by JH Fletcher
If she could joke even about the most sacred icons of her art, she told herself she might lessen the burden of creativity that daily became more oppressive. More frightening, too, because she was coming increasingly to link the creative impulse with her madness and her increasing belief in her own non-existence.
‘One more thing. Some people call aboriginal art primitive and so it is. But those who say that often mean to belittle it, and they are wrong. The art they despise is magnificent. Because to be truly primitive, in the sense that I mean, is to be close to the truth: closer, perhaps, than we are. Early peoples, and those of our own culture who have still not emerged from the darkness of their primitive beliefs, live in a world with a past but without history. Civilisation, for all of us, ends at the point where myth is taken literally, where the importance of ritual transcends human identity and feeling. It is art, and only art, that provides the wings that enable us to ride out the storms of human existence.’
So she told Alan, and herself. She had to believe it; it was the one thing that remained.
3
Once again she came out of it. To all appearances, she was normal. Few people knew; she had learned to hide from eyes, and tongues, when the madness was upon her.
She renewed her interest in mysticism. She spent a year investigating, and eventually discarding, the formal Christian faith.
She continued visiting the Outback. In 1946, two years after she had attended the Namatjira exhibition in Melbourne, Marie, at the age of seventy-five, bought a property in the Northern Territory and turned it into a wildlife reserve.
Alice was furious, but Marie told her that it was necessary.
‘Necessary? Why?’ Thinking of the tens of thousands of pounds down the drain because her mother had lost her marbles.
‘In order to find ecstasy,’ Marie told her.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means to identify with all existence. To become one with whatever one does. I feel the need to bury my hands in the dirt of this land, which includes its wildlife, forests, even its deserts. In every particle of its past and present and future. Because I know now that this is truly my place. Here I shall discover how to return to the state of pristine wonder that marks our life’s beginning. We must unlearn everything we have ever learned.’
Alice thought that was a right load of gobbledygook.
‘Maybe we should get a doctor to look at her?’ she wondered, that night, to Chumps.
‘Doubt we’ll get the courts to put it aside,’ he said. ‘Fact is, it’s too late. She’s already done it.’
‘So much money …’ Alice mourned. It was, after all, theirs, or would be. It had better be, she thought. After the run-around she’d had with her mother all her life, she had the right to expect that, at least.
4
When she was eighty-one, Marie permitted Alan to talk her into moving a little closer to town. She would not go to the city, instead bought a small cottage on the New South Wales coast, within sight and sound of the sea. She had kept her legs and could still walk to the beach, and back, and when she had a mind, did so.
Alan did not approve. ‘You should be nearer to civilisation.’ At your age: at least he did not say that, although they both knew what he meant.
‘Civilisation? Is that what you call it?’
Alan — an authority, like all seventeen-year-olds — was willing to jolly the old lady along. ‘It’s not as bad as that.’
‘Isn’t it? Britain planning to test atomic weapons here?’ Even now, she had lost none of her fire. ‘By what right? Who are they, to pollute the land? Who are we, to permit it? And what about this nonsense of refusing to fund Australian writers because they’re communists? Why shouldn’t they be communists? Brett Samochin was a communist!’
‘You never heard from him after he went to Russia?’
‘Never.’ Marie was sad; she thought of Brett more, nowadays, than she had for years. More than when they had been together, come to that. ‘Russia swallowed him, as it did so many.’
‘You weren’t a communist yourself?’
‘I was never anything. In my case, art has never had anything to do with politics.’
‘What has it to do with?’ Alan asked.
‘It’s a celebration of life, and the courage of life. The courage to move on, to be different, to accept the inexplicable, to speak out against evil.’ She laughed. ‘The best compliment I ever had was when the Nazis stuck my work in their Exhibition of Degenerate Art, back in 1937.’
‘You’ve had an interesting life,’ Alan said, in danger of losing his seventeen-year-old footing.
She smiled affectionately. ‘Your great-aunt Aline said the same thing, but she meant something different. Yes, it has been a great adventure. It still is.’
‘Haven’t you finished with adventures, yet?’ Oh, the way the young address the old.
‘The biggest one is still waiting.’ She saw he did not understand. ‘Death,’ she said.
‘Death?’ Even the word itself made Alan uneasy.
‘Of course. Death is the affirmation of life. When we deny its existence, we deny life itself. We deny God.’
She saw he was finding it hard, trying to keep up with the leaps and bounds of her imagination.
‘Do you believe in God?’ Who was completely out of fashion, except, perhaps, for the old.
‘Not as an old man with a beard, sitting on a cloud, but as the spiritual dimension of life, of course. No-one alive to life and the universe can disbelieve.’
‘And do you really believe that Christ died and rose again?’
Marie, in response to a question that might have been flippant, was serious. And firm. ‘Christ died, not by crucifixion, but by two thousand years of inept priests and bishops who presumed to know, to tailor life to their own smug precepts of what should be.’
She saw that Alan was put out; by his question, flippant or not, he might also have thought to know, to instruct.
‘I am tired,’ she said. ‘I refuse to accept that I am old, but in truth I am. And the old need their rest.’ Then, in case he might have been wounded by her reproval, she took his arm, even as she led him to the door.
‘Art has been my universe. There has never been room for anything else. That is what life has given me: the privilege and joy of seeking; even, perhaps, a measure of fulfilment. But also the gift of pain.’ In the doorway, she hesitated. ‘Let me show you something, before you go.’
It was a record player, the newest and best, glossy as a horse chestnut in its wooden box. With the player, records. She picked one and showed it to him.
‘I have discovered Wagner,’ she said. She looked at him, tentatively. ‘Would you like to listen —’
Alan was alarmed; he did not feel up to Wagner. ‘I must go.’
She smiled philosophically. ‘Of course.’
Alan
I often wish I had stayed, to listen with her to the final scenes of Gotterdämmerung. Because that was the last time I ever saw Marie Desmoulins.
The darkness descended on her once more, before the act of immolation that many have called vandalism, even wickedness. Her journal bore witness to that.
They say the mad are preoccupied. Is the converse also true? Is preoccupation a sign of madness? There is danger in too much introspection. But how are we to know the world, if we do not know ourselves?
Again: I am tormented by fractured fragments of the light. This, from one who all her life had worshipped what she called the Sun in Splendour.
Reading her words, I am reminded of what she told me during our last conversation: Life has given me joy and fulfilment and also pain.
So much joy, so much pain.
A week before she died came the burning. All her work that remained in her hands, all, she carried to the cliff top. She stacked it, like a funeral pyre. She placed wood about it, and firelighters. She burned it. Ashes alone remained, out of all the glory.
It was this that Giles Kin
gdon meant when he spoke to me about the biography.
What made her do what she did at the end? An explanation, after all this time …
Giles has the impertinence to imagine that I will tell the world of that? Let him dream.
Yet I know: oh yes.
I had to do it, she wrote. I have been cursed, and know only one way to make amends.
That sacrificial act, the offering of her paintings and so herself to the cleansing flames, was an act of atonement for all the wrongs, real and imagined, that she had committed during her life and that weighed so heavily upon her.
The world has called it the mindless vandalism of a lunatic. It was nothing of the kind. It was the action of a shining sanity that, at the last, transcended even art itself to emerge into the light of truth. Sun in Splendour, indeed.
As to what Marie herself thought …
Music, certainly, was a great solace to her; the final entry in her journal bears testimony to that. Thank God for music.
That is how I picture her, playing over and over again the closing scenes of Gotterdämmerung, matching the glorious cataclysm of that collapsing universe with her own world that was also ending.
Music and atonement and peace. And, at the last, silence.
EPILOGUE
Giles Kingdon has been here, turning up on my doorstep without warning, offering to help in what he calls my research. So he continues with the fantasy of this book that I shall never write. Giles was waggish with me before he left; even now, it seems, he does not realise how much I detest him. ‘I know you’ve got the records stashed away, somewhere. I’ll get them out of you, in the end.’
It was a close call, too close for comfort. The next thing I know, he will be coming into the house when I am out, to rummage for what he hopes to find. I cannot risk that.
I take the journals and correspondence, all the other documents I have that relate to her. I carry them to the top of the hill behind the house. I burn them as, in her last days, she burned her paintings. The breeze carries away even the ashes. Nothing remains.
I return to the house. As I go indoors, the phone is ringing. Before I answer it, I know who it will be.
Giles Kingdon’s voice brays. ‘Posterity demands —’
I cut him off. I walk outside and stare at the sun, shining in splendour over the distant ranges. I am at peace.
I have told him no.
About JH Fletcher
JH Fletcher is the author of eight romantic historical novels, published to both critical and popular acclaim. The author's plays for radio and television have been produced by the BBC and the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and many of this author's stories have been published in Australia and throughout the world.
JH Fletcher was educated in the UK and travelled and worked in France, Asia and Africa before emigrating to Australia in 1991. Home is now a house within sound of the sea in a small town on the South Australian coast.
Also by JH Fletcher
View from the Beach
Keepers of the House
Fire in Summer
Wings of the Storm
The Cloud Forest
Voice of Destiny
Eagle on the Hill
First published by HarperCollins Publishers Pty Ltd in 2002
This edition published in 2013 by Momentum
Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
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Copyright © JH Fletcher 2002
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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Sun in Splendour
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