by Alex Miller
‘What happened to his pictures?’
‘Mum’s got them.’
‘You and I ought to take a look at them one of these days. I should give your dad the show he never had. Prochownik I. We could make him famous too.’
‘Dad didn’t want to be famous.’
‘Everyone wants to be famous. You ever do a portrait of him?’
‘No.’
‘I’m taking these two. Okay?’ Andy had the 35 x 60 of Marina asleep on the island and the 50 x 30 of Theo Schwartz sitting on the library steps reading in the corner by the bookshelves at Richmond, looking like the tragic bust of Seneca.
Toni was mixing a glaze. He was working. He was putting himself in the picture. ‘Take whatever you like,’ he said.
Andy stood watching him for a while. ‘I’m leaving. I’ll be in touch.’
As Andy was going out the door, Toni called, ‘Nothing’s for sale yet.’
‘Listen to the voice of Prochownik, folks! Nothing’s for sale!’ Andy was gone.
Toni did not look up. He was working at the problem of himself. It was not Haine’s monumental works, after all, but Theo Schwartz’s illicit intimacies that he was drawing upon. It was a delicious surprise for him . . .
fifteen
A week later The Other Family was going nowhere for him. He found to his dismay, after the initial euphoria of beginning work on the problem of himself, that he was unable to translate his imaginary presence convincingly onto the canvas. He made no attempt at the figure of Marina, but painted himself into the composition and scraped himself back to the canvas a dozen times. Always, however, there was the feeling that something essential to the success of the figure was absent. It was a great disappointment to him that this image of himself remained so unresponsive, so without light and life; so without, in fact, the conviction of that elusive sense of presence that is necessary in all successful representations of the human figure in art, even if the representation is no more than an entirely impersonal depiction such as the fugitive figure of Haine’s running man. He was finally forced to admit, with a faint feeling of self-disgust, that he was blocked. His visual sense of himself was inadequate to the task he had set himself. He could not deal with it. For days he did not know what to do, and he had begun to despair when, late one night, he thought of the book he had been holding in his hand the day Marina had telephoned out of the blue and told him that she and Robert had returned from Sydney—that day when he had not had the heart to do anything.
Glad of this distraction from the frustrating and enervating task at the easel, he got off the stool and went over to the pile of books by the door. The book was still on top where he had left it. He picked it up and examined it. It was his father’s old Penguin Classics edition of Sartre’s Nausea, the familiar and very beautiful greens and yellows of Dali’s painting, The Triangular Hour, on the front cover. He had been holding the book in his hand that day, not exactly reading it but looking at it, his eye touching down at a sentence here and there while he had posed for Nada. He could not remember what it was that he had read then that had made him think of the book now, but holding it he nevertheless felt a comforting sense of connection with it that provided him with a certain feeling of reassurance. He did not search randomly through the book’s pages for the line that had arrested his attention that day, but sat on the stool and began to read the book from the beginning. It was a welcome relief from struggling fruitlessly with the attempt to paint his own image . . . Then, suddenly, when he had forgotten the impulse that had made him seek out the book in the first place and was already lost in the world of its story, the phrase that had arrested his attention that day was before his eyes: I should like to understand myself properly before it is too late. He read the sentence over several times, feeling strangely comforted by it, as if he shared with its author, or at least with the character to whom the author had given this thought, the feeling of being lost within himself, and of being unable to solve a conundrum about his own existence that demanded a solution before he could move forward with his work. It was true, after all; as an artist he was, like the character in the book, a stranger to himself. Although the estrangement of the character in the book was of a more dramatic kind than his own, it nevertheless corresponded to his own in his imagination, which was where the realities of the book took shape for him. He felt an enormous gratitude to the book and, instead of going back to the arduous struggle of his work, he sat on the cane chaise and continued to read until he had finished the story. By then it was daylight outside his window and he could hear Teresa’s voice calling to Nada and the sound of the morning cartoons on the television. He had been deeply absorbed for several hours in this strangely beautiful story of a man in search of an image of himself that would satisfy his sense of his own moral worth and would, indeed, justify his existence—and even, possibly, give him a certain pleasure in his life. The fact that the story had not ended happily with the fulfilment of this man’s dream had the strange effect of uplifting Toni’s mood and of making him feel more optimistic than if the story had ended happily. It felt good to have been reminded that the complete fulfilment of such a dream of perfect sanity as the character in the book possessed was unrealistic, and that it was the possession of such a dream, and not its realisation, that had prevented his otherwise inevitable descent into despair. He read the final sentence again before laying the book aside. The yard of the New Station smells strongly of damp wood: tomorrow it will rain over Bouville. Then, with a feeling of regret at having to leave the familiar enchanted world of the story, he closed the book and set it aside on the chaise, promising himself that one day soon he would return to it and read it again, as if not to do so would be in some way a betrayal of what he had gained from it. He stood up and stretched the stiffness from his limbs, then went over and opened the door to the courtyard and stood looking out at the sunlit morning. He not only knew now exactly what he had to do, but he also believed that he would possess the will and the capacity to do it. Somehow his dilemma had resolved itself while he was reading, as if he had gone to sleep and dreamed away the block that had stood implacably before him only a few hours ago.
He went across to the house and joined Teresa and Nada, who were having their breakfast in front of the television. He was tired but anxious to get on with his work and so, instead of going to bed after Teresa and Nada had left, he drove to the local hardware store and purchased a cheap full-length mirror of the kind used on the doors of built-in wardrobes. He brought the mirror home and set it up at the back of the studio. Then he took off his clothes and sat on the stool.
There he was. A naked stranger.
He might not have been looking at himself but at another man who, until this moment, through a kind of mental blindness, he had been unable to see. Looking at his naked body as a subject for his art was a novel experience for him, and was quite unlike looking at himself in the mirror in the normal narcissistic and semi-critical way that he did every day while he was having a shower or shaving. Now his eye was detached from his vanity and he was at liberty to search in the mirror for the truth of the visual form of the naked man reflected there. As he sat gazing at himself it was as if he had become two people.
During the following nights he worked up dozens of studies of his naked torso and limbs in pencil, charcoal, gouache and oil. The studio was soon filled with these intimate images of himself. As he worked on a large freehand charcoal drawing of his shoulders and chest, he was aware that all this self-research, the newness of it and the promise it seemed to hold for him of a real and substantial future as an artist, was linked in some way to his having accepted his identity as the artist Prochownik and to having cast off the old false identity of Powlett—a name which had been given to his father before his own birth by the foreman at the Dunlop plant, who had told his father on his first morning at the factory, Prochownik is not a name in Australia. In what precise way this relinquishing of the falseness of his past name was linked to the revolution of
his view of himself and his art, he did not know, and perhaps he never would know. All he knew for certain was the feeling of rightness about it. Belief in himself was the key to it, not understanding. As he worked he wanted very much to tell Marina everything that had happened to him since they had taken The Schwartz Family to Richmond. But he resisted the desire to telephone her. He was not sure why he resisted, but was aware that there were probably a number of good reasons to resist. So instead of speaking to her over the telephone, or even in the flesh, he made do with imaginary conversations with her in his head. He was at liberty, in these very real but imaginary conversations, to say whatever occurred to him without censoring his thoughts, and so during this time alone with himself and his own reflection, Marina became the ideal companion of his hours and seemed to share with him a perfect intuitive understanding of his situation.
He did not attempt to depict his facial features in any of the studies of himself. Seated on the stool in a variety of poses, and sometimes standing close up to the mirror, he examined his body hour after hour, and as the days and nights passed he gradually became his own familiar. When he closed his eyes before going to sleep beside Teresa in the early hours of each morning, the intricate details of his body remained imprinted on his inner eye . . .
Teresa said very little to him during this time either about his art or about the absence of Marina from his studio. She was being watchful and careful. She was crafting the situation along and was hoping for the best, like a woman in a war zone waiting for the resumption of normality and praying her family would emerge intact. Nada had all but disappeared from his days and in his moments of lucidity away from his studio he regretted this intensely, but he did nothing to change it. He had not heard from Marina on the progress of her new background for The Schwartz Family. But this no longer seemed an urgent matter to him.
One night he was playing around with Theo’s head on a drawing of his own torso when he realised there was something about the composition that greatly intrigued him. He set up a small canvas on the easel and painted an oil study of the subject. When he had finished it he titled the painting The Eye of Tiresias. The bizarre, but beguiling, image came to him not only from Theo’s drawing of the youthful satyr with the head of an old man, but also from the passing glimpse of Theo’s head on the pillow, framed by the doorjamb, as he went by his bedroom that day; imagining the old man’s sorrow at the loss of his beloved Marguerite, and seeing his features hollowed by misery behind his closed eyelids. There was something beautiful and poignant in the perversity of this image for Toni, the dying man’s head on his own youthful torso. He was aware of dealing not with strict likeness but with the repressed, the inarticulate, the unconscious, the as-yet-unrealised, and knew himself to be in touch at last with that dimension of himself that had always eluded him, a place only revealed by a trick of the light at night when he was tired and his mind was no longer clear but was open to the bright, sudden, uncanny energies of fatigue. He could scarcely bear to leave his work and his studio even to eat or to sleep and he did so only reluctantly and briefly, anxious all the time he was away to get back as soon as possible. As he worked he was conscious of touching upon something concealed that he would only be able to recognise when the work was finished. He did a larger painting of Theo’s head on his own naked body, working for hours without a break, lost in the process and unaware of the passing of time. It was an image that seemed to hold for him the key to something of great importance . . .
•
He smelled the cigarette smoke and looked up from the canvas. She was standing in the doorway. She took the cigarette from between her lips and let the smoke drift from her mouth. The way she stood—loose and careless, the cigarette held close to her lips, her other hand propping her elbow, her eyes squinting at him through the smoke—he realised she had been drinking. She was wearing her dressing-gown, her weight resting on one leg, the gown held closed as carelessly as her attitude, her hip thrust out, giving in to the heaviness of her body. Looking slowly over the scene, seeing the interior of his studio as if it were at the bottom of a lake.
‘I can heat something up if you’re hungry.’ She spoke in a lazy tone, as if she could scarcely muster the energy to speak at all, or addressed him from some other place, a place where these events were of no consequence, her gaze going over his naked body, lingering on his glistening skin.
‘What do you think of it?’ he said.
She looked at his painting, considering the head of the old man, alone with himself at the end, in the secret, sacred place of the dying. The naked body of the young man, smooth, cool, charged with energy and expectation. She gave a small lift of her shoulders and took a drag on her cigarette, her expression indifferent. ‘You’re not painting her anymore then?’
He got off the stool and pulled on his underpants and his jeans and put on his T-shirt. ‘It’s a way of approaching myself,’ he said, standing looking at his picture and making a futile effort to include Teresa. It sounded, however, as if he were offering her an excuse. ‘It’s a way of taking myself by surprise,’ he said and he turned from the painting and looked at her. It sounded silly, taking myself by surprise. It would have been better to have kept silent than to have attempted to explain himself. He loved the painting and knew she saw it as something weird and inexplicable. ‘My problemis to get myself into that picture.’ He pointed. ‘That big one. There!’
She looked without interest at The Other Family, unveiled and leaning against the press.
He noticed how a drooping of the flesh at the corners of her mouth had begun to interrupt the clean youthful line of her jaw. He felt guilty, as if the signs of her ageing were the result of his neglect. She was tired and was beginning to give way a little. Tired of work. Tired of waiting for him. Tired of their money problems. Tired of dealing with it all on her own. He said gently, ‘We should take a holiday after the show. Go to Tassie for a couple of weeks. Or over to Perth. We’ve never crossed the Nullarbor together.’ Once again, as soon as he had spoken, he realised it would have been better if he had remained silent.
She turned towards him, cool, sardonic, removed, the wine of disbelief in her eyes. ‘You want me to heat something up for you before I go to bed?’
‘No. It’s okay. I can do it. You go on. I’ll clean up down here.’
‘I made a lasagna and opened a bottle of Dad’s red earlier.’ She watched him. ‘I was hoping you might have come up and shared it with us.’ She did not wait for him to respond but turned abruptly, faltered, a hand to the doorframe, steadying herself, then left.
He should have followed her at once and comforted her. But he did not move. Instead he stood looking into the darkness after her . . . Then he turned from the doorway and examined the bizarre fiction of himself. It was, of course, the image of himself that he had been looking for to include in The Other Family; a young man’s body with the head of a grieving monster. The fascination of the paradox. The artist, in other words. Himself! It was the most important thing he had ever done. He was sure of it. One day Nada would forgive him his neglect of her. But would Teresa ever be able to forgive him? Tomorrow he would begin transferring the image to The Other Family. Marina would know it the moment she saw it. There would be no need to explain or to excuse it to her, or to Theo or Robert, or to Andy either. Whatever the opinions of these people about the painting’s success or failure might be, none of them would require an explanation from him. It would not distress them or threaten them in any way that he had chosen to stay up night after night neglecting his family in order to do such a thing.
Reluctantly he turned away from his painting and went over to the door and stood a moment, his hand to the light switch, looking back at the The Other Family. He loved the painting, and he feared it. His life as an artist! He switched off the light and closed the door. The house was in darkness and there was the stale smell of cigarettes and the heated lasagna. He turned the oven off. He was too distracted to eat. He stood in the darkened room a
t the window looking across the courtyard toward the studio. Teresa’s fountain was still on, the glint of water spouting from the wall in the tinkling silence, splashing into the stone bowl . . .
3
Prochownik’s Dream
sixteen
As he stood at the tall window in the house gazing across the darkened courtyard towards the studio, he was trying to decide whether to return to the studio and begin work at once on the image of himself in The Other Family—for it felt to him that its moment had arrived—or whether to go and get into bed beside Teresa and give her the comfort and reassurance that she needed and which was the very least she might expect from him at this moment. He stood at the window for some minutes before he turned and went out to the studio. He felt bad about abandoning Teresa, indeed he felt like a miserable traitor for doing it; but he did it, nevertheless.
He set up The Other Family and mixed a glaze and, within a few minutes of beginning work, Teresa and the rest of the world had gone out of his mind—the rest of the world, that is, except for Marina, with whom every now and then he enjoyed a brief imaginary exchange; the perfect companion of his solitary hours. He worked without a break through what was left of the night and on through the dawn and into the day, until the naked male figure stood boldly to the left of the principal group in the big painting, poised side on to the viewer. It was a figure that was strangely familiar to Toni, one which in some essential way represented himself, even though its features—or such of them as could be made out, for it stood within a puzzling array of shadows—were those of an old man. As he stood in front of the painting, seeing the figure with a feeling of surprise, he had little recollection of the hours he had spent painting it. He felt that he had at last taken root in his own work, and the possibilities for his art seemed to him to be endless. With the inclusion of himself, he had stepped through a doorway and the field of his future endeavour lay open to him. He would paint them all. Teresa and Nada and Teresa’s family and Andy. All of them. Repeatedly. Naked and clothed. He would depict their vulnerability and their humanity. That is what he would do. Paint what you love, his father had told him, and at last he seemed to understand what his father had meant.
