Mr. Neal’s Scots ancestry was clear from first glance: his blue eyes sparkled with the intensity of his soul; his hair, light and silky in texture, framed his fine high forehead in soft natural ringlets; his complexion too was fair, his lips full, and all the features of his head proportionate. He was not tall, but his frame, even for a man of about fifty, was robust. His whole body seemed as vigorous as his mind, both in continual motion, as if from some turbulence of energy or activity within. Miss Fuller at times called him by a pseudonym he had once used, “Jehu O’ Cataract,” and I cannot think of a better to express the essence of his wild yet learned character.
He was self-educated in literature and law, and he disclosed at one point his own system—which I cannot possibly now remember—for learning foreign languages, by means of which he had taught himself perhaps ten, and with phrases from which he peppered his conversation. “Svelature, trenta o quarantu!” (or some such thing) he would cry out suddenly. His conversation revealed a doctrine of novel writing somewhat in the mesmeric line. Which doctrine, Mr. Spooner humorously suggested, “Mr. Neal-O’Cataract” used to insure the unmatched spontaneity and power of his prose, and the entrancement of his readers, but which also caused him to “burst upon the page with all the sins of his early drafts about him, like weeds hanging from a god rising out of the sea.”
“If he takes as his masters the digressive Mr. Fielding and Mr. Sterne,” Miss Fuller put in, “he does so with barely half their discipline!” She tweaked him, if rather pleasantly, for his “little essays on a host of topics and for substantial doses of self-justification” implanted in his “perhaps too-melodramatic fictions.” Indeed, she gave a humorous rendition of “his abundant lectures on fine art” in Randolph.
“Mr. Neal has been much criticized for the erratic and roaring audacity of his style,” Miss Fuller then suggested, “but he is also a great exponent of naturalness in the speech of his characters.”
“Yes,” he admitted, “I have striven to reproduce familiar patterns of speech, or talking on paper, as opposed to display or oration, and I think that is one way to insure a distinct quality in our national literature, to distinguish it from that of our British cousins. Otherwise, are not our American authors left eternally struggling to out-English the English themselves? Anglis ipsis Anglior!”
“Might not we also distinguish our national literature,” Mr. Spooner suggested—for he and Miss Fuller alone had read Mr. Neal—“by a frankness we find in your own tales?”
“I hope so,” Mr. Neal agreed. “I myself have always tried to write, and to encourage others to write, a daring and naked exposure of what people generally can not avoid thinking, but dare not express.”
“Which may be the main evil in this flood of indistinguishable novels expressly for women,” Mr. Spooner offered, “this absence of honesty, for lack of a better word.” He began to open another bottle of wine.
“Yes, George, I believe that is our problem, this side of the Atlantic,” Mr. Neal agreed.
“You mean to say, Mr. Neal,” I asked, “that American authors need no longer apologize for their novels as the products of their leisure hours for the moral improvement of ladies and children of leisure?”
He looked at me sharply. “Indeed, Mrs. Fullerton!” He smiled. “Why can not the novel ascend the same heights as poetry and take within its ample purview all fiction of great merit, whether in drama or verse or prose—wherever, in brief, the novelist finds imaginary creatures, who entertain and terrify us, who are invested with all the attributes of humanity and agitated by all the passions of our nature?” He looked about him with an air of expectancy. His words—“the naked exposure of what people can not avoid thinking, but dare not express” struck me as somehow essential, for painting as well as for writing.
“In short,” he began again, “tell me that storytelling one way or another is not the chief employment of all mankind! Can you? Can anyone truly say it is not? Then storytelling—novels above all—thereby might have the widest appeal and the deepest influence upon our nation!”
“You make an ambitious appeal for poor scribblers, John,” Mr. Spooner said, raising his glass and laughing. “Gibbon, would you run down cellar, please, and fetch us a couple more of these Bordeaux.”
“Well, sir, may we say at least,” Mr. Neal continued, “that in painting as in novel making Mr. Emerson enlightens us once again when he says that ‘mere study as much as mere talent can not make a writer. There must be a man’—or a woman I daresay—‘behind the book!’ Or, let us add, behind the painting.”
As a reader of novels, I was much taken with these comparisons of writers and painters, of making American novels and paintings. Again, I felt as if he were expressing my own secret if unformed thoughts.
Our conversations went on late into the night and thereby once again was the following day spoiled for serious work. I should not have been able to concentrate on my work in any event, for that day Mr. Wellington had brought his deposition for me to sign.
But John Neal also paid us a parting visit in the afternoon, even while all the Spooners and I remained about the dining table reading the newspaper accounts of his lecture. Mr. Spooner was in fact in the middle of a sentence, decrying the obtuseness of these reports which had mistaken Mr. Neal for a destroyer of marriages. Mr. Spooner was saying that Neal was a thoroughly married man and devoted husband who, however, had once known his share of vital women, and that Mr. Neal, far from recommending profligacy or abstinence, did not at all deny our lower, animal passions.
Into his very pronouncement, as I say, walked Mr. Neal. He himself had read and had by heart one passage in particular that amused him, which he recited now in a most amusing voice: “The subject was discussed in a very entertaining and original manner, but we suspect the fair are well satisfied with their present influence.” Everyone laughed.
Mr. Spooner flipped through the newspaper, then read on in the same spirit: “The subject would be too dangerous if it were not too absurd to debate. These are the jokes of a man fond of humor and fantastic notions.”
After some further amusement at the expense of his critics, Mr. Neal stepped over to a painting Julian had been working on. Julian had not come to the studio that afternoon, and the painting was unfinished, but Mr. Neal expressed his approval the more he examined its composition and effects. “Marvelous!” he said. “And this is Mr. Forrester’s work, you say?”
“Yes,” Mr. Spooner answered. “His work has changed for the better since Italy.”
“Something of Canaletto, perhaps, is here?” Mr. Neal suggested.
Mr. Spooner nodded. “And his trips home to Gloucester in aid of his aging mother have inspired new subject matter: the sea and land of his home ground.”
“I think his old friend Fitz Lane has had something of a benevolent influence on our dear Julian,” I ventured.
“You may be quite right, Allegra,” Mr. Spooner said. “But whatever the variety of influences, Julian has begun to devote himself to work, and I am the happier for it. This particular marine,” he continued, “is a memory, an instant from childhood when he saw a certain effect of summer air, light, and sea. It struck him deeply at the time, and there you see it called forth upon the canvas.” Even in its unfinished state, Julian’s canvas was unlike anything I had seen him paint before.
The sky was broad and heavy-clouded in the upper half of the canvas, creating a sombre tone. From somewhere, however, a shaft of light illumined a distant sail, with the brilliance of sun gleaming on snow. The distant hull, on the other hand, was scarcely visible. Everywhere, the dark sea obscured other modest vessels. Islands were mostly in shadow as well, but for here and there one part of an island was ignited into brilliant green and white out of the encompassing gloom. The surprising effect of such illumination and shadow was one of ever-expanding space, limitless horizon.
Mr. Neal then turned to an easel where I had been working on a canvas of my own. It was a portrait of a woman in a white sum
mer gown, her back to the viewer, paint brush in hand, contemplating her reflection in a mirror. The face reflected back to the viewer was my own—an exercise in self-portraiture that Mr. Spooner hoped to submit on my behalf to the next year’s Athenaeum exhibition.
He had simply handed me a copy of the previous invitation for submissions with a note scribbled in his own hand attached. “We might submit this one, once sufficiently finished, next year to the Athenaeum, don’t you think?” was all it said. The invitation read:
Sir,
We beg to inform you that the Annual Exhibition of
PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE
at the Atheneum, will be opened on the 20th May, next.
All Pictures sent for Exhibition must be framed with Gilt Frames.
All cases forwarded to the Atheneum should be addressed to J. P. Davis, Esq.
All expenses of transporting any Pictures or Statuary will be paid by the Atheneum, and the pieces will be returned, free of expense, at the close of the Exhibition.
Any Pictures sent to the Exhibition for Sale, should have a label attached, naming a price.
The loan of any Pictures or Statuary, in your possession, is respectfully solicited.
Sarah Clarke, that acquaintance from my earliest days in Boston and a mutual friend with Miss Fuller, had been exhibiting in the Athenaeum since 1832, and I had seen her View of Kentucky Beech Forest there only this year. She too had encouraged me to exhibit when I had called upon her recently at her West Street studio. So my courage and ambition to produce fine work and to place it before the most discriminating audiences in competitive situations grew apace, with, above all, such moments of encouragement from Mr. Spooner.
I had only begun to portray a possible facial expression, but Mr. Neal, after ascertaining that it was a work of mine, simply said, “Ah, a young woman recalls in the privacy of her chamber those men—desirable and undesirable—who had once centered their hearts on her.”
I felt my face flush because he of course recognized it as my self-portrait, and because, though I had not intended the painting to speak of such reminiscence, it suddenly occurred to me that Mr. Neal might have somehow caught what the woman’s vague expression in the mirror was beginning to betray.
Rachel Ruysch in Her Studio, he said, referring to a Netscher print I had once seen: the woman artist blessed by trumpeting angels who wreathe her hair in laurel as she paints flowers upon a somberly undercoated canvas. He laughed. “Yes, yes, Mrs. Fullerton—and why should you not aspire to the European tradition of women artists? Katherina van Hemessen (or her master Margaretta von Eyck); Giovanna Fratellini; Onorata Rodiana, the maiden warrior-painter! …”
Even as he spoke, Mr. Neal poked and pottered about the studio and found another exercise Mr. Spooner had set for me, in this case a pencil study in form and composition. The objects in the sketch had come from one of our long walks in the surrounding country—Mr. Spooner, Gibbon, and I. Before the oaken door of an old house stood a family sleigh. Through its slats sprouted the growth of a summer’s sunshine. Beyond the sleigh, an old barn, its sides stained with the dung of decades, leaned against beams placed to brace it.
“Yes,” he said. “The composition is quite refined, isn’t it?” He glanced at Mr. Spooner, who smiled, and then turned the drawing about to observe it from a number of angles.
“But you see, don’t you, Mrs. Fullerton, the way narrative emerges as well? It is so with everything you do?”
“Everything?” I asked, not knowing how to answer.
“Narrative,” Mr. Spooner offered, “seems to arise naturally out of her temperament.”
“I see,” he said and put the drawing down. “You know, Mrs. Fullerton, George has told me of certain episodes in your remarkable peripeteia. And I understand that you love the great English authors, that your mental companionship has been of a high order. Now, clearly you have a gift for narrative, as a product of your temperament, as George put it. Why not consider some day setting down a few of your adventures—whether as memoir or romance—to see what you can make of them, in all honesty, for the amusement and edification of others?”
“I’m afraid, sir, that however much I love to read when leisure arises, I’m no scribbler.” He laughed along with me. “What’s more, Mr. Neal, I find that my days are quite full learning to paint and painting for my living. And why should one wish to compete in yet another field overcrowded with aspirants, mad scribblers all—these annual productions of tens of thousands of moral and religious tracts, of volumes of fiction and poetry, and most of it trash and nonsense, or written to the ten-chapter formula or some such external necessity?”
He glanced at Mr. Spooner again and smiled. “Some day, perhaps, I mean, Mrs. Fullerton. Some day when you achieve more leisure and would wish to turn it to advantage. It is the very presence of so much rubbish, as you say—and to speak nothing of the immense exhalation of periodical trash—that all the more requires a book of truth now and then. Every educated person knows that the most popular and lauded authors of one generation, but for the rarest of exceptions, are forgotten by the next, and the next, and on even unto the last. I should think it a flattering distinction to escape the admiration of the papers and periodicals. The overwhelming presence of mountebankery in American letters need not stop a woman of character and ability, Mrs. Fullerton.”
“Perhaps some day then, eh, Allegra?” Mr. Spooner said and smiled. “But for now the dear lady has her hands full. And she is learning what we all must learn: one achieves mastery not only by yielding to one’s impulses but by gradually, patiently chipping away the stone wall that separates what one sees or feels from what one is capable of doing.”
“I would expect nothing less of you, George, than that you discover remarkable talents and nurture them,” Mr. Neal said, then turned again to me. “It was just a thought, to be considered in later years, Mrs. Fullerton. Allow me to send you some of my favorite American and European authors.” He chuckled and began picking through piles of studies which had collected from Mr. Spooner’s pupils, passing through many, pulling out one from time to time for examination and, at intervals, commenting. All the while, Mr. Spooner sat in his favorite chair comfortably smoking a cigar, enjoying Mr. Neal’s desultory commentary.
IF I FOUND such conversations pleasing and provoking, I nevertheless did not forget my former companion, and I was deeply troubled all these days in Boston at the prospect of never hearing from Tom again. My only consolation was a firm belief that by now he was well beyond the reach of all those who would detain him.
EIGHTEEN
Chas returns to me
After Mr. Neal’s visit, days went by in a rush of garnering commissions and working with Mr. Spooner. I also took in turn two pupils of my own, daughters of a merchant living in Roxbury not far from my own rooms. Mr. Stock had suggested to me that he often found the practice of taking on pupils lucrative. I had done a portrait of the merchant’s wife, and she purchased the last of my garden landscapes begun at Newspirit.
I also had letters, or notes rather, from Chas Sparhawk, because as promised I sent him my new address. He arrived at my door during the third week after my return to Boston. At that very moment, about three o’clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, I was engaged with my young pupils. So I asked Chas to dawdle on the settee with the newspapers while I finished the girls’ lessons. As soon as they left, he caught me up. “I have you in my arms and my sight for two days, Allegra,” he said. “I’ve come all this way to be with you and you alone. Have you arranged it so, my dear?” I told him that I had kept my promise, but for one obligation briefly with Mr. Spooner the following afternoon. “All the rest is to be ours.”
“Then close your door—I’ve brought two bottles of the good farmer Johnston’s vintage.” He drew a bottle out of the carpetbag he had carried in. “Glasses? Cups?” he said, holding the bottle high. “Anything will do.”
While he opened the bottle of very dark red wine, I went to the cupboard. I
took out two cups, having no glassware as yet, and turned back to him. He had the bottle open and a wide grin on his face.
“Not settled in yet, I see,” he said. “And I’m sure you’ve been working hard every day. Today especially? I thought so.”
He handed me a cup half full of the wine. “Now, my dear, sit down and put your pretty feet up on that hassock there. Enjoy a draught.” I sat back and sipped the strong-tasting wine. “You should see the grog blossom on farmer Johnston’s nose!” he continued. “A jolly bottleman who drinks this delicious stuff like mother’s milk, and has been at it for about as long, I’d say. The old lady herself still lives with him and I suspect her for a bacchante, which is where he must have learned to imbibe.” He laughed and held out his cup toward me. “Mother’s milk, you see!”
I sat with my tired legs outstretched while we drank off our first cup and he told me about his journey to find me. He soon poured a second draught for both of us and then sat down beside me and gazed into my eyes. His low voice now, the wine, my sitting after a long day dividing my time between commissions and lessons for the Misses Lewiston, contributed to my growing languor. I wanted more than anything just then to take a nap, whether in his arms or not hardly mattered. Yet I was also receptive to his presence, as if I were a gullible farm girl-turned-clairvoyant in one of his mesmerical demonstrations.
“Why don’t we have supper at the Oyster House later,” he was saying. “Is that all right?”
As I closed my eyes and agreed, he put a hand gently on the back of my neck. I heard him stand up and move behind me. Then I felt both his hands lightly kneading my neck and shoulders. “Poor Allegra,” he said. “You are tired, aren’t you?”
“Um,” I said. “You’re putting me to sleep, Chas.”
The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton Page 22
