The Portrait (14 page)

Anyway, she was crying; I thought it was just the sickness, and I’ve no doubt that did make it worse, but the real reason was that she hadn’t been able to draw or paint since she fell sick. The previous day she had become so desperate she tried to get to the desk by the little window to draw something, anything. “It’s like an addiction,” she said. “I go mad if I can’t use my hands. It’s all I have, the only thing that makes it worthwhile getting out of bed in the morning.”

Do you understand that? I do, just. I feel it sometimes but not with the intensity of her affliction. It was like breathing for her. Take it away and she began to feel stifled. Neurosis? Hysteria? I’ve no doubt. I’m sure some infection of the uterus was behind it all. Or, if that is out of favour now, some physiological imbalance in her brain. No doubt, nothing that a baby or two wouldn’t have cured. But like a man who drags himself off to some squalid opium hell for his pipe and secretly relishes the prospect as much as he is disgusted by himself, she didn’t want to be cured. She didn’t want the madness taken away from her. It was her most treasured possession. It was what she was, and it made her both magnificent and, as you say, a freak.

I remember you tried to convert her at one stage, to bring her in as your disciple. If Jesus could put up with Mary Magdalene, it was not beneath you to have a woman or two in your entourage. She should have been more flattered, I grant you. No-one has ever doubted your eye, and you have never put up with fools or the second rate. It gives the lie to your later opinions, you know. She was not to be mere ornament; that has never been your failing. It is part of your egotism that only the best should be allowed to surround you. And you tried to lure Evelyn to your side. I rest my case.

So you invited her to your soirées in Paris, to meet the people she should really know; not the printers and their assistants, but the men with power and influence. To take tea with Proust, with Oscar Wilde, with Anatole France. With
salonnières
and novelists and politicians, with other artists, but only those carefully selected. How did you know all these people, anyway? I never figured it out. How did you have the self-confidence to invite them and expect them to show up? You were nothing but a bumptious little Englishman with some skill at conversation. Some connections, but nothing special. Charm, I suppose; you managed to make people think you were a good investment for the future. Of course I was jealous. Why should I not be? It was so easy for you, so hard for me. It wasn’t until I realised that brooding ill-humour had its own appeal that I could stop making myself ridiculous.

Anyway, into this society of the great, you invited Evelyn, along with some other candidates for patronage. I expected her to be cowed, grateful, a little obviously trying to make a good impression. Giving off all those signs of someone ill at ease—perched on the edge of her chair, nervous of speech either too loud or too soft. Saying little, but listening carefully to every one else. As I did when you invited me.

Certainly she didn’t say much, but what she did say was to the point. Don’t pretend you don’t remember what she said to Sarah Bernhardt; I know full well it is ingrained in your memory. She announced in a clear voice that the great lady’s opinion on some painting was facile; that perhaps she should look more and opine less. But
lèse-majesté,
no? Evelyn was there to worship and admire, not to treat these people as equals, and certainly not to criticise them. I can still remember the smooth way you intervened and changed the topic of conversation, showing how capable you were even in awkward situations.

But I can also remember the look on La Bernhardt’s face: a look of boredom dissipated. Splendid woman, as vain as a peacock but knows how to tell the difference between praise and flattery. She is a professional, after all; her success depends on being able to distinguish the two. She knew she’d been caught out, that the comment was justified. She liked being assaulted by this skinny little girl who tossed her head with a sort of naïve defiance and looked you in the eye as she spoke. It spiced up the dull fare of adulation that was her normal lot. All those gasps of amazement, that delight in whatever she said, the squeaks of appreciation at her slightest utterance. Someone like Evelyn must have been like a glass of cold fresh water after an afternoon drinking undiluted treacle.

How much did it grieve you when Evelyn was invited to supper and you never were? Don’t pretend; you were furious. I know you too well to pretend otherwise. Even more so when you realised that she was not in the slightest bit gratified by the honour. She went, she ate, she had a “perfectly nice time, thank you.” She was impervious to such things, and so she was impervious to you, as well. She did not want to be around the famous. You in particular had nothing to offer her, except for your skills in society, your politician’s ability to make people do your bidding, so she stopped coming to your little gatherings. It wasn’t meant to be insulting, you know. She did not realise that she had delivered an irreparable insult, had struck at the core of your power. She rejected you even more completely than she rejected me.

A few friends, the rest enemies. That was your philosophy of life, and Evelyn showed she did not want to be your friend.

“Surely, a painting works or it doesn’t, no?” That was her response after you had laid out an early version of your theory of art, of modernity, of the artistic engagement with reality and all the rest of it. It was naïve, unsophisticated, but a damning indictment of your whole life’s work, which seeks to make things more complex and obscure, more difficult to understand. To turn a simple pleasure into a mystery. For Evelyn, there was the painting and the viewer; a direct communion. She was an artistic protestant, and had no need of intermediaries, be they critics or priests.

Her weakness was the crippling self-doubt that afflicted her every step of the way. That is the price of Protestantism and individuality. The constant worry of having to choose between good and bad fades when you cede authority to others. That is probably why I was so eager to bow to your judgement, and why I am such a happy papist. Having to make up your own mind is a terrible burden, and the inevitable cost is massive doubt.

I didn’t realise it until I had a terrible fight with her one day; you sensed it instinctively, knew where to strike when the moment came. That was well after we all drifted back to London for the new century. I started painting portraits, and desperately began seeking publicity—any publicity—to become known. Any exhibition that would accept my pictures got them in abundance. Any notice in the press was pored over and treasured. I sent picture after picture to the RA, and had most of them turned down. In my clodhopping way, I cultivated those who might be of use to me somehow. I was a desperate man; this was my last throw. Until then I had been able to persuade myself I was still young, still learning. Now I was past thirty and I knew I would not get much better, and I was not sure if Anderson’s fate awaited me. I needed all the help I could get and wasn’t too proud to ask for it. Especially as you encouraged me, and told me it was the only way to succeed.

Evelyn did none of it. When she finally came back in 1902 she contacted nobody, took lodgings in Clapham and was scarcely ever seen. I didn’t even realise she’d returned until she’d been back nearly a year. I felt quite insulted by that, and thought that she disdained all the little humiliations I put myself to because she could afford to. Her father was a barrister, I remember, and I imagined he supported her. An artistic daughter, how charming! She never mentioned that they disapproved so thoroughly that they gave her not one ha’penny; wouldn’t even talk to her. There is, after all, a difference between painting pictures and being an artist. She freely gave up everything I wanted—house, money, comfort. The only hot food she ever ate was in the cheap working men’s cafés in the area, or unless someone took her out for a free meal. Most of the little money she had she spent on canvasses and paints. But she more or less managed to keep up appearances, proper girl that she was, and was too proud to glory in her poverty or play the bohemian. It was the way it was; no choice. It took someone who knew her well to realise she had been wearing the same clothes when she arrived in Paris, or to see the exquisite stitching that had repaired a threadbare patch here, or a little hole there. We were travelling in opposite directions, she and I.

I didn’t know how she did it. I would have withered in similar circumstances. It’s all very well being wedded to your art, but
someone
has to notice. Someone has to approve, or appreciate, or buy. No-one is so sublimely confident that they can do without any applause, however faint and sporadic. But Evelyn rarely showed her pictures, scarcely ever sold one. I hadn’t seen anything she’d produced for years. She was entirely unknown, forgotten by most of those she knew in Paris, not taken seriously by anyone else. Most people didn’t even know she painted. It didn’t appear to have any effect on her. Indeed, she seemed to thrive on it; around that time I’d noticed a fire in her eyes, a self-confidence that almost seemed like happiness, I had never seen in Paris.

She didn’t encourage visitors; we met in cafés usually, occasionally in my studio, but after about five years I needed to get hold of her; I’d sold a picture to the Countess of Armagh, and I needed to celebrate with someone as a matter of urgency. I planned to spend some of my fee in advance, and take her for a good meal. She needed the food, and I needed the company; she was one of the few painters I knew who would be able to listen to my bragging without feeling impatient or envious. Besides, I relied on her to bring me back down to earth when the vainglory got wearisome, by asking whether the picture I’d sold was actually worth the money.

So I took a cab to Clapham—which shows how opulent I was feeling—and arrived on her doorstep. And got a shock: her lodgings were even more mean than Jacky’s. Freezing, bitterly cold. She was out when I arrived, but the landlady was an amiable woman and, as it was even colder outside than in, let me in to wait. The room—on the top floor of a building which smelt strongly of boiled vegetables and floor polish—was tiny and had scarcely any furniture in it, just a grate, a bed, a chair and a table. It was lit—when it was lit—by a remarkably ornate chandelier hanging from a vast iron hook in the middle of the ceiling. Heavens knows how it got there. That was all, apart from the pictures—dozens of them, all stacked against the wall, piles of paper on the one little desk and on the floor, boxes of paints, bottles of solvents. The usual stuff, but an awful lot of it.

I started looking at the pictures. Of course I did; who wouldn’t? It never occurred to me not to. Every painter who ever came into my studio in Hammersmith went through the canvasses as a matter of course to see what I was up to. I did the same myself, wherever I went. Nosiness is the great driving force of art. Think of Raphael sneaking into the Sistine Chapel to see what his great rival was up to. In Evelyn’s little room I was astonished by what I saw; truly I was. You weren’t there to guide me, and I had seen nothing by her hand for ages. She had achieved a remarkable simplicity. One particularly stayed with me: a picture of her little wicker chair against the window. That was it; nothing else in the image at all, but it was delightful, warm and lonely, confident and despairing, simple and subtle. Such a mixture of differing emotions and reflections it threw up, it was quite dazzling. And tiny as well—not more than ten inches square. As near to perfection as you can get. She’d taken the spirit of someone like Vermeer and turned it into something wholly modern and personal. Exquisite.

I was looking at it when she came in, and instantly forgot all about wicker chairs. She was furious with me, and I had never seen her truly angry before. Nothing had ever got through the quiet, well-brought-up behaviour that made her so easy to underestimate. “How dare you go through my private things? Who do you think you are. . . .” Her rage was like a torrent that swept over me, terrifying in its intensity, the more so for being so completely unexpected.

And much much more. She was deeply offended, but more than that: she was terrified. As she bustled about, collecting the few pictures I had looked at, carefully stacking them once more with their faces to the wall so they could not be seen, I suddenly realised she was embarrassed; she thought I might make some critical remark, might make fun of her for painting a chair in a bedroom. Good heavens, that was the last thing that occurred to me. But she would not listen to any of my attempts to reassure, or even apologise. She was near to tears with fury; anyone would have thought I had made an indecent advance. By her lights I suppose I had, far more than in Paris. I had violated her privacy, and exposed her weakness—she put everything into those pictures, and she was afraid of what others might see in them. Still, I wished I had seen more, wished I could have seen the ones she particularly did not want me to look at.

She threw me out, and I had to write a grovelling letter—a long one—to win forgiveness. Even so, she didn’t speak to me for months and still wouldn’t talk about it, although I tried. “What’s the point of painting the wretched things if no-one ever sees them?” I tried saying once.

“They’re not ready. They’re not good enough and I don’t want to talk about it. . . .”

But eventually, she was forced to decide. I forced her. The Chenil gallery offered her a show, largely because I had enthused to them and piqued their interest. They decided to take a risk on a woman whose paintings they had never even seen. Imagine how good that made me feel! That I could exert such influence, that my word alone could conjure such things into existence. There was a bit of politics involved, of course. They wanted to put on an exhibition of Augustus John, but he had pulled out because the dates coincided with your big Post-Impressionism display. Not only was he mortally offended he’d not been invited by you, he was clever enough to realise that the furore you were going to cause would swamp everything else. So the Chenil had the prospect of blank walls for a couple of weeks. A little show by an unknown artist, which wouldn’t be seen as a defeat if it failed to get much attention, was just what they needed.