The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  As I now approach Dengate, my vow to write this book having been privately made at some point in this railway journey, Hans’s sentences chant themselves in my now weary head. How can I do otherwise than give my readers now the document in its entirety:

  The new April morning streams green toward me, through green slats. I leap out of bed to fling open the shutters . . . No, I don’t. I can’t any longer leap out of bed, and I doubt I’ll ever be able to again. Instead, breathing like some wounded young elephant, I lift one slow foot after the other over the red floor-tiles to gain the window. Then, to recover myself, I lean against the wall for a moment before performing that action after which the day proper can begin. Behind me the night has been so cruel. I thought the bout of coughing just after midnight would smash me up, I compared myself to a little wooden boat I once saw tossed on a rock by a gale-force wind and splintered to bits. My temperature had risen also, sweats so strong I couldn’t tell whether I was hot or cold, or what the difference between these states was. But I did fall asleep, and when, at four o’clock I woke up briefly, I had improved, really improved. The fever had subsided, my breaths were regular. So now, despite my labored movements across the room, I can feel my old optimism about to take hold of me again.

  With a slight effort I push back the shutters, then gasp not so much with illness as with health, the health of strong sensory pleasure. Below me—I’m quartered in a second-floor apartment in a tall stone medieval house with a front-wall like a cliff-face and similar houses hanging both above and beneath—the valley lies filled with a lake which reminds me, at first glance, of certain lakes I knew on walking expeditions back in my own Norway. Except that this one isn’t a reed-and-stone-fringed blue, but a heaving white, with gleaming silver waves at its eastern end. Except that it isn’t composed of lapping water but of mist, and will soon break up into formless clouds that will drift upwards to disperse among the surrounding mountains. Then I can look down onto the valley floor with its serpentine river lined by poplars and water-meadows where youths collect edible snails, and then across to all the neighboring villages, which, far from dropping down to a lake-strand, as you might now suppose, perch on hillsides and crags like the nests of clever birds. I take slow steady breaths and the air tastes sweet in my mouth, laden with the scents of ripe vines and chestnuts. I say to myself: “Yes, they were probably right to bring me up here from Rome, sixty kilometers away, too sweltering by day and too steamy by night for my health to stand it.” Yet every day I’m tormented by the possibility that I may never be at large again in that wonderful city, where my life began, for the second time. Mightn’t it really be better to be down there, where the hopes and dreams of years can be met, letting it do its worst on my poor wracked body, than to be putting up with this banishment, this pleasant, calm, picturesque (yes, go on, say it!) tomb.

  Ripples pass over the surface of the “lake”; there is the mildest of breezes, though the September day ahead will surely be very warm, very still. I turn my head to my left and a face smiles and a hand waves at me from the next-door window but one: Giulia, so kind, so handsome, so assuring, so difficult to understand with her country dialect that doesn’t fit in with any grammar I’ve studied, any Italian book I’ve tried to read. Knowing I’m not only awake but out of bed, she will now go and prepare my breakfast (just coffee and rolls), which she’ll bring in along with a filled ewer and a bowl for washing. When I’m done and dressed, I shall go into the room immediately next to this bedroom, my studio (well, I’m entitled to call it that) with its comforting aromas of oils, charcoal, clay, turpentine, and tinker with sketches until my model and helper, Orazio arrives.

  What would the Wangel girls, Bolette and Hilde, say if they saw me here? I often ask myself that question. I was drawn to the pair of them back in Molde, spent much time with them, confided in them too, and they for their part were friendly, indeed hospitable to me. But they also laughed at me, Hilde, the younger and the prettier of them, more (and more openly) than her sister. Her mockery of me behind my back doesn’t bear thinking about, even now! I’m pretty sure neither of them believed in me as an artist, ever thought I’d make it as a sculptor, even if my health permitted me to work. In their opinion, though they never exactly said as much (at least not to me), Herr Strømme has been supporting me out of charity, or some purely personal whim. (Was he perhaps my biological father?) Bolette and Hilde would never have anticipated the kind of acceptance I was to find in Rome, the way my enthusiasms and projects were listened to at the Scandinavian Club and even outside it. And wouldn’t even Hilde be impressed by the way (this very morning, for instance) I override my complaints and apply myself to my chosen medium, how after a night of tormenting coughs and feverish sweats I busy myself getting ready for my model, and with precise knowledge of what has artistically to be done?

  And wouldn’t my former friend in England, Martin Bridges, be impressed also, though such (I take it) is his shame at himself for the love he accepted from me, that he has never been able to write me even the faintest note of help or inquiry?

  Orazio. He’s due at eleven o’clock, but punctuality isn’t one of his strongest points, and he can be up to an hour and a half late, always for an excellent reason, during which time I get impatient, restless, almost annoyed. I’m eager for his visits—to be getting on with work I believe in, to have company, and that of somebody my own age and largely of my sympathies—and yet they fill me with dread, too. That’s the paradox. There are times, and today, I’m afraid, is one of them, when I could almost wish he were not coming to pose for me.

  First, the good things. As a model he is incredibly patient. The artist using him couldn’t be more pleased with his capacity for sustaining demanding postures than he is himself. He revels in his own strength and suppleness. Though I can never be quite sure how long he will be able actually to stay with me, whatever our discussions on the matter the previous day, I know that once here he will not stint himself. Also he is genuinely interested in the whole making process—in my sketches, my calculations, my little clay figures suitable for holding in my palm to guide me toward the big work. He takes a contemporary’s ambitions to be a good sculptor perfectly seriously, whereas in northern Europe, absorption in an art is apt to be taken as one further proof of a young man’s idiocy. Orazio belongs, you might say, to the land of Michelangelo and Bernini and Canova (and my revered Thorvaldsen, with his “Roman birthday”), even if to an obscure corner of it. But—a paradox—he doesn’t, I’m sure, come from it. His father—whom I have only spoken to in my poor Italian—is, I am pretty sure, an Englishman, fled from his native country to the warmth of this classical land, whose poets and sculptors have taught him, he once told me, to find the spirit in the flesh, and the flesh in the spirit.

  Second good thing (though here, I think, the problems begin). He has a general alive-ness which communicates itself from the moment he passes through my door, possibly even before, as I hear his springy step on the stairs. It’s a tonic in itself to be in the presence of somebody who gets such satisfaction simply from being himself. From existing. And then the mean inner voice whispers:

  Why couldn’t Hans Lyngstrand have been granted Orazio Martello’s easy good fortune? Hans has had ideas, plans, which go far beyond the limits of himself, and from which humanity (is it wrong to think in such large terms?) could benefit, but which he will very probably never realize. Whereas Orazio . . .

  If I break out into punishing coughs, if I have a giddy spell when my vision temporarily betrays me and the objects in the studio I’ve so carefully assembled threaten to merge into each other and melt, nobody could feel to me more kind than Orazio, with his arms steadying my shaking frame, his muscular hands rubbing my back. I put it like that—“could feel to me more kind”—because I’m not wholly sure that Orazio in himself is kind. I’m far from sure that (like Hilde Wangel back in the fjord-town) he doesn’t despise me (well, a little, if not a lot) for my condition. I can tell him till I’m blue in the
face (as I fear I often am) about that terrible shipwreck in the English Channel which I survived but which put paid to normal health for me for ever. The sly judging look that then comes into his eyes tells me his thoughts only too clearly: “If that had happened to me, Orazio Martello, I wouldn’t have turned out like you now. I’d be just as you see me today, able to tackle anything and everything I want to, I wouldn’t have become weaker, not by one millimeter.” And if I dare meet the pale blue gleam of his eyes, which I often avoid, I receive something even more disconcerting, the challenge, the proposition (as I sometimes think it) that to deal with my life, I should become him. How, you might ask? Even the possibilities of an answer brings on an increase and an irregularity of my pulse, too often quickened by fever anyway.

  Orazio can’t be held at all accountable for another reason why I dread his visits. No modelling session, for all the scheme I’ve worked out beforehand, goes as well as I’ve been hoping it would, or even—poor fool that I am—been expecting, even on my best days, even on those when I’ve scaled down the agenda. Well, I suppose that’s a situation all artists, including those in perfect health, have to face some time or other. Execution never, or only exceptionally, matches conception, especially if the conception is ambitious. Friends down in Rome have told me tales of the Michelangelo of our time, some of whom have actually called on him: Auguste Rodin. At the start of this decade he received a staggeringly handsome commission for a great work which was going to rival Ghiberti himself, more, was to match in bronze (in its scope and power) nothing less than Dante’s Divine Comedy itself. Yet though he has produced figure after figure, he has not yet been able to blend them into any kind of whole, and is already disappointing those who believed in his genius. Ridiculous, I know, to make a comparison between such a living titan and a young sick Norwegian nobody. But nevertheless I always make it—after hearing myself talking to Orazio, in my slightly theatrical Italian, about my intentions. He’s perfectly aware, I know, of the discrepancy between what I’ve announced and what I’ve actually managed in any sitting (indeed in the totality of sittings), and the look in his eyes—this is what is so disquieting—suggests that he doesn’t put this down entirely to my illness either. I feel he has some instinctive ability (just as pretty Hilde Wangel did) to see right through to what is weakest in my character. “There he goes again,” his face, no, his whole body says, “giving his dreams too much headway. Take those dreams away from il signor norvegese, and what would be left? Certainly not the ability to make this tribute to his sailor-friend’s tragic adventures we’ve heard so much about. (Rather too much, to tell the truth!)

  And that brings me to the third and maybe most important thing about Orazio which gets between me and my work and makes me sometimes wish he didn’t come to my studio. Yes, like him, Orazio’s a well-built, vigorous male (with a good deal of amorous experience behind him, I would think), but in truth he has scant similarity to the original inspiration for my—well, allow me to call it, my one serious contribution to the art of sculpture. Down in Rome my friends and colleagues at the Scandinavian Club found me models who did suggest, at least to some degree—by the lines on their faces, by the alternations of brightness and cloudiness in their eyes, the involuntary gestures of their great hands—his physical versatility, his capacity for burning passion (and, as I was later to find out, for inspiring it in a woman), his brooding inability to forget any injury to his heart or his dignity, his knock-about life in three continents and on many seas, throughout the rough, tough varied scenes of which he ceaselessly recalled that magic he’d learned in his remote boyhood. Not so Orazio. Never, for one moment, does he suggest any of all that. But he does suggest the second figure I intend to include in my capolavoro, and that is how I shall use him, as the eternal foil to Him.

  Him! As I work on my sketches or on my palm’s-breadth clay models, I’m thinking of him with all the intensity I can muster, reliving our strange proximity, trying to work my mind into his powerful, bewildering person as hard as I can. I would be utterly amazed, dumbfounded indeed, if I learned that he were thinking of me! He’s rarely, I would wager, given me a thought! For a long time I believed him dead, was almost certain that the English Channel in its ferocity must have carried him off. Did I not have that message at the Gateway in the summer of 1885, with all those convincing details? But some form of telepathy must have been in operation there. Because, three years later, quite unexpectedly, and in the beautiful company of the Wangel sisters, I encountered the man again. We did not speak, we did not even exchange glances. He went away from Molde on an English ship, on which he was a passenger, his passenger’s ticket probably having been given him as a reward for work done for the line to which she belonged. I expect he is bo’suning for that company now.

  I don’t even know how best to refer to him. Which is, of course, another way of saying I don’t know what I should call my sculpture depicting his agony. I got to know him as Johnston, though even then, callow though I was, I doubted that was his real name. On our remeeting, up in that West Norwegian fjord-town of summer sunshine, flowers and mountain vistas, I learned through Ellida, his loved one, that, before I came across him, he’d been known as Friman. Being Johnston then had been a means of escape from the troubles of being Friman—which I’m almost positive wasn’t his name either.

  But, despite the drama of late summer last year, Johnston is how I think of him. Though wouldn’t Friman sound better, have more resonance, as the title for a major sculpture? Yet was he freer than any of the rest of us? If he had the ability to know more intimately than most men can the secret ways of Nature, of the rough seas and the whales who both ride and inhabit them, of the eagles in the mountains that sweep down to northern harbors, and the seals who brave out storms on rocks, then he had none of the abilities which a free man needs, to let gentleness prevail, and harmony be your guide.

  What a life I’ve led! Odd, but honest, to be using the past tense about it now. At the end of my first year in Norway my patron took me to Sӕby in Denmark, on the coast of Jutland, and there, among the charming, little low (usually one-story) color-washed houses, and the sand dunes and the beaches on which I loved to find glinting pieces of amber, I came across most days a distinguished frock-coated man in middle age, with fierce eyes and an immaculate white beard, muttering to himself about the life of the sea, about all the myriad forms that are sustained beneath its blue surface. How part of humankind longed to go back there to join them, but never—or only rarely—could admit this to itself. Then, two years later, when I went to Molde, that “Town of Flowers” on Romsdalsfjord, I heard of a man, a writer, who had stayed for a summer in one of the two grand hotels that have recently been erected on the sea-front, and who could never stare down long enough at the sea—often from little rowing-boats which he’d take out himself on to the fjord—and who again talked to himself about how all existence was intricately related to the ocean depths. If only we knew how to attain them again.

  And other times this man (he was famous) would go—along with many another visitor to Molde—all the way up to the View. From its eminence, you see, on the opposite side of the fjord, row upon row of mountain-peaks, cones that in the sun glisten white or silver with ice and snow, 222 of them, so the locals say. And these told another truth about existence, that we were all bound up with the obstinate mineral world, whether we liked it or not, and must be received into it sooner or later.

  It will be sooner, of course, that I, not yet thirty, will enter the domain of Nature’s supremacy. Why pretend any longer? I’m too exhausted to do so. And nothing is stranger in my life than that I shall make my entrance from a quiet village near Rome (that Mecca for all Scandinavian artists), whose existence I first knew about just after my shipwreck from the name of the house in the Mercy Room of which I lodged for a few weeks. Castelaniene, Castelaniene—a beautiful name for a beautiful place. And back in England it honored the scene of a beautiful love.

  Martin Bridges, my Martin, if I
am unable ever to offer you again my lips, my loins, my heart—and I surely am unable—then I shall give you something endurable enough to survive till the day of your own death, may it be ever so distant!

  I shall revert to the past tense now for have I not reached the very evening when I wrote the first sentences of this memoir, the evening of May 11 last year, when I watched Hans Lyngstrand move again, on the boards of Terry’s Theatre and when Will Postgate had made me an irresistible offer which I nevertheless whole-heartedly resisted?

  I took my dog Balthasar out for his walk, and my feet took me of their own accord down to the Royal Gardens. (Where else?) There of course it stood, sturdy enough to face up to all weathers, The Sailor’s Revenge, which I could never have in my own home or garden but which by giving to the people of Dengate I had not exactly spurned. I realize that I have not informed readers of the particularities of the two figures that constitute it. One figure is Johnston, newly emerged from the sea, irate, threatening, arm raised to strike. The other is a young man, who has clearly not yet seen him but will surely shortly turn around and, appalled, do so. I suppose the model for him was indeed Orazio, though in truth it is a generalized enough figure. But I cannot see him either as Mrs. Fuller’s “disappeared son” or as a mere composite representative of youth. I know that this second figure on the plinth is none other than myself. And how do I know? Because he holds himself in the very posture in which that now-distant summer night I received Hans’s love.

  Publication Note

  The sculpture still stands in the Royal Gardens, Dengate, Kent. Martin Bridges’s will specified that after his death the memoir he had written “accounting for the work” should be bequeathed in perpetuity to the Dengate Museum, which has accordingly held it since 1946. Martin Bridges’s grandson, the art historian and Thorvaldsen expert, Horace Bridges (1922–2003) gave the work its present title.