Surviving

by Henry Green

  Or is it at dusk when each emerald within the sea will rise to take the surface air, when light winds from the Bosphorus, the Golden Gates, waft from the East a cool to pant palace windows even now lighting against dusk and the sky is gold, when pigeons clap their wings to take evening flight in air that now is eyelid pink and the stench subsides, when those blue-stoned walls can breathe and saints in stone do stretch to sigh for another day that is done in five, six hundred years, then, is it then, Venice, time for lovers in that darker dusk within the little room that glides while the gondolier hums. . . .

  But wait, the pigeons circling must be doves in Venice, there can be no sea-birds here, no cormorants forlorn on a post, no red-legged cranes – white peacocks perhaps, but certainly doves there must be above the long hoot of a liner at anchor in the roadway, doves for six, seven hundred years, doves of peace dove-soft and with a clap the square before St Mark’s is clear; they rise in spirals indulgently followed in the poached-egg eyes of those who sit over coffee and growing smaller below in Venice. . . .

  Hanging to his bars the prisoner at his cell will see this evening dove flight, the maid in black and on her bed will yawn at them then draw her skirts down along fat legs, the lovesick girl will weep in Venice to see her hopes’ sweet flight, the sky will droop on doves as they find their way, as the sea must fade, the sun set before they roost on an old statue’s taut right arm, the marble shoulder, or on bronze imperishable ever-folded wings of angels standing on a corner to await the daily death of Venice. . . .

  And the rising moon. Above a sea turned dark as night on which Venice ever leans her tresses the disc emerges apricot gold and every small wave set with diamonds, fanned by her desert breath, takes on an Afric sunshine only cold as death as dolphins come in out of the wide sea to Venice. For she is wedded to the sea. Her rulers the Doges, when each in his turn came to office, had this custom by which he was rowed out on to the main where he let drop a golden ring to sway criss-cross down into the ocean, to gleam a while a sport for dolphins, for Venice is wed to the sea called Mediterranean. . . .

  And the dolphins at night drive in from the sea. With their brief sigh as they come up to breathe, they are quicksilver in moonlight over Venice and in their play they do sigh for lovers adrift in that moonlight lane from Venice. . . .

  And these lovers, as they are urged by no action of their own into this old enchantment, leave behind as they must in their care for one another, marble with blood in its veins under midday heat, now classically turned blue blooded in the moon, blanched, carved into a living identity with its statues that live for ever on the buildings of Venice which does not sleep at night. Here too the noonday blaze which stunned Venice, which drew her stench up to freight the air with living, has cooled, has turned as cold as silhouettes where the gondola cuts its own outline where no other vessel is and where, in one another’s arms, cut off in our shade from the gondolier, we voyage more than ever by ourselves away from the cold marble forehead of Venice in which doves now swoon on statues and the night holds still and we, bereft in one another’s warmth by the sheer moonlight, in one another’s nyloned skin, each gently haloed in the other’s breath, and silenced she and I, are silenced as we draw out from Venice. . . .

  For silence is best where we, while idly talking, might disagree under the clear stars, alone, the gondolier forgotten. Nor is it safe for lovers to more than murmur in Venice, even out at sea. For behind them they have the storied pavements, great lives in mosaic, and above those fabled women swathed in marble idleness over great niches set in silken-covered walls, there are ceilings dimmed now by night, unreflected by moonlight through the wide windows, there are heroes drawn over stretched motionless ceilings to vast designs which were painted to show each in his greatest moment and, thus painted, become the thieves of time; these are for us, in the city we have left behind, which our gondola has sunk beneath the skyline, these are the epitome of all love stories, in mosaic, in statues and in great painting to bring us mortals down to little more than ghosts, but warm, off Venice. . . .

  So it is perhaps we should be chary of a honeymoon in or off the seaborne city. It may be too much has gone on or is pictured there. There could be frailty in our lives not to be endured under that magnificence. We might be found wanting. How then can the inhabitants live through such a challenge? The answer must be they are so used to riches that they no longer feel, or else they live in cross-eyed blindness. . . .

  Can one then have the heart, the impudence to visit Venice? Is that the reason Proust would never go? For, against this, if it might be too hot by day or the stench then too great, by contrast it would seem only too easy to set out by moonlight so that no couple, if given the miraculous chance, could fail, intent on their two selves, to sink Venice, as can be done tomorrow by the gondola covering of a moonlit lane of sea. Yet to leave her thus is but to come back to bed in Venice. The dawn is always chill, better met between sheets. The sun, in first rising, is not warmer than the loved one’s arms. So, in returning over the sea, in seeing that fabled city rise out of the ocean under moonlight, first one dome then another, and the gold crosses paled to white, next the roads of water between black shadows – oh here then must be who knows what of the great myths of the world that each one carries within him, Venice by moonlight, all the whole literature of the world that every human being, the heir as we all are to each beautiful line created, is born to and holds in a molten casket in his heart for Venice. . . .

  For Venice is everlasting, lives by a life that cannot die except by bombs. It may be she is too strong for mortals, that we could feel too human to submit our will to hers. But sure as day follows night the morrow’s sun will rise on Venice, the stench, if you will, return. But the doves must come down from up the palaces, dawn will find her great statuary eyes wide opened. Prisons, palaces and churches will smile again as they have through centuries, and the people of Venice will go on unregarding. And while she is here still, through her and under her will continue to drift brave pilgrims from the West. Then, as day closes yet once more, Venice will clothe herself for the moon. And, when that reflection rises from Africa in the moon’s triumph over men, that is the time for all the world’s lovers, living their lives over again (their lives perhaps to be) in the photographs and pictures of Venice; a city for ever wedded to the sea that there is no one does not carry by him and which each one of us lives by, despite himself, his inward eye fixed, perhaps it would best be not in, but rather trained upon Venice. . . .

  FOR JOHN LEHMANN’S PROGRAMME

  (Broadcast by the BBC, 1952)

  I want to say a few words about two things tonight, both to do with style. First about journalism. I have felt for some time that journalists cannot possibly go on writing much longer in the style they now use. It may be the shortage of newsprint has cramped them but the way they are, at present, almost every sentence has become a paragraph, or they make a paragraph out of nearly every sentence. They seem so frightened no one will read them that they have almost as much blank paper from the end of one paragraph to the beginning of another, as they have printed matter. And then consider the space they waste with their headlines, headings and sub-headings.

  Paradoxically enough, I suppose it will only be when they get more paper, that they will begin to write with long sentences, long sentences in which, as with life, one thing leads to another, consequences follow and through which there is a kind of flow. Not the sort of staccato drum beat they practise with now.

  They seem to think that a reader’s mind is so confused, as it is, of course, that he can only follow a series of statements in the severest black or white, statements which follow one another, paragraphed out and away from one another down the narrow column. I have made enquiries of my friends. Our minds are fully as confused as the next man’s, but we are all agreed that the facts as presented by journalists nowadays are virtually ununderstandable. It is only too true that this may be due to the incomprehensibility of the facts journalists have a
s their duty to relate, but my point is, they don’t relate them rather they rattle their facts out in a stutter, as a machine gun does bullets, until we are dazed, alarmed and deafened every day, until we don’t know what is to be feared, what item is more deadly than the next, in each day’s news.

  The answer must be in the journalist’s use of the longer sentence whereby he can gain depth, or light and shade.

  I have long held that novels should be written as far as possible in dialogue only. The conventional approach by a novelist in which he presumes to know all about his characters, what they are feeling and thinking at any moment, seems to me as dead as the Dodo.

  This leads me on to novels. But novels have to have occasional descriptive passages too, to link the dialogue and here the longer sentence is, in my opinion, just as important. As an example, offered, let me tell you, not entirely seriously, is an extract from a new novel of mine which is at the moment in proof. There are four characters, a father, a mother, a son who is a public school boy aged about seventeen and a girl of nineteen, who has been asked along to keep him happy at a party at a night club to celebrate the first day of the holidays. This extract is offered you on the understanding that I disapprove of my work being read aloud. Incidentally, it is almost the only bit of description in the whole book.

  Then, to yet another roll of drums, violet limes were switched on the small stage, a man hurrahed, and the girl bellied the corsage of her low dress the better to see between their elegant-shod toes, the party being seated to supper on a balcony at this night club and hard against wrought-iron railings, – she did this the better to watch what now emerged, an almost entirely naked woman who walked on to scant applause, and who carried with some awkwardness, within two arms thin like snakes, a simple wicker, purple, washing basket.

  ‘Well but just look at that,’ the father said and turned his gaze back to the girl, while the son opened his mouth as if he could eat what he now saw.

  ‘Now, who’s being stuffy dear, please?’ the mother asked.

  The boy shushed both, as, following the drums, a dirge of indigo music rose then sank, or rose, to a single flute with repeated, but ever changing, runs or trills.

  ‘Would you call her pretty?’ the mother asked in a bright voice.

  ‘Fairly awful’ the son replied. At which his mother smiled her fondest.

  ‘All right by me’ his father said to the girl to be snubbed by yet another ‘sh’sh’ from the boy.

  For the lady had begun to dance.

  All she wore was a blue sequin on the point of each breast and a few more to cover her sex. As she swayed those hips, sequins caught the light to strike off in a blaze of royal blue while the skin stayed moonlit and the palms of her two hands, daubed probably with a darker pigment, made a deeper shadow, above raised arms of a red so harsh it was almost black in that space through which she waved her opened fingers in figure of eights before the cut jet of two staring eyes.

  MATTHEW SMITH – A PERSONAL TRIBUTE

  (Tate Gallery Exhibition, 1953)

  ⎯

  Green wrote to Sir John Rothenstein: ‘I have never written about painting before and never shall again. It has given me hell. I am much too close to Matthew to have done this. I have not submitted it to him and dread to think what the result will be when he sees it. The trouble is that the piece cannot be knocked about too much and perhaps it would be a good thing if he did not see it before it was printed if it suits you to print it.’

  ⎯

  Percipience in a painter can involve an oblique or amused approach on his part to his viewers. This Matthew Smith has in an endearing degree. Indeed the sense of humour in his work is so vivid that, to see him in the flesh, the fun might lie, above his painting eye, as just a crease on a broad great forehead. But in fact what his eye does see, as well as a joke, is beauty pure and simple.

  In his nudes those flaunting women so often stare us in the face with what seems to be contempt for the effect their chests may have on us. Arrogantly proud of their soft great thighs, they seem more conscious and disdainful of our peeping than the models of any other painter. Even when curled up in bed, eyes closed, they obviously pretend to ignore their audience. Or, sitting up, a rose impudently placed against a more than naked breast, the girl just looks past us, pouting.

  Nearly always these models are big women and, if as often is, they are done asleep, and his colours suggest, as only Smith can, a great drowsy-hot afternoon, then has sleep portrayed on canvas ever been more secure or deeper? No, there is a sureness about these women which carries over to us that utter serenity which only great painting can impose.

  And then as to his colours which, as we can see for ourselves here and today, are by no means always the red or rose so often attributed to him. He uses, he puts on canvas, colours as varied and vivid as any other living painter, and, in so doing, extends miraculously the content of his work. For it is Smith’s colour that can be said to carry his work away, that fuses the whole to greatness. And yet his use of colour could be called purely romantic: indeed, paradoxically enough, it is the only literary element in his work. And while he knows all, of course, about how to put the paint on so as to make colour clothe and create form, it does seem as if he were ambivalent in vision. For Smith is very much a two-eyed man. It strikes one that form (shape) and colour come to him separately and that then, somehow, and this is his particular triumph, he fuses the two together into his own unity, his integrity as a person. This last is particularly true of what can be called those painter’s exercises, the still-lives – perhaps of a plate and few rounds of fruit. In these the effect of colour on form is self-evident. On the other hand, many will disagree, he is not so successful with the shape of his flowers: they are sometimes no more than just a glorious fire of colour. But in the nudes and landscapes when he makes form and colour create and breathe life the one into the other and vice versa, it is then that one plus one does not equal two, no, it is great art; in Smith’s particular case it can be called painting in the round.

  The landscapes of the country about Aix are poems, lyrical poems. Painted towards that moment of fleeting dusk which lasts down there for perhaps thirty short minutes, they have very often an olive tree or two in the foreground, which have the panache but not, to one eye at least, the true shape of these trees, then a middle distance of infinite mystery, and often a line of hills literally swooning on the horizon. They are done, so it appears, almost entirely in a long gradation of one colour, except perhaps for one touch of one other shade always exquisitely placed. They bring one an extraordinary impression of depth or distance which is conveyed with the minimum arrangement of poles or trees in the foreground, or a winding road, to suggest perspective. No, the whole great panorama, these great expanses of the South of France, which stretch from us back out of the canvas, are done entirely by Smith’s masterly play on colour. It is here, in these entirely romantic landscapes, that he displays a new concept of the use of colour.

  But like all great painters, Smith cannot and will not be tied down. Around 1920 he went to Cornwall and there brought off an astounding series of landscapes which, to some of us, give the fondest joy we have of his work. In these the principles laid down above that seem to rule his later Aix canvases, are totally ignored. In dark greens and blues and, in particular, with mauves of an amazing intensity, he gives us a sombre rain-soaked countryside in his unique midday of a stifling West Country summer. Far from employing gradations of one colour to give him his perspective or depth, these landscapes are criss-crossed by thick horizontal bands, often in yellow, to show a lane or something else which must recede. This series of pictures should be studied to be realised, and are unparalleled in their ominous lyricism.

  To step back, to consider the extent of Smith’s range, his oeuvre, is an experience in itself. Nor are we less astonished by the lapse of time his work covers. The earliest canvas hung in this exhibition is dated 1909. And yet how much more cannot be on view, if only for reasons of w
all space? For instance there are no drawings here today to disprove what some have written, that he cannot draw. Some of Smith’s drawings, with their simplicity and roundness of line are the quintessence of the knowledge he has acquired in a long lifetime of work. There are here no crayon drawings either, with strokes never thinner than one quarter of an inch, which are yet as delicate as lace. Many also of his finest paintings are abroad.

  It is the fashion just now in Britain to decry achievement. While one can read in any newspaper almost every day how wonderful a nation we are, there is scant praise for any single Briton who is not a politician. Art critics have hardly more than two inches of a column to give to a one-man show. When therefore the Tate grants Smith his accolade, which is so rarely given to living artists, we should pause before all the richness of his work to ask ourselves why, after a lifetime of dedication and endeavour, there is so little to read about the man? Retiring as he is by nature, nevertheless it is strange we should have so little in print about him. All the more honour to the Tate therefore for allowing us to see for ourselves a great cross-section of his paintings, so to speak, in the flesh.

  To take only one picture, the Nude with Pearl Necklace (47) from 1931. With what loving brutality has Smith painted the model’s belly and that thick strong wrist. How proudly she lies, how superb her bent right knee. How gaily she lies, and how little she cares! And that right breast walloping to the couch! The happy fling of her necklace, to the right as well, is all humour and gaiety, while her face (and surely Smith is one of the very few modern painters to fit the right face to his nudes) her face holds just the expression of what must have been the mood in that studio more than twenty years ago, a situation that is now fixed for ever. And finally the whole magnificent composition of this picture is brought together, fused, is made three dimensional by Smith’s colours, those colours which cannot and will never be described in words. And that, of course, is one of the great reasons for painting.