And in this second one, I must find a way of depicting power achieved. It would have been easier had you been a general or a politician; then I would have had five hundred years of props to make my point. I could have painted your army at its moment of triumph, and subverted the image by showing the dead and dying in their midst. Or a politician making a speech at the hustings, moulding an audience of the poor and the hungry so that they vote to remain so. Military power, political power, religious power are all well-painted phenomena; each has its attitude and stance and set of the jaw. But a critic? How to depict the power of such a man when I can follow in no giant’s footsteps?
YOU’RE NOT REALLY interested in how I came to live on this island, are you? At least, it would be unlike you to be so concerned. But I’ll tell you anyway. It will be your punishment for that fatuous politeness you so often affect. It wasn’t planned. I didn’t work out in advance what was the perfect place for me. On the contrary, it took many months of wandering before I got here. Don’t think, by the way, that it marks my submission to your artistic principles, that it demonstrates my acceptance of the French model. Quite the contrary. There is no art here, as you may have noticed. The fads and fancies of Paris are of no more interest to these people than they are to the aldermen of Dundee. Indeed, they think of Paris as an enemy, when they think of it at all. Spending time, energy or money on paintings is all but incomprehensible to them; fighting over it is totally so. They have the sea. It is all they have and all they need.
So I came to a place with no artistic history, where what I do is regarded with blank indifference. I am, I think, the first person ever to wield a brush on this island. There is no predecessor, no artistic colony of like-minded souls, no earnest matrons desperate to have me for tea or dinner. Just the fishermen, their stolid wives, semi-literate children and the sea.
I remember telling you once that I had always wanted to live by the sea. You, of course, thought it was about painting and went on about the possibilities for tactility in the seascape—was that the absurd word you were using then?—in the way the paint could represent light and water. You missed the point, of course. The point was to have all that nonsense washed away. Being by the sea is like a permanent baptism; the light and air hypnotises, and your soul is washed by vastness. You see what true magnificence is, and it is not something that can be put down on a canvas. When you paint, you either represent what you see or project yourself through what is in front of you. Confronted with the sea, you realise the uselessness of both. You cannot humanise the sea. It’s not like all those mountains that are so popular, with merry peasants walking down tracks or harvesting corn. The sea is movement and violence and noise. You remember that Géricault painting, The Raft of the Medusa? A failure; a cop-out. All these people being heroic and desperate, dominating the canvas, as if they were the point. Put people on the ocean and they are irrelevant and ridiculous, not heroic. They can be swallowed up in an instant and the sea doesn’t even notice. Think of that boy on the beach. But did he paint that? Did he even try to depict the magnificence of it all? No; he twisted it around so that it is yet another tale of people battling terrible odds, of human suffering and courage. How pathetic. The sea is not there for men to be heroes on.
There I go again; I know. But that is why I came here, you know; that is what I was looking for when I left England. It took some time to realise it, of course. I was making it up as I went along. When I took the train from Victoria for the Channel, I thought that I would go south, to the sun and the light, follow in the footseps of everyone else. So I did, for a while. I left my luggage at Boulogne, to be sent after me when I knew where I was going, then headed for Provence. I only stayed a few weeks; there was something in the place that disgusted my Scottish sensibilities. I could feel myself becoming sentimental, even as I stood on the balcony of a hotel in some town whose name I’ve forgotten. Cézanne could do it, no doubt; find the sublime in those people and landscapes. He is the only one of your protegés who is truly remarkable, head and shoulders over the rest of them. In half a dozen little pictures, he changed reality. Provence now looks like a Cézanne painting. It cannot be seen in any other way. Perhaps if I’d never gone to that exhibition of yours, I might have come up with something different, but it would not have been as good, and I was determined not to copy.
Besides, they’ve had it too easy. All they have to concern them is the wind, and they complain about that incessantly. They have never had to bellow their defiance of fate. No-one who drinks wine grown in their own fields has. Besides, what was I to do? Paint bull fights and olive groves? So I moved on, headed for Spain, and stopped in a town called Collioure; stayed there for a few weeks. But the Mediterranean! So blue, so civilised, so warm! None of the ferocity I needed; none of the battle or the terror that the sea should have. At least there I learnt what I was looking for, so it wasn’t a wasted voyage. It’s a poor place, benighted and grim, and I thought when I arrived that it would be perfect. I stayed in a cheap hotel for a week, and found it very peaceful. The people have their own particular inbred beauty, but it is a civilised place, really, if you scrape a little below the poverty and the hardship. That “but” is important. There is a good stone port, and castle, a handsome church, a hotel, some shops—all too much. I got so far as negotiating to take a little house in the village, and thought I would be happy there. So I would have been; that was the trouble. The night before I was due to move in, I walked along the quayside; cloudless night, stars twinkling, a warm wind coming in off the sea, and I felt this strange panic sweep over me. I wasn’t looking for happiness.
So on I went, waiting for that feeling of being there. Do you know what I mean? The feeling that you are home, even though you have never been there before. The sense that where you are is where you should be. I can describe it no better than that, I’m afraid. It’s not a feeling you get in a big city, as when you are in London or Paris you are never anywhere in particular. So I avoided the towns and took the train slowly up through France, sometimes coming close, sometimes trying to persuade myself that I had found what I was looking for, because it was a long voyage, and a frustrating one. I wanted it over, and took no real pleasure in the trip. The landscape, the sights, the architectural marvels, were not important. They were not what I was chasing.
And I ended in Quiberon, a poor and depressing place, as I’m sure you noticed, and was not especially tempted by it. But I wandered down to the port to kill time until I could continue my journey, and saw a fishing boat unloading their catch onto the quayside. I had been looking for some time before I realised that I could understand what the men were saying. Not the understanding that is filtered through learning and education, mind, but real understanding, without even having to think. They were speaking the Gaelic. A distant variant of Scottish, of course, but close enough to the language I learned from my grandmother when I was packed off to her to live whenever my father was out of work and couldn’t afford my keep. Fairly often I spent months there, and she spoke Gaelic to me only. She was a gentle woman with a fierce pride that was expressed only in these words. Unlike many, I never tried to forget the language, even though it was of little use to me.
And those fishermen reminded me of her through their conversation. A strange accent they have, with dozens of words and expressions that are different, but just recognisable. So I asked them, in Gaelic, where they came from. They found my speech as odd as I found theirs, but the curiosity of a man so obviously foreign speaking to them in something close to their own tongue tickled their fancy, and they responded. They were the first people I had had a decent conversation with in weeks, they shared a drink with me, told me of a little house which I might rent. I was home. My journey was over. I crossed over with them the next day.
I’ve only left a few times since, to go to the morgue in Quiberon to study my corpses or to pick up some paints and canvasses. You think I am in exile, I see myself as being in refuge. Not the first Scot to be so, either. I have an illu
strious forebear. If you want, go back to the church, and look at the statue. Saint Gildas. Another man of the Clyde, although a bit before my time. I must say he had escaped my attention before I came here, but Father Charles told me all about him. Gildas fled the tumult and beastliness of England and took sanctuary on this island so he would not have to submit to the opinion of others who considered him a heretic. Thus the version of the story I was told.
A perceptive man, our priest. He says little, but sees much. You still haven’t been to visit him, I note.
The islanders welcome me in their fashion, but think I’m a bit crazy as well. No-one else has chosen to live here for 1500 years, and no English—they think of me as English despite everything, which is a big disadvantage—since the smugglers were defeated half a century ago. No-one stays unless they have to, or if they can think of anywhere better to go. They don’t even have any people spending the summer; nobody in their right mind would come to Houat, to this island with no running water, where it is devilish hard to get fuel for your fire or food for your plate. But here I stay, and here I would have stayed forever, had I not summoned you here and had your presence not reminded me of the advice I gave to Evelyn—that a painting unseen might as well not exist. I am thinking—no, I have decided—to go back, to re-enter the fray; but on my terms only.
What was that again? I summoned you? How dare I presume? You wrote to me, did you not, proposing the commission for a portrait? Your attempt to begin my reintroduction into the world of English art, the only one that matters to folk like us, poor though it be. To lure me back and help me take up the reins once more. No, no, my dear friend! We are trying to look below the surface now. It was I who summoned you; I who knew you would come, would have to come to see me. I lured you here. I needed to see if you would come.
I have written few letters in the past couple of years; my bank has received most of them, and they have not been so important. My demands on its services are small these days. One was important, though; the short note I wrote to your protegé Duncan a few months back. That I laboured long over, once I knew what I must do, because I knew you would read it. That was the letter which brought you here; to which you had to respond, if all was as I thought.
One sentence only, in fact, made you pack your bags and take the train to Paris, then out to Quiberon, the fishing boat over to the island, and walk across it until you arrived at my door. One short sentence made the difference. “I hope you and William are still friends; many have drowned in his displeasure.”
You read things, words and pictures, with an intensity greater than any man I have known. You seize on the little detail—a colour contrast, the shape of an ear lobe, the crook of a finger, one malformed sentence, a curious use of words, and tease it until it gives up its secrets. But what secret did my letter conceal? It tantalised, that clumsy sentence, but remained mute.
It was no slip of the pen, my friend, not a piece of babbling from someone losing touch with reality, a poor joke made by someone forgetting even the basics of English grammar. I wanted to see if you would come. It was the final test, every word considered and laboured over. Besides, I needed you here, if I was ever to break through the block which has stopped me painting anything truly satisfying.
I THINK it’s time to tell you what made me leave England. You’ll love it; it will appeal to your egotism. You did. It began at half past nine on a Tuesday morning, May 10, 1910. I was sitting having my breakfast, and cursing the weather, as it was dull and cloudy and I wanted brightness for a picture I was working on. At the very least I knew I would be doing nothing at least until lunchtime; maybe not even then. So I decided to read the Morning Chronicle and take my time over my scrambled eggs and coffee that my landlady had just brought me. I started, as I always did, with the notices and advertisements, then worked my way through the news, foreign and domestic, then, for a final pleasure, turned to the reviews.
I had been looking forward to it; Evelyn’s show had opened a couple of days before, and I knew there would be something. At worst, only a little mention; at best, something more fulsome. I didn’t know who’d be doing it; the Chronicle is always cagey about that, for some reason. It was the sort of show some young lad would be given to review, not important enough to justify paying some figure of influence. She was scarcely known, after all.
The reviews for your show had run the previous week and were dreadful, the letters from outraged colonels and academicians had followed. Your show was a perfect disaster critically, and a fine success in every other respect. In a matter of days, everybody in the country who cared for such things now knew the names of Gauguin, Seurat, Degas, and all the others.
I thought this boded well for Evelyn; she was likely to benefit from not being part of your group. Besides, I thought the critics would have exhausted their stock of vitriol on you, and would find it agreeable to say something nice for once. But no; they were having too good a time hurling abuse at the French, and most journals had passed her by to give over more space to you. Only the Chronicle ran a review, an anonymous one as occasionally they did. Better than nothing; any review at all was a good start. And the moment I started reading, I knew that you had written it. You have a style with words as distinct as any artist’s with paint. The way you cluster adjectives, the rhythm of the sentences, the complexity of your subclauses, each one diving into another so that the meaning is almost lost as your thought races on—no-one writes like you. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who recognised it, although I could see why you didn’t want your authorship generally known. You liked to think of yourself as a gentleman, after all.
We are back to my hobby horse again. The surface and the instant impression. Meet you, and one imagines you to be the perfect gentleman. Meet Evelyn for the first time, run off a sketch of her, rely on the artist’s intuitive judgement and instant assessment and what do you get? A skinny little thing, who looks as though her lip might start trembling at any moment. Those slightly sloped shoulders; the sign of someone turning in on herself and afraid of reality. And sex, and femininity? Forget all that. A professional spinster, who would shudder should any man even think of touching her. A fearful timorous creature, easily broken. Inconsiderable, and not to be taken seriously. Some people stand alone because they are strong and disdain the world; others do so out of fear, desperate to belong and be accepted but not knowing how to do so, afraid of being spurned. One look and it was clear Evelyn was in the second category.
Thus the dubious insight of the modern artist. But look at her as Raphael might, that lover of women. Or Rembrandt, who saw people’s souls with his godlike gaze, or Vermeer, who could paint depths and levels of calm and show the turmoil within total placidity, and you see something different again. Then you see the brittleness, the force of will which impelled her to sacrifice everything for the single goal of being a painter. Not to make a living, not to be a success; those are low things, not worth the candle. But to follow her own instincts until she was content with what she produced. She wanted my biscuit tin, to get to that point which I have approached only once in my life. But her standards were higher than mine; she was one of those souls who can never be content in this life.
You can’t understand any of that; don’t even pretend you can. For you art is politics, and Evelyn would not bend to your will. Why is it that you have had so much trouble with women when you find men so easy to control? Do women have to be bullied in different ways? Is another style required, one which is beyond your skill? Your wife. Evelyn. Jacky. You failed with all of them. Did they perceive something we did not? Did they see a weakness known only to yourself?
Let me look at you. Do you know, I think I must have hit on it. You are truly angry at last. Was it the slip in mentioning Jacky, perhaps? After days of provocation, you have finally opened up to me. A new emotional register on your face, which I must take into account.
Come, come! Don’t be cross! I am only doing my job, you know. You have had it always too easy. No portra
itist has ever pushed you this far; that’s why all the pictures of you I have seen are so terrible. Oh, fine for public presentation, I have no doubt. They would look good in the dining hall of your Cambridge College, or on the walls of the Athenaeum. But they present the public face, not the inner man. They have the personality and insight of an encomium. What was it Oliver Cromwell said to Walker? “I desire that you paint me warts and all.” Those other portraitists not only left out the warts, they didn’t even notice they were there. Nor did I first time round. But not this time, and I am determined the next will be even better.
No; that’s it for the day. I am tired, and you have been punished enough, I think. It is time we parted; I have my duties to perform.
Which ones? Oh, good heavens, there are so many of them on this island. I must make sure the tide is coming in, that the sun is setting, and that the wind continues to blow. Have you been to see the fort yet? You should; it is a sad enough spectacle to make anyone thoughtful. Built by Vauban, that great military engineer, to fend off the English. I don’t believe it was ever used for that purpose. The English turned up anyway, and the good folk of this place know fine building stone when they see it. Whole walls, escarpments and abutments and whatever they call them, have vanished in the night, turned into docks and houses and shelters. One of the strongest forts in Brittany, falling to pieces because no-one loves it, while the little church, unprotected by the state and far weaker in construction, is in fine shape, sustained only by the affection of the populace. I will leave you to figure out the moral for yourself. That’s where I will end up, I think. The next few days will be important, and I need to prepare myself for what is to come. I find being in that church helps me, for some reason. Father Charles encourages it; he says quiet contemplation is as good as prayer or instruction. Not that he disdains instruction, although he teaches in hints, rather than in injunctions.