The Portrait (4 page)

I grant that there are some questions to be answered. How is it that an artist in his prime, nearing the peak of his career, should act in such a foolish way? He has income, some small renown and (even better) reputation. He has just taken part in one of the most important exhibitions ever to be seen in the country, is at the vanguard of the artistic revolution sweeping the world. He has achieved, nearly, what he has aimed at all his life. From near poverty in Scotland, then time as a jobbing illustrator for scruffy magazines and penny dreadfuls in London, scrimping and saving to go to Paris, and finally the goal is at hand. Then suddenly—pop!—off he goes. Packs his bags and says farewell to more than twenty years of struggle and hard work. Tells no-one where he is for some time, refuses to answer letters. Why? There is no insanity in the family, is there? Both his parents were well-nigh teetotal, were they not? If he has some horrible disease, better, surely, that he stay in London and get proper medical treatment? What is the cause of this behaviour? What did he do that makes him flee the country like some murderer on the run?

There are limits to eccentricity, after all. Behaving outrageously is conventional, necessary for any painter wishing to be taken seriously these days. But this is beyond outrageous. It is offensive. The whole point of running off to the continent in a fit of aesthetic pique is to come back again, so others may revel in the deed, glory in the flouting of convention, draw strength from the shock and disapproval of others. To disappear completely, send back no pictures to advertise your continued existence, is different; it implies a disdain for all those artists in Chelsea and beyond, and few people can forgive being disdained. Makes them look at their metropolitan lives and wonder. What’s wrong with being here? Should we be doing that too? Or it makes people suspicious, makes them gossip.

You want an explanation. You have a right to know. Well, we shall see; I think you may know the reasons as well as I do. As my painting progresses, perhaps mutual understanding will emerge as well as a portrait. I have been waiting nearly four years for you to ask; you can wait a few days for my answer.

Sit, then; the light is good and I’m often at my best when in an ill-humour. No, no, no. You know better than that. Both arms on the chair, head against the rest; you are meant to look senatorial, the Roman of old, an imposing figure of authority. Don’t you remember? Or did your dinner have a similar effect on you as on me that you slump there like an empty paper bag? That’s better. Now keep still, for pity’s sake.

Memories? Oh yes. Both good and bad, I assure you. Worst of all, you brought out feelings of regret, for the first time since I came here. But then, you always had that effect on me, so why should it be any different now? I started thinking about what might have been, had I stayed in London, had I cultivated people properly, had I stayed in the fight, had I got married. I saw the career ahead of me, culminating in a large house in Holland Park or Kensington, revered by my many pupils, rather than forgotten and living in total isolation. Too late now. Now I would have the reputation of being unreliable, an unsafe pair of hands. How many commissions do you think I abandoned when I left? At least a dozen, most of them paid for. And I doubt that what I paint these days would find much favour. Too eccentric, too strange.

It could have been different, as you know. It was within my grasp; all I had to do was keep in favour with people like you, produce works that were suitably advanced but not too daring that no-one would buy them. That is why I can indulge in regret. You can’t regret a fantasy; only a real opportunity lost can produce that sort of wistfulness. Would success have been so delicious as it seemed when I thought about it late last night in my bed? Probably not; I tasted enough of it to get the bitterness on my tongue, the dry feeling in my mouth when I complimented ugly old women for the sake of their husbands’ wallets, or made polite conversation to dealers interested only in the difference between buying and selling prices. I knew the vulnerability of the successful with those beneath, eager to tear them down and feast on their entrails.

Did we not do that, you and I? Would I have been spared in my turn? I think not. It is the cycle of the generations, played out in every species that walks the face of the earth. The rise of the young, the tearing down of the old. Again and again. Was I supposed to sleepwalk meekly through a play where the script was already written, on which I could have no influence? We sat long hours in Paris bars and London pubs, sneering at the likes of Bouguereau and Herkomer and Hunt, deriding their pomposity, the prostitution of their skills into sterile emblems for the bourgeoisie—those were the glorious, rolling phrases, were they not? How good they made us feel. But what would those below say about me now? What are they called again? Vorticists, Cubists, Futurists or some such? Too weird even for you, I imagine. Sentimental, I think, might be one word for the sort of stuff I was producing in London. Prettified, perhaps; insincere would wound because it would be true. And no doubt a whole raft of other insults I cannot even imagine. Who knows what sins we committed in our turn when we cast our elders into the darkness and trampled so gleefully on their reputations?

We weren’t really very good, you know. Think of all those acres of canvas we churned out when we came back from Paris, all that semi-digested Impressionism. We got rid of the wistful peasants and the studies of girls knitting, true enough; but we replaced them with unending landscapes painted in muted greens and browns. Thousands of them. Didn’t really matter if it was Cumbria or Gloucestershire or Brittany, they all looked pretty much the same. I don’t know why English painters love brown so much. It’s not as if it is so much cheaper than any other colour. We learned from the Impressionists only how to produce pictures safe enough to hang on the parlour wall, next to the engraving of the Queen and the needlepoint made by Granny when she was young.

It is the violence these new people bring to their work which interests me; what they produce may be revolting, incompetent, the antithesis of real art; they may be frauds and fools. Who knows? But they tap into the violence of men’s souls like the first roll of thunder on a summer’s day. They have extended their emotional range into areas we never thought of. There was nothing of that in our work. We challenged those old men in so many ways, but our notion of violence was still heroic. General Wolfe capturing Quebec, Napoleon crossing the Alps. No blood, no death and no cruelty. We produced studies of sunlight on cathedral walls and thought that was revolutionary enough. I could have led the way, you know.

Anyway, I decided not to wait for my inevitable eclipse. I would not be a sitting target. I retreated, packed up, came here; foreswore the knighthood, the obituary in
The Times,
the commemorative retrospective at the Royal Academy. I did not wish others to destroy my reputation, so I did it myself, before they could strike me down. At least I would deprive them of the pleasure. Cowardice, you may have thought at the time. I prefer to think of it as being acute. What soldier stands and waits to be overcome by a superior force? Better to get out of the way.

And bide my time. My renunciation was tactical, not mystical. I do not yearn for obliteration; my opinion of my work is too high for that. True, the wait will be long, but I am not concerned with my reputation during my life. Even had I achieved immense fame, I knew it would evaporate soon enough. I am after a bigger prize than that. Far bigger.

You think I am deranged, that the years of loneliness and isolation have finally tipped me over into an insane self-importance. Ah, but you will see, when I have finished this painting. You will see.

I suppose I’d better tell you my secret; you’ll find it out on your own, and I don’t want that smirk of yours to appear without being summoned by me. I have taken to going to church. Not just for the aesthetics of it all, either. I do the whole thing. Communion, confession, everything. A good Catholic I have become—me, brought up in the Church of Scotland, which abominates all things papist. If you want to break with your past, exterminate history beyond all hope of recovery, there is no better way of accomplishing it than a good conversion, I find. I think it was the discipline of it which attracted me. I was, after all, living in this house on my own, without any attachments, and I needed to give some form to the week. You’ll see that it has influenced my painting considerably. I’m now more than conversant with the sufferings of the martyrs, for the local priest is very keen on such things, and likes to go on about it in his sermons. A man for miracles as well, which I find refreshing these days, when everyone seeks an explanation and refuses to believe anything which cannot be made rational.

He has undertaken my education in matters religious, and gives me readings to ponder after my confessions. He has a predilection for the old Celtic saints, coming as he does from sturdy Breton stock, and I find that they appeal to me greatly as well. A few months ago I read about Saint Coloman, who was accused of being a traitor for some reason and killed. He was hanged, and his body was left on the gibbet, uncorrupted, for eighteen months. I think the point of the story is that it was only his death which sanctified him; before that he had been nothing extraordinary, yet the hate of others turned him into something not even crows dared defile. We are a long way from Good Works and the teaching of the kirk here. Do you think that was why the good father chose that for my bedside reading? Or perhaps there was something else in his mind. Perhaps I was meant to think about those who killed him; they were all drowned.

If I let you see what I am doing here, you would see instantly how Catholic my eyes have become under the influence of such teaching. There you sit on your chair, which I am subtly transforming into a throne. Your pose is imperious, you are more than a mere critic writing for newspapers and fashionable magazines. I seek to approach truth through subtle flattery, you see. I will not short-change you; I have given my word on that. No mere journalist, then, but something more. You will have the pose of a pope, as painted by Velázquez, to remind everyone of the power that people like yourself wield in our modern world. You command, and it comes to pass. You lift your finger and a reputation is made, shake your head and the hopes nurtured for years in the ateliers, worked for and so desperately desired, are dashed forever. So, you do not move armies, do not wreak destruction on faraway lands like our politicians and generals. You are far more powerful than that, are you not? You change the way people think, shape the way they see the world. A great power, wielded without check or hindrance. A despotism of the arts, in which you are high priest of the true and the beautiful. Very much like the Pope in your own way, and in my fashion so will I honour you.

But the church and myself? Yes; I am serious. I have always believed in sin, you know, my Scottish forebears gave me that if nothing else. But I always found Scottish sin so unsatisfying. There is so much of it you can’t really distinguish between any of its wonderful varieties. Playing cards on a Sunday, drinking alcohol for more than medical necessity, seducing your neighbour’s wife, murder—it is all one and the same, sin which condemns you to eternal torment. Wake up, get out of bed, go downstairs and have breakfast, and already your soul is lost. So why not murder someone as well? You’re doomed before you’re even out of the cradle anyway. Down here they are more subtle in the matter. They have big sins and little sins, sins mortal and sins minor; you are not thrust into hellfire without any say in the matter. You have to earn damnation.

A God like that I have time for. We get along, and as He has made my life so much more interesting, I find I can believe in Him a little. So I go to Mass, and sit in rapture with the fishermen and their wives, bathe in the odour of haddock and sanctity, and confess four times a year. I find I have little to own up to these days, so I have to go back over the years, clearing away the backlog. I fear the priest groans when he sees me coming, as he knows he’s going to get another chapter of autobiography which will have him crouched in his little confessional for hours. He suspects me of enthusiasm, which is itself a sin.

On the other hand, he cannot say that I do not have a wondrous variety of faults to own up to. I keep him entertained; occasionally I hear an intake of breath, and I feel him half-smiling in shock, and, I suspect, with more than a little envy. You must meet him, by the way. I don’t mean that because you will enjoy the experience, although he is pleasant enough. Or because he is the high point of social life on the island, even though that is true as well. You
must
meet him: it is an absolute obligation. His power in his domain is greater than that of the Pope in what is left of his. This island of Houat is a theocracy. I do not joke. The priest is deputy mayor, but ensures a nonentity has the official role so that everything is done his way. He is head of the fishing syndicate. The magistrate. The headmaster of the school. His nuns control the electric telegraph, and he has only recently given up control of the alcohol supply. You do not annoy Father Charles. Not if you want to stay on this island. He is monarch, head of the judiciary and God’s representative on earth, all incarnate in the same small man. And he has the only good cook on the island. Benevolent, but in his sphere as autocratic as you are in yours. You must go and see him; if you do not, he will come and see you, and that would be impolite. Do please try to make yourself agreeable, for my sake. None of your witty cosmopolitan repartee, if you don’t mind. He is a proud man, very protective of his subjects who, you should know, do not object to their subjection. Were it not Father Charles, it would be someone else, who might not be so enthusiastic at keeping the French at bay.

This is the man who has taken your place as my guide and confessor. I did my best to enjoy my sins, but I find atoning for them is more pleasurable. Do you know, he once called me a libertine? A marvellously
ancien régime
term, which I was quite taken by. I came back home and immediately sketched myself as Hogarth’s rake, soaked in debauchery in my studio, with my two favourite models draped all over me. I burnt it, though, as I didn’t manage to put in any severity, only nostalgia, which wasn’t proper. You can’t be forgiven unless you truly regret—that’s one of the rules, apparently—and it was clear evidence that my regret was far from total.