right: looking and moving away, always out of reach.
The people in his crowd scenes are the same, hurrying along on the balls of their feet, hunched forward, lost in thought. Their faces are splodges, sometimes with even the two dots for eyes missing. Those huddled in groups do not talk to each other but stand at right angles, their arms limp, as if they have frozen in a game of statues. “All those people in my pictures, they are all alone you know,” he said. “Crowds are the most lonely thing of all. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else.”2 In Lowry’s paintings parents face away from their children, courting couples look across at each other from straight-backed chairs, and patients in doctors’ waiting rooms gaze ahead with thousand-yard stares.
In the 1950s he dispersed the crowds in his paintings and began to paint solitary figures, often tramps or men shunned in the street because of their palsies or prostheses. The titles of these paintings reflect the way that people on their own, without the anchor of human relationships, are reduced to going through the motions of mundane life: Man Eating a Sandwich. Man Drinking from a Fountain. Man Looking in the Waste Paper Bin. Man in a Doorway. Man Looking through a Hole in the Fence. It is odd that Lowry’s paintings have become the kitsch scenery for gift-shop refrigerator magnets and tea towels, because they are so far from being sentimental or consoling; they pulse with fear and loneliness.
In the summer of 1963, Lowry went with a friend, the young artist Sheila Fell, to London’s new Mayfair Theatre, to see a revival of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, with Ralph Richardson. The theater had a tiny, three-hundred-seat auditorium under the Mayfair Hotel, with the seats raked up in a single tier. The size of the space, with its bare stage with exposed wings and simple spot lighting, allowed for sotto voce acting; the gap between audience and performers seemed to dissolve, and Lowry found himself entranced. When the six characters, dressed in black Victorian clothes and gazing straight ahead, moved together slowly to the front of the stage, they looked like the uncommunicative, impassive people in his paintings. Lowry went twice more with Fell to see the play, and another six times alone. Pirandello’s message is that we are all spiritual solipsists and that the language and social rituals that seem to link us cannot cross the chasm of comprehension between separate minds. We are, as the father in the play says, “trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules.”
At his home in the Cheshire village of Mottram, Lowry had seventeen clocks, his dead mother’s collection, primed to ting at different times so that it felt as if the house were peopled. His telephone, which he finally installed after a burglary, could only make outgoing calls. The front door had no knocker. He piled up letters, unopened, in a porcelain bowl. His accountant opened the pecuniary-looking ones every six weeks, and when the rest turned brown, Lowry burned them unread. Friends knew to write their names in large letters on the envelope. Once Alick Leggat, treasurer of Lancashire County Cricket Club, opened this neglected mail with him, and extracted checks worth £1,600.3
One day in 1960, Lowry went to the northeast coastal town of Sunderland, stopping for lunch at the Seaburn Hotel on the seafront. For the next fifteen years he came regularly to this hotel to stay in the same first-floor room, number 104, sometimes for weeks at a time. He often went there on impulse, traveling the 135 miles from Mottram by taxi—once while still in his slippers. Since the hotel was separated from the beach only by a road and the promenade, he could look out at the North Sea from the dining room, where he always sat at the same table eating the same meal: roast beef, chips, and gravy, followed by sliced bananas and cream.
In these latter years he painted a series of seascapes in which the mist-enveloped land, sea, and sky merged into a single, Turneresque agglomeration of paint. In some of these paintings pillars stand upright and isolated in the water, waiting for the waves to batter them down. He called them self-portraits. “Had I not been lonely,” he told Edwin Mullins one evening as Mullins was driving him home, “none of my work would have happened.”4
No one is sure why, around forty thousand years ago, Homo sapiens went deep into caves many thousands of miles apart—in southern France and Spain, the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, the Arnhem Land plateau in northern Australia—and began to paint bison, mammoths, and deer, or to outline their hands in finger flutings on the walls. Whether the motive was shamanistic, ceremonial, or homage-giving to the animals they hunted, this huge cognitive leap in human history, known as “the creative explosion,” seems to have involved retreating from the social world, for the paintings are found in remote parts of caves that no one could have lived in.
Humans have tended to see themselves as the supremely social animals, the apex communicators, elevated above the beasts by their ability to talk. But whales, dolphins, and other animals have sophisticated languages that might seem even more so if we could only decipher them. Our uniqueness as animals lies not in our ability to communicate but in our ability to sublimate, to turn our communicative instincts into abstract and ancillary forms. We are the only living things to leave meaningful marks, complex messages that can be read and seen by others when we are not there, perhaps even when we are no longer alive.
The autistic scientist and writer Temple Grandin has her own hunch about why this happened: the introverts among our ancestors got tired of the “yacketyyaks,” the alpha males sat round the tribal fire sharpening their flints and boasting to each other about their bison-killing count, and went off on their own to produce the earliest human art. She imagines these art works being created, along with groundbreaking inventions such as the stone spear and the wheel, by “some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave.”5
Grandin’s own life and work demonstrate how an autistic strain in the mind can be a spur to creativity. As an introverted and disturbed teenager who longed to experience the pressure stimulation of being hugged but who shrank from human contact, she visited her aunt’s Arizona ranch, where she saw cattle being put in a squeeze chute: a pen with compressing metal sides, which kept them still and calm while they were inoculated, branded, or castrated. Inspired, she devised a human “squeeze machine.” It had two slanting wooden boards, upholstered with thick padding and joined by hinges to make a V-shaped trough. When she kneeled inside it and turned on an air compressor, the boards applied gentle pressure, as if they were hugging her. For Grandin, this was a useful half-way stage on the way to allowing others to touch her.
To the autistic, those who are neurotypical seem to be operating by weird social rules acquired mysteriously. Their view is a much more severe version, perhaps, of how the shy view the socially confident. Grandin had to learn everyday etiquette by rote, and compute what others meant by scrupulously assembling clues. Tone-deaf to rhythm and cadence, her voice sounded unmodulated, like those railway station public-address systems that make voices rise and fall and accentuate them randomly. When she first started lecturing, she would stand with her back to the audience, but she soon developed a flair for it, perhaps because her normal way of talking seemed much like a performance anyway.
The first person to suggest that autism might add creativity to the human mix was Hans Asperger, a pediatrician at the University Children’s Hospital in Vienna. In 1943, a year after his fellow Austrian Leo Kanner had listed the characteristics of autism, Asperger identified a similar tendency to withdrawal in some of his child patients, but, unlike Kanner, he suggested that it might live alongside special talents.
The astounding ability of some autistic people to solve jigsaw puzzles, memorize books, or orient themselves around towns
seems to be partly a visual skill, a knack at recognizing repetitive patterns and taxonomies. Autistic people have what is called “weak central coherence,” a focus on individual components at the expense of the larger picture. An autistic artist might start from a single detail—the precise topography of a knobbly kneecap, say, or a single brick on a house—and build up the drawing out of its constituent parts rather than use the more common method of starting with a rough sketch and then filling in details. Some autistic artists, such as the London-based Stephen Wiltshire or the Malaysian Ping Lian Yeak, can paint massive vistas of city skylines from memory, with complex architectural features rendered perfectly. Others conjure up their own intricate worlds—like the French artist Gilles Tréhin’s “Urville,” an imaginary island city off the Côte d’Azur populated with meticulously drawn high-rises and Lowry-like stick people.
Lowry was similarly absorbed by minutiae. His paintings were composites, accretions of detail. He would walk round the streets of Manchester and Salford, sketching on scraps of paper he stuffed into his pockets, and then assemble these scraps into paintings. With their carless streets, chimneys billowing smoke, and passersby wearing hats and head scarves, even his later paintings seem stuck in the early part of the century. The most common explanation is that he felt lost in the postwar world of slum clearances and high rises, so in his mind’s eye he carried on walking the same Salford streets of his childhood. In fact he was unconcerned with how landscapes changed over time. His interest was in the natural geometry of the North’s industrial scape, the blunt horizontals and verticals of its terraced rows and factory chimneys. Sheila Fell, who came from Aspatria in the Lake District, took him out one day to paint with her in the mountains. In the late afternoon she had a sneak peek at what he was painting: another industrial townscape.
If Lowry liked a particular set of steps, or a loop of the River Irwell, it would turn up in his paintings again and again. His work is made up of lines and angles, not brushwork, which is why there are no shadows and his buildings seem to have no volume. The crowds, he conceded, were there to slot into the design. “To say the truth, I was not thinking very much about the people,” he said. “I did not care for them the way a social reformer does. They are part of a private beauty that haunted me.”6
Asperger’s syndrome was unknown in the English-speaking world until 1981, when the British psychiatrist Lorna Wing published a paper on it in the journal Psychological Medicine. Lowry was dead, but a number of people observed that he had the Asperger-like fixation on detail and some of the other traits of this high-functioning autism: an attachment to routine, physical awkwardness, limited facial expression and eye contact, and a veering between social withdrawal and a relentless form of address that sounded as though he were talking to a pet: “You like that picture? Do you really? How very interesting. I am pleased.”7
Lorna Wing was not equating Asperger’s with shyness any more than Grandin was. But she did believe, like Grandin, that an “autistic spectrum” existed throughout the population and that autism covered not one discrete condition but a wide range of disorders. Nature, she insisted, reusing what Winston Churchill said about the English, “never draws a straight line without smudging it.”8 For Wing, autism captured in stark form the ordinary human problem of relating to others. Like Grandin, she felt that having some autistic traits might be an essential ingredient of the creative life.
Could the origins of art lie in this capacity for introversion, the need to make strategic retreats from social life, from the yaketyyaks, to make sense of our experiences? We all have this quality in some degree. Just as our brains have to sleep and dream to recuperate, we need periods of fallowness to germinate new ideas. As Carl Jung argued in Psychological Types (1921), introverts take longer than extroverts to collect their thoughts and process meanings and need solitude to curate these thoughts into meaningful shapes. Their brains are overstimulated when they are in contact with too many other humans for too long. Amid a noisy group of people, an introvert’s cerebral cortex can overload and freeze like a computer that has run out of memory.
Some autistic people never return from these interior journeys; they obsess endlessly over a few grains of salt or the friction ridges on their fingertips, unable to direct their creativity outward into communication. The autistic artist Jessy Park’s earliest paintings were of radio dials, mileage gauges, and electric blanket controls, beautifully rendered but unlikely to interest anyone other than engineers. Gradually, with her mother’s help, she managed to break out of this insular enthrallment with the random detail of the world and create work with wider appeal: extraordinarily particularized paintings of buildings—New York’s Flatiron, London’s Houses of Parliament—accurate to the last drainpipe but painted in pastel pinks and bright oranges below purple-black skies sparkling with stars in all their correct constellations. Park also came up with the perfect neologism for the inarticulate: “speako,” a slipup in speech, derived from “typo.”9 Those who learn to express the otherness of the introverted mind help us all see the world in new ways.
We are used to seeing madness, depression, and other illnesses as stimuli for art; perhaps we need to see shyness in the same way. We tend to associate the twentieth-century art world with the ideal of the confidently bohemian, avant-garde artist—Picasso and Dalí come to mind—but many other artists have stood, like Lowry, for the aurea mediocritas: consistent dedication to one’s work within the enabling milieu of an ordinary bourgeois life. Another example is the Bolognan painter Giorgio Morandi. Morandi told the critic Édouard Roditi, who came to visit him in 1958, when he was sixty-eight, that he had been “fortunate enough to lead . . . an uneventful life.”10
Morandi rarely left Bologna. He did not leave Italy until he was sixty-six, when he attended an exhibition just over the border in Switzerland. When visitors called at his modest apartment on the via Fondazza, he would knock politely and pause before he got permission from his sisters, with whom he lived, to walk through their bedrooms to the studio, where he worked and slept, on a single bed. Roditi saw him as leading “the same kind of restricted social life as most of the older university professors and professional men of his native city, but with an additional touch of purely personal modesty, shyness and asceticism.”11 Locals knew him as il monaco, “the monk.” Like Lowry, he was oddly formal in manner. He used the impersonal Italian “you” (lei) with all but his family and a few childhood friends. His letters, even to these oldest friends, were eerily restrained and self-possessed, closing with generic sign-offs and his surname.
Bologna, renowned for its university, its cuisine, and its communism, is known in Italy as dotta, grassa e rossa (learned, fat, and red). Morandi’s work is the opposite: unallusive, ascetic, and apolitical. His working life was spent painting, in works all called Natura morta (Still Life), endlessly permutable arrangements of the same milk tins, biscuit boxes, caffé latte bowls, and Ovaltine canisters that he had picked up in the weekly bric-a-brac market. Coated with dust and with the labels removed, they are painted in earthy hues—raw sienna, burnt umber—though with an undercoat of blues and reds that warm up these muted surface colors.
Morandi’s work is reminiscent of that of another shy and solitary artist, Piet Mondrian, whose factory-perfect paintings of geometric shapes and grids in primary colors feel similarly serene and ineffable. Mondrian’s work is entirely nonfigurative, neater and cleaner than the world; Morandi’s is rooted in the concrete and particular. But the artists are united in their absolute refusal to beguile, to ingratiate, to épater le bourgeois. It is hard not to see their economy with paint as emerging out of a similar economy with life. Their art feels wrung out of their shyness.
Morandi, it must be said, belonged to a nation not noted for this character trait. The word “privacy” has no equivalent in Italian, and the Italian temperament is often thought to be exuberant and gestural. This anti-shyness seems apparent in many of its art forms: the melodrama of Italian opera, the Futurist
movement’s love of violence and speed, the egocentric abandon of the symbolist-decadents and the rituals of dictatorship that Mussolini stole from their leader Gabriele D’Annunzio, such as the balcony oration delivered in the chest-pounding, hectoring style that Italians call protagonismo.
And yet there is a shyness and resignation about so many Italian writers and artists, particularly those who worked in the shadow of fascism. One thinks of the stark, astringent poems of Eugenio Montale, with their feeling for little things such as cigar smoke rings or cuttlefish bones and their conscious avoidance of show-off Italian intonation and dead rhetoric. Joseph Brodsky called Montale’s poems the “voice of a man speaking—often muttering—to himself.”12 The most famous modern poem among Italians is by Giuseppe Ungaretti, Montale’s fellow hermeticist poet, and is two words long, a few phonic fragments embedded in the white silence of the page: “M’illumino / d’immenso.”
A similar shyness breeds a similar suspicion of the facile and overblown in many Italian novelists of this period, such as Italo Svevo, Cesare Pavese, and Giuseppe di Lampedusa. In the foreword to his masterpiece, Dialogues with Leucò (1947), Pavese could have been thinking of Morandi when he declared: “I have nothing in common with experimentalists, adventurers, with those who travel in strange regions. The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object.” Lampedusa did not complete his first and only novel, The Leopard, until he was fifty-nine, and it was only published posthumously, its flawless eye for the human comedy clearly the result of a lifetime of circumspect observation. A deeply reserved Sicilian aristocrat, he proudly claimed to have an English temperament, although on his many visits to Britain he was too shy to speak the language he knew well. “It is always a pleasure dealing with the English,” he wrote home from London in August 1927. “They are courteous and prompt, and their apparent stupidity is merely an immense and uncontrollable shyness.”13