by John Gardner
I stare through the windshield, through my clownish reflection, and though I’ve forgotten my behavior already, I am full of wrath, remorse. Ah, how I’ve made that poor girl suffer! Woe, woe! My reflected mouth twists. Then I smile (so does it), gloomier than ever, and pull down the brim of my old black hat till it meets with the collar of my overcoat. She’ll forgive me. Poor Joan understands my plight, and hers; the plight of the universe. Lightless; mere shell of its former self. We’ve survived a good many trials together, my Joan and I, poor suffering artists (a composer, a poet). The years have made us like a couple of sly old outlaws, shriveled and testy, holed up in a cave. We dress in black.
The car lights myopically grope down the road, past old drunken telephone poles, dead barns.
Then we’re home, the house and chickenhouse stark as tombstones under the zombie glow of the security light. She parks the car— hangs it up by one fender on the sagging fence—comes around to my side and helps me out, and we lean on each other across the lawn to the steps and up into the bone-white house, empty, too big for us two tonight, the children sleeping with friends in town. I suffer a black premonition of sad old age. Two husks in the doorway. Pictures of children, grandchildren. I play with the idea, walking stooped now, testing my lips in search of teeth.
“I b’lieve I’ll go set in my chair, heh, good ole chair,” I say to my love, old joy of my life, and wring my fingers.
“Come to bed,” she says.
I give her a look. There’s a time I’d have knocked her on her ear, but we’ve grown old. I obey. She pauses at the top of the stairs to catch her breath, one hand on the newel post, the other on her heart. (Tick tick. Ah, woe!) She was beautiful once. I watch her looking at the painting of our daughter. She glances back at me, a thought in her mind (she too, our Lucy, will grow womanly, beautiful; but time will blast her, her flesh will sag like an elderly dog’s—they too have their flicker, their hour as art, like Snow White’s stepmother, Cleopatra, Eve). She looks down, silent; a kind of snag in Time. At last we continue on our arduous way, come huffing and blowing to our room—cracked plaster— and, fumbling, helping each other as we must, we get ready for bed, take our teeth out. I’m ninety-two. The planet is dying—pestilence, famine, everlasting war. The nation’s in the hands of child molesters.
She says in the darkness, “I miss John Napper.”
I grunt, swimming back, unwinding time, and I smile, foxy. I pat her hand. I have half a mind to get up and write letters, give all my enemies heart attacks. I am sober, as still as midnight, full of joy.
2
He was a huge old man, wild gray long hair and shabby clothes—clothes that transcended shabbiness, became a kind of magnificent mess, a flight of wild chickens and Chinese kites that filled the whole room, filled continents: the last and noblest argument for monarchy. He was full of joy, mad Irish. His pleasure in life was ridiculous, like a bear reeling home with a honey tree, and I, even I, was impressed by it. He had an absurdly beatific grin, even when the songs he sang were sad (he was a singing painter). When he sang of the death of Hiram Hubbard, grinning down like a snowcapped mountain at his steel guitar, he was Brahma himself, standing outside, behind, beyond, creating the world out of nothing, with luminous eyes. My banjo, above his calm, sang rackety glee.
“It must be hell to be his wife,” I said, sitting in my corner, bloodshot, hunched. His admirers hadn’t considered that. They looked startled, pursed their lips, troubled, and gloomily shook their heads like a roomful of crows.
But his wife was brave. She would smile absently, hearing him sing, or she’d help him find the lost pieces of the tape recorder when he wanted to tape the goats outside their bedroom window or the roar of a passing train. Day and night, through that year, they’d have visitors over—“Come anytime! Marvelous!”—sitting on the floor of their shell of an apartment, and John Napper would hold forth, wide-armed, beaming, on the general topic Everything, and his wife, Pauline, amused and sly, would hunt for the coffeepot cord he’d misplaced (for all his care) and would eventually work out a toggle for him. “Perfect!” he’d say, the soul of happiness. Happiness is stupid, dangerous; but there was some mysterious trick in his, some ingenious sleight of wits. I watched them, brooding, hatbrim over my eyes so they wouldn’t suspect.
Sometimes, absurdly, the campus police would arrive at his sessions, hands on their nightsticks, sniffing for pot, ears cocked for time bombs, watching the bearded guests as they would tarantulas. John Napper’s smile was so gleeful I could hardly believe, myself, that we were innocent. When they left he would say, “Incredible! Simply incredible!” He looked it. “Balance is everything,” he’d whisper, and give us a wink.
I wrote in my notebook: A tricky old man.
I wrote:
When people with violently opposed opinions attack each other in John Napper’s presence, he has two main ploys. One is to say, “Exactly, exactly!”—soberly, thoughtfully—to everything said on either side, until the people debating grow slightly confused; the other is to resolve the thing by an appeal to higher principle, for instance: “Welsh music and Irish music are both marvelous, both marvelous! But personally I hate Welsh music, and I love Irish music.”
Ridiculous or not, everybody shifts to the side of the Irish. It’s a fact, however, that Welsh music is superior.
I watched and waited. My sense of world sorrow, black-hearted rage, took increasing concentration. I’d go home from parties melancholy, half-convinced that all my poems were false, I’d misunderstood the universe.
“How happy they seem,” my wife would say, leaning on her elbow, jaw thrown forward.
“Shut up,” I’d say with a furtive glance upward, my hand on her knee. “I’m working on it.”
His stint as visitor among us ended, and he went back to Paris, to his studio. He was replaced by a typical important artist—crafty, charged with familiar opinions. He scoffed at John Napper, couldn’t play the guitar, and talked like a commoner of “masterpieces.” I wrote the new man threatening letters signed Auber, or The Arrow, or KKK, tipped off the police on his sexual perversions, and avoided him. He was crazy. A German. As for myself, my writing turned darker. I could think in nothing but hexameters.
Joan stopped composing.
“I can’t,” she said. The children, supposed to be doing their homework, were hiding behind the couch, making flags.
“Write!” I told her. “I’m the wolf at the door.” I clawed, made a horrible face. I meant it.
“No use,” she said. “I’ve lost conviction.”
“The planet’s dying,” I said, “the nation’s in the hands—“
She turned to me, slowly, the way blind people turn, or cranes at dusk, at some whisper no one else hears. “Why can’t we go visit the Nappers?”
“In Europe?” I howled. I banged the piano. “We’re poor! Have you forgotten?”
“Poorer than you think,” she said—smug, full of woe. The children peeked over the back of the couch.
I wrote grant applications, working down cellar by candlelight. I cackled. They were brilliant! They worked.
3
The only paintings of his that I’d seen were brochure reproductions, mostly black and white, for a show he’d had in New York while visiting America. Landscape with flowers, people with flowers, flowers with (barely visible) cats. I’d smiled, lugubrious (memento mori), and thought them pretty—decorative, tasteful, good at least in this: They were the work of a warmhearted, gentle old man. For what that’s worth.
When we reached his Paris studio, in a famous old house full of studios, La Ruche—dark, roundish house, octagonal, gloomy in its cavern of trees as the House of Usher, but tamed by dogs, kids, half-dead vines, here and there bits of sculpture and auto parts collected and abandoned by generations of Left Bank artists—the Nappers weren’t home. They’d loaned the place to some friends and had gone off to England. We drank wine with the friends—a beaming American of twenty-two and a girl who was pretty,
carefully considered, but invisible against the gray-white walls—and after a while, from out of the closet and under the bed we dragged some old John Napper paintings. They were a shock: dark, furious, intellectual, full of scorn and something suicidal. Mostly black, with struggles of light, losing. He’d been through all the movements, through all the tricks, and he thoroughly understood what he was doing—a third-generation master painter. Understood everything, it seemed to me, but why he kept fighting instead of slitting his wrists. No sense of the clownish in the universal sorrow. No sense of dressing up, putting on gray spats, for the funeral. I hadn’t looked with sufficient attention at the pretty pictures of flowers in the New York brochure.
“Amazing, eh?” the American who was using the studio said. Looking helpless, innocent, maybe slightly alarmed, pulling at the ends of his big John Lennon mustache. A cartoonist. He had eyes like Orphan Annie. He played bass jug in a jug band back home, which was how he’d met John Napper.
I nodded, peeked out past the brim of my hat. Joan smiled, superior, looking over some mosaics by the wall. We drank some more wine and talked about Paris. There used to be two famous places like La Ruche. The other of the two was blown up in the riots, just after it was given to the Government. The friend had been told by the white-bearded sculptor who lived in the darkness downstairs with his dying wife.
When we arrived in London, I called up John. He invited us over. Third-floor apartment upstairs from a sensitive elderly lady who was, John assured us, “Marvelous! Marvelous!” We’d seen her peeking through the curtains at us. We went down to his second-floor studio with our Scotch and tea—my Scotch, their tea—and we looked at the picture he was working on now; also some others, all of Pauline, that he’d recently finished. The new one was large—not enormous, the size of the studio stopped him—but large; generous. A lady in flowers. You couldn’t tell much. He’d just roughed it out with thin, thin colors, almost invisible. Crafty, eyeing him sideways, I mentioned the paintings in his studio in Paris.
John Napper became still, towering above me in his bare feet, big belly protruding, his hand—behind the uptilted nose—radiating wild silver hair, Christ’s head (slightly mystical, cracked) in polished wire. He smiled, a confirmed and satisfied maniac. “Amazing, isn’t it? I was mad!” His hands clapped. “Totally mad!” He was ecstatic, awed, like an old-time pirate reviewing, long after conversion, his shocking deeds. I leered, sharp-eyed, and John Napper said, “But that’s nothing. Nothing!” He made a dive, a terrifying swoop, at a huge stack of old canvases and photographs under the table where he kept his brushes. He started sorting them, scattering the things into, loosely, piles. Joan and our children—Lucy and Joel—and John’s wife, Pauline, went after the ones that drifted away to the corners of the room, the fire-bright patches of light by the windows. He showed us his history—what survived of it. He’d lost more work than most artists do: a random bomb on an English house; a musty, dark cellar in a French gallery, once a Nazi torture chamber, where mold and murderous ghosts ate the paint. (John Napper’s view.) When he’d sorted out what he wanted us to see, we looked, heads touching, at the Napper retrospective. Ghoulish faces, fuliginous lump-people, terrible previews of Hiroshima, mournful cityscapes the texture of, roughly, dried blood. Here and there, there was a scraggly flower, a crushed bit of light. “Amazing!” he kept saying. Joan smiled, moved away with Pauline, talking.
He had, among other things, some portraits. At one time portraits had kept him alive. One was a commission portrait of the Queen— Elizabeth II. Idealized. “The critics all said I should be hanged,” he said. “They wanted her dumpy.” He grinned, eyes bright as cornflowers. “They love her exactly as she is,” he said. The grin turned into a laugh, pure joy at the ridiculous goodness, deep down, of patriotic critics. He said:
“Lecteur paisible et bucolique,
Sobre et naif homme de bien,
Jette ce livre saturnien …”
Lucy said, “John, will you draw my picture?”
He looked thoughtful, half-imp, half-grandfather. “How much can you afford, Lucy?”
She thought about it, an eight-year-old not indifferent to money. She got out her purse and counted. She said: “Seven pennies.” Sly. She pushed back her hair; her mother’s gesture.
John Napper beamed, eyes brilliant and wicked. The sly shall inherit the earth. “Perfect.”
Joel watched, envious, and made his face a mask.
We agreed to meet at the Wallace Collection, where John could introduce Joel to the armor and, after that, sketch Lucy. Then Pauline, my wife, Joan, and the kids went upstairs to the living quarters, to look at Pauline’s mosaics. (Gloomy things, as mosaics go. The things from her youth were bright, full of warmth.) I hung around John’s studio looking at the photographs. The morose early paintings, deadly intellectual, furious; the realistic portraits, expert, professional. Neither kind was, I thought, great art, though they were obviously good. There was something I felt myself at the edge of (peering like a raven, round back hunched). It had to do with light. Beyond—deeper than—all the technical facility, all the spearheading or riding of movements, there was something obsessive, obscurely frightening, in the light.
“Isn’t it amazing!” he said happily, as if all that were a thousand years ago.
I nodded, glanced away. Smoky, dead yellow sunlight came in, pushing down from a slate-gray sky past the chimney-loaded houses west of the studio. It crept toward the paintings as if drawn in by them, like Grendel.
4
We met at the Wallace, and John showed us the armor. He stood huge and wild-headed, an enormous bird with diamond eyes, his sportcoat tattered like an anarchist’s. He pointed out the ornamentation on swords and pistols, so finely wrought that it might have been carved by intelligent spiders. Sometimes he’d bend over, bringing his huge beak an inch from the glass, like a nearsighted eagle in front of a mirror, his eyes screwing up like a jeweler’s, and he’d say, “Exactly!” Not to us. “It’s marvelous, the work of human hands! Do you realize the people who wore this equipment—all those glorious heroes—are dead, all vanished!” He laughed, pure joy, examining his hand. It was long and powerful, lighter than a wing. The armor stared at us, faceless— abandoned husks, old crusts of creatures. We noted the Christian solemnity of German artists, the change in the English when they’d once seen the work of India. We smiled, paternal, at the clever French. He kept glancing at the window, and at some point, for reasons of his own, he said, “Good. Exactly!” and snatched Lucy’s hand and walked with her, smiling and bowing like a courtier leading a princess—but hurrying, subtly; gently and firmly propelling her down the long hall counterpaned with slanting light and out to the courtyard, the fountain, where he meant to do the sketch. He seated her on a bench in the shade and sat down cross-legged on the ground with his pad and pencils—he, too, was in the shade, wild-haired, the fountain in sunlight— and started. He got Joel to tell him a long, made-up story (“Something about castles and princesses,” John said, and Joel obliged). He listened to the story as if with total concentration as he drew. Then he finished, shot a glance at the sky, and said, “It’s going to work,” and smiled— something cunning in the smile, as if, by an old and ingenious trick, he’d outwitted a dangerous enemy.
We left the place, John subtly hurrying, propelling us, and caught a taxi. John dropped us off at our hotel and hurried home.
He came back that night to our hotel, rags flying, his hair eloquently insane, face jubilant with light. He’d brought his guitar. I got out my banjo and we went down together to the hotel pub—a splendid place. The hotel was the house where Edward VII kept Lillie Langtry—a place full of hand-carved balconies, rooms with paintings on the ceilings (old rapes and wars), marble-topped tables, sculptures of centaurs, malevolent cherubs, a dying stag. What was now the pub was her private theater, complete (still complete) with her royal lover’s box—appropriately gloomy, set back from the lamps. (The whole pub was gloomy, or all but the frosted-gla
ss mirror, indecipherable swirls.) John Napper had been there to parties before the house turned hotel— the Inverness Court. It was run now by Irishmen—grinning young bellboys, Lucy’s friends; bossy colleens at the main desk and back in the dining rooms; a manager built like a pigeon, with curly black hair. We sat at a table on what used to be the stage—the bar girl turned off the television, some American thriller—and we played as we’d done in John’s apartment in southern Illinois. The manager bought us drinks and sang. Obscene or sweetly plaintive ditties on love and death. “Lovely,” John kept saying. My glasses were misted over with tears. Soon the pub was packed with Irishmen, singing in the darkness, playing tin whistles. I sang a dirge or two in Welsh, old mining disasters, modal hymns from the bottom of the sea. The Irish were polite. John sang the rare old American song he’d picked up on his visit. “Hiram Hubbard.” His voice got quieter and quieter as he approached the end, the execution. “And his body shrank away.” The Irishmen wept. Someone mentioned Belfast. The police were shooting people now. After that we played some more, but the Irish didn’t sing. Laughed; threw well-turned phrases like darts. It was late, 2:00 A.M., and our singing was illegal. The Irish began leaving, a few at a time, and my Joan took our sleeping children up to bed. The colleen at the desk was astonished, furious. We had a last beer, John Napper smiling, gazing down at the table top, not talking except to say now and then, “Amazing.” I went to the door with him and watched him walk away, majestic old giant in his flowing tatters, to hunt down one of those big black hearse-like taxis. At the Bayswater corner he turned and waved his huge guitar case, gray hair bright as the sunlight coming through white-caps in a dream, and then he disappeared into the blackness beyond the lamp.
5
I was working on an epic poem, the Jason story. A ridiculous project, but you write what the spirit tells you to, whether the spirit’s responsible or not. I decided to drop by John Napper’s with it. I knew that when he paints he listens to music, the radio, anything at all to distract him.
