Amelia had seen me off, handed me a stoppered bottle and a wrapped parcel of food and then wished me what I took to be a good journey in English which sounded unusually delightful when spoken in the musical tones of her quite enthralling voice. The journey was meant to take one very long day. That it took two was due to the fact that the carter took violent exception to the appearance of a young man who was balanced on a tree branch above the road. The carter immediately took to cursing, shouting and thrashing the youth with his whip for no purpose that I could discern. The whip soon got caught in the tree and, lunging after it, the carter fell off his seat into the road. The horse, left to itself, accelerated to a higher speed than it had ever achieved until that moment, swerving across towards the lush grass verge on the other side of the road, bringing one of the cart wheels into violent and destructive contact with a milestone sticking out of that verge. The youth in the tree jumped down and sauntered away laughing as if this had been the entire purpose of his day and the carter went into a blistering, tumultuous crescendo of leaping, writhing rage which made me think that when I painted Balaam's Ass recoiling from the sight of the Angel, I did not go nearly far enough with the posture of Balaam.
None of his antics got us any further up the road. Something crucial was broken, some part of the wheel with a very specific English name which the carter kept shouting loudly, attempting to punch me again each time. He then took to kicking the wheel spokes as if that might fix things. There were buildings visible ahead, possibly even a town, and a passing horseman was sent for aid. All this required me to get out of the back of the wagon while men with huge metal tools arrived to set things to rights. It would have made a most engrossing scene, had I but the means to paint it. Instead, I ate the contents of my package, drank what proved to be thin and bitter beer from the flask and watched the youth who had been up the tree go creeping into the bushes across the neighbouring field, hand in hand with a woman who certainly looked old enough to be his mother whereupon the bushes began to shake and sway. This youth appeared to be living a most curious life.
It set me to remembering, and what I remembered was a time when I should have been busy on the sketch for an etching by the Rhine. The usual sort of thing, skyline, artful trees, an attractively tumbled barn. I sold a lot of those at one time. On this occasion, I was sitting on a bank, almost inside a bush and what I saw instead, being most unattractively tumbled in the field just below, was a woman with short thick legs. If I describe her like that, it is not because of want of attention to the rest of her but because that was all I could see of her. What blocked my view of the rest of her was a monk, who without even getting out of his habit, was pumping away at her as hard as he could with those two short legs gripping him round the waist. I would like to say that the reason I could not take my eyes off the sight was it seemed to me to say all that there was to be said about hypocrisy, but that would be a complete lie. The real reason was that I'd never seen a monk humping anyone before and he was going at it like a jack-rabbit. I felt like cheering and, oddly enough, I really had no idea that I was drawing them. The lines seemed to flow on to the paper all by themselves.
My God he took his time, that monk. I had plenty of opportunity to get the picture right – those two legs wrapped round him and that stubby little man, half-kneeling between them.
I had a client in those days who had a depraved way with him. You would never have known it from the portrait I painted of him but sittings with him were an eye-opener. I've never been a prude but he told tales that had you looking out of the window for the first sign of an approaching lightning bolt. Saskia, who was no prude herself, sweet Saskie, heard the last line of one of them as she was passing the door and I found her later that evening, scrubbing her ears with a bar of strong soap. With him in mind, I turned the monk into money. I sold my client the first print from that very private block and he then bought ten more for others in his unusual circle of friends. It helped me through a bad patch and I confess that in the next years I did a few more for his 'special tastes' as he called them. It was art. It really was. You could feel the muscles in those stumpy legs.
The carter saw me watching the bushes and made some particularly crude gestures of his own which robbed the scene of that specially erotic sense of private voyeurism and quickly had me turning my gaze elsewhere. What it did do, though, was leave me with a powerful wish for paper, paint or charcoal – anything to let me fill the time the way I filled it best. The worst thing, the very worst thing, about the way I had somehow kidnapped myself into this inconvenient English oblivion was the absence of all the comforts of my studio, the comforts I had taken for granted for so long. I never had to think about supplying my art. Titus and Hennie always saw that what I needed was there at hand. I have met men who depend on schnapps and men who depend on laudanum but I did not know until that moment that I depended on paint to just the same degree.
To take my mind off my lack, I turned it to thoughts of Amelia Dahl but the juxtaposition was unfortunate and I soon found myself deep in a bawdy day-dream, involving fields, soft grass and that ferociously beautiful face of hers. Even worse, I soon found myself etching a scene on the copper tablet of my mind in which I was the monk and it was Amelia's legs which gripped me. I couldn't get the legs thin enough and in the middle of it all, it struck me that I had never painted myself from behind and that with an arrangement of mirrors, it might be contrived.
Would it be worth the trouble? No. The back of the head tells you nothing. It's all in the face of course.
Why do I paint my own face? There's a quick answer I usually give. Nobody else keeps still enough for long enough and I don't have to pay myself. There's a less pat version I have sometimes given when I particularly want to impress someone. It is that I know what's behind those eyes. I know exactly how the restless consciousness inside moves that flesh-mask and therefore I face a more subtle task when I paint myself than when I paint any other.
Then there's the real reason, the one I don't admit to anybody, and hardly ever even to myself. The other reasons are true enough so far as they go but the main reason I do it is that it makes me feel better. When I'm feeling the pinch, when I wake up at first light and the pressure of my debts hits me in the face, it is a relief to start touching in the highlights of the gold chain around my neck. When I start to worry that in another few years the folds of my face will be taken for age, not character, then I can look at the evidence that my paintbrush has produced to reassure myself that the bull is still a bull and all the better for a bit of character.
In recent years I have liked the way my portraits look. The man who has looked back at me reeked of substance and reputation. He has had a presence about him. Any woman would know just what was on offer when she looked into that face. He has been as real as I am and by painting myself whenever opportunity and lack of a paying sitter allow I have kept myself young.
I was still musing on that considerably later on when, as the wagon was having the final offices served upon it, Marvell arrived on his great big horse at unnecessary speed and seemed irritated in the extreme to find us with so little of our journey done.
He dismounted and talked to the carter then turned to me.
'We will be obliged to stay the night,' he said. 'The town ahead is Beverley and there is a good inn.'
It cannot have been much after the middle of the afternoon but it gets dark very early at this time of year and I did not argue.
'You'll pay, will you?' I said. 'I've got nothing. Until you pay for the picture that is.'
'The picture you haven't yet painted,' he reminded me.
He seemed to be known at the inn, a dark place of corridors filled with the smell of old cabbage and even older beer. My expectations were low but I have to admit that the food and the drinking were good. A bit too good, perhaps. With the boiled beef stew we drank a sherry wine, English style, by the bucketful. It was too sweet for my taste but I matched Marvell beaker for beaker. I had the stronger head
by far, helped by my greater bulk, for there is nothing like flesh for drawing alcohol away from the brain. We attracted some curiosity at first with our foreign talk, but we took our plates into the darkest corner of all. By the end of the meal, he had passed from arrogant disdain, through mild vanity to full-blown boastfulness and now, on the third jug, I started to see the true Marvell emerge.
'See all these people?' he slurred, waving his hand around the room. Pig-ignorant shits the lot of them. Do they know anything of me and my work? No they do not sir, they do not.'
'Your work in the Parliament?' I said, filling his beaker again.
'My work, sir. My words. My VERSE!'
He tilted the beaker to his lips, a little cocked and awry so some of it trickled down his chin. He tried to put it down on a table that was a hand's-breadth higher than he thought it was and spilt even more in the resulting collision.
'She thinks she is too good for me,' he blurted out.
'Who does?'
'No matter. Do not ask.'
'All right, I won't.'
'Her, of course. You know who I mean.'
'I believe I do.'
He tried to wink, wagging a finger at me, but the first time both his eyes closed together and he had to try again.
'Now here is the thing,' he said, 'and I tell you this because you have not one hope of impressing her with your brush. Not one.' He stared at me truculently then seemed to find it hugely surprising that his hand still clasped his beaker and raised it to his lips again.
I waited until he had finished.
'What were you going to tell me?' I asked in the end.
'Ah yes. This.' He spoke with slow emphasis, 'She is an artist, too. Her house is her poem.'
'Or her picture.'
'No. Whatever. Any man must match her to deserve her.'
'Dahl?'
He sneered. 'Dahl was a ticket. Dahl was a ship. Dahl was a purse. Dahl's day is done.'
'You want her?'
'She won't turn down my verse,' he said, and slowly sagged forward into the remains of his stew.
I had to sleep in the same bed once he had been carried to it. I was careful to arrange myself nose to tail as it were, but when I was fast asleep, two more men woke me by clambering in, one still with boots on. Being the only one with my head at the foot end, I received several kicks in the skull before the night was over. It was still quite dark when they hammered on the door to wake us, Marvell getting to his feet with surprisingly little evidence of his excesses. All things considered, I was quite pleased to be in the can without ever seeing much more of Beverley than two fine large churches and a host of narrow streets.
Roads are a pain in the backside, that being exactly how they communicate themselves in unnecessary detail to those who travel by cart. Countryside is countryside and can be found everywhere, but York made up for everything. What a city! The walls and the gates and the river added up to something very much finer than Hull, and even, I have to admit, than parts of Amsterdam, We had a set-to with an official at the gate who seemed to want to know unnecessary detail about me, my origins and my purpose, but Marvell floored him with the production of some paper from an inner pocket which had him tugging his forelock to the great amusement of the carter.
'There are some advantages to being a Member of the Parliament,' Marvell said dryly as we went through.
I had been observing him all through that second day's travel, weighing the artist in him, to measure my opponent as he seemed determined to be. It appeared he had no idea what he had said the night before. The Parliamentarian was very strong in him today. He delivered high-up horseback opinions on everything of which we spoke, of politics, of the husbandry of the countryside we passed through, even of the proper way to paint a picture. He set himself above others, did that man, for much of the time, but there was a crack somewhere in his belf that stopped him ringing quite true. He spoke of the restoration of the King as if he were the man's most ardent supporter but I could see right through him because if I have studied anything at all, I have studied faces and that man's face showed his brain was at odds with his heart.
I do not know what it is to write a poem, but if it is an art to rival painting then should it not have at its heart a quiet, humble study of the world? I know that you are no kind of painter at all if you do not gaze quietly for long periods at the play of light on a dress or the play of love in the eyes. You must watch and wonder because that is what brings you nearer to truth. I never saw a moment when Marvell seemed to watch or wonder. He formed his views in a trice and the world seemed to him to be of his own making, not a place in which he was privileged to wander. I became more and more sure that his poetry would be just the same, a one-way judgement on the world, formed too fast and instantly immutable.
I forgot all that in the centre of York. The cathedral, called Minster by Marvell as he trotted beside me, was brazen in its grandeur. The shop we found in a narrow winding street beside the Minster made up for all the discomforts of the journey. In the front it sold hand tools for craftsmen of all sorts, but in the back it had properly arrayed pigment, row upon row, in the finest grades. Some was ground but some – the sort that does not keep well when reduced to powder – had rightly been left in raw lumps. The keeper of that shop knew what he was doing. I thought there must be several other painters in York to allow him to maintain such a stock. He had good oil, brushes not far short of those I am used to and, wonder of wonders, the man even understood some Dutch. Though seeming lacking in the niceties of grammar, he certainly knew the names of the colours. I indulged myself in my selection, adding to it some excellent paper and even pausing for a moment to consider the fine canvas he had on offer before I realized there was something about the challenge of the boards which had begun to appeal to me.
Then I saw them, on the side of the counter. Four copper blocks, perfectly prepared.
Copper had been in my mind since my thoughts of the fornicating monk. It was months since I had last held a needle in my hand. The light in my new studio in the damned low-built Jordaan was nowhere near as good as that huge light which had flooded into the high windows of my real house, the Breestraat house, the house that rogues had stolen from me. You need good light for that fine scratching work, especially if your eyes are growing just a little weary. I had spent all my time with my brushes for months now, shunning my needles, but my hand started to twitch as soon as I saw this bounty. Marvell seemed willing to buy whatever I took a fancy to, so I added the blocks, or at least I tried to. The man gave me to believe they were all sold to another customer. I insisted, he argued. Marvell slapped coins on the counter. The shopkeeper gave me just one block and would not relent. Without wax and acid, a copper block is a more or less useless thing for etching but there was always drypoint, my first love, and he had a drypoint needle he could sell me.
I should explain the difference I suppose, because it is a difference which is all about directness and mutability. In etching, you coat the copper with wax or sometimes with a varnish, though I like that less. With your needle, you make your scratches in the wax to bare the copper beneath and when done, you dip it in acid to eat away at the copper just so. The wax preserves the rest of the copper from the acid's bite.
It makes a filthy smell which creeps, curdling, into the lungs. My Saskia's lungs, I think now, were damaged for ever by the savage vapour which filled our house when the plates were etching. She died of the consumption but I think that the acid prepared the way for it and I have never etched a plate again without regretting it.
That is not the only way. Some use a burin to cut straight into the copper, to engrave a line without recourse to acid. I prefer to use that tool to deepen the lines of an etching already made, to get that variation into the depth and width of the lines that the acid cannot achieve by itself. That's etching and that's engraving, but the simplest way from eye to final print is to dispense with the acid altogether and use the drypoint needle on the virgin copper plate, so that
no other agency except your own hand decides how deep and wide the channel for the ink should be.
Work produced by all these three methods has a common power, which is the power to surprise the artist's brain. You sit there scratching away and you compose your scratchings to make a pleasant whole and you think of the golden mean and all those rules of proportion that dog us all and at the end of a day's scratchings you have your picture. It is, of course, not quite what you were looking at because your brain has got in the way and changed this and that and maybe given that tree a more pleasing shape and that woman a bigger pair of tits – all the usual sort of thing. Then what happens? You take your copper and you ink it and you wipe it and you wet the paper and you press the paper as hard as it can be pressed on to the plate. Then you peel it carefully off and look at it and something wonderful happens.
It is something you have never seen before.
It is completely familiar and also completely unfamiliar because you have stepped through the looking glass and sneaked up on the world from the other side.
So what? I hear you say. Seeing something the other way round is not a big change. Oh yes it is. Left and right are as different as dark and light, as evil and good, as hell and heaven. Do you know how people look at pictures? They stan on the left, a bit above centre, and their eyes travel round in a clockwise circuit of the centre part, having no choice in the matter. They may be deflected and diverted by highlights and clever little booby-traps which the artist has inserted but that's the way they go whether they like it or not. More than that, the journey changes how they see what they see because what they have just looked at alters the next thing in line. Light is lighter after dark. Dark is darker after light. If it's a painting, yellow seen after blue is altogether different to yellow seen after red.
The Painter Page 15
