Mark Lambert's Supper

by J. I. M. Stewart

  I gather up my own old man’s paraphernalia to move indoors, and my eye is caught by the tiny red fleshy bells, tightly enclosing their jet black clappers, that lurk in the yew. At once I am a child again, hiding at the garden’s foot from some unloved pupillary occasion. But a child now—alas!—by whom no hopeful man will be fathered.

  O for the spirit of that matchless man

  Whom Nature led throughout her whole domain,

  While he embodied breath’d ethereal air!

  Tho’ panting in the play-hour of my youth

  I drank of Avon too, a dangerous draught,

  That rous’d within the feverish thirst of song,

  Yet never may I trespass o’er the stream

  Of jealous Acheron, nor alive descend

  The silent and unsearchable abodes

  Of Erebus and Night, nor unchastised

  Lead up long-absent heroes into day.

  When on the pausing theatre of earth

  Eve’s shadowy curtain falls, can any man

  Bring back the far-off intercepted hills,

  Grasp the round rock-built turret, or arrest

  The glittering spires that pierce the brow of Heaven?

  Rather can any with outstripping voice

  The parting Sun’s gigantic strides recall?

  Landor being still in my mind, I read these lines last night – they open the third book of Gebir – and find them intact in my memory this morning. On my thirteenth birthday their author gave me tea, entertaining me first with a diatribe against Louis Napoleon and then with much mysterious discussion of classical prosody, illustrated from his own alcaics, which I was given to understand directed themselves against Louis Napoleon also. But he went on to read some of his English poetry too. Of this I have preserved no recollection, but I should like to think that the above was the passage – so poignant to me is the image of the eager and ambitious boy hearing with incomprehension then what so echoes in the old man’s heart now. The despairing invocation of the spirit of Shakespeare forms a dirge – but over what? Is it for the passing of the artist’s belief in himself? Is it for the passing of an era? I do not know. But I do assuredly know that I find it beautiful and moving.

  Siena – August.

  It is to be presumed a sign of tolerable success in my pursuit of what the old masters of this place called otium that August is as much as I know – or would be as much as I know did not the Torre del Mangia’s ingeniously informative clock officiously signal the day of the month as often as I cross the Campo. But what is otium if one does not sense, deep beneath its relaxations, the tautened muscles of the daemon, wrestling with the raw stuff of creation and urging it towards the light?

  A note, this, on a depressed and sterile morning. But at noon comes a letter from Charles S., with a postscript by Hermione. The dearest, these, of my younger friends! It is likely that Charles will be offered, and accept, the N.G. At once there comes to me the shadowy story (lightly satirical?) of a man who brings to such a position a flair or specific faculty, wholly acceptable at first, for detecting the falsely attributed, the spurious, the counterfeit, etc. He saves the nation, or perhaps some great private donor, from spending oceans of money on a particularly specious fraud. The thing becomes a sensation, has international repercussions, etc. Then his suspicions (as to other similar authenticities and the like) begin alarmingly to proliferate; he distrusts himself but his distrust is invariably groundless; he charges himself with irrational obsession, but science (in the person of students of pigments, glazes, canvas and so on: all matter that would have to be got up) bears him out every time. Eventually . . . I don’t at all know! But the thing has possibilities, in however inept a role this sudden freak of mind may have cast poor Charles. The awkwardness is in the particular gallery, and the specific masterpieces therein that are to be exposed as spurious. Blank invention would be arbitrary and unconvincing; simple libel would loom uncomfortably close did one go to the opposite extreme. The generalised, the intimated would be the only road to take. I feel in this theme more of the old tug than in any that has come to me for a long time.

  An excellent stravecchio at luncheon. Has anyone written a comprehensive monograph on cheeses?

  Walking this morning to the Osservanza – a climb accomplished without undue fatigue – I noticed, not far beyond the Porta Ovile, an old man squatting in a hovel and beating out the seeds from a great pile of sunflowers. His buon giorno was notably cheerful – and moreover familiar. Thinking back, I realise that I have on sundry occasions over many years passed the same fellow so engaged. During the long interval since my last sojourn in Siena, therefore, he has presumably been doing nothing else – nothing but take up those dark heavy rotundities one by one and with a short rod go thwack, thwack, thwack. Does his excellent nervous tone proceed from a lifetime of mild sadistic satisfaction? There is a new psychology that would take this solemnly enough.

  The above trivial reflection recalls by a simple associative process an amusing anecdote told me by H. G. W. Sigmund Freud, it appears, now has many disciples in Vienna. One of these makes a comfortable living by listening to the dreams of young Englishmen and Americans and then gravely pronouncing this diagnosis: Me in Freud, Sie sind wirklich Hamlet. Naturally, this seldom fails to convince and delight.

  Villa Pastorelli.

  I returned by rail (with a tiresome change at Empoli) and during the journey [1] read in some favourite places in The Awkward Age. Monotony is indubitably inherent in the strictly scenic method. Its rigours – no glimpse into any mind, but only talk, tiny indications of character through behaviour, and so on – can perhaps best be relieved by intermittent documentation. A letter, a fragment of a diary, something written for publication by a journalist or literary man: these may be used by way of unobtrusive relief. But with what infinite precaution always must one shuffle the cards! Of all human activities art, since it is a system of illusions, can least afford to be detected in a cheat.

  Eliot, the young American poet, whose Waste Land made such a stir last year, has in his earlier volume an ineffective person called Prufrock who declares I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. Did Freud’s disciple mentioned above, I wonder, read Prufrock’s words and see that there was profit to be made from reversing the verdict? Or was he merely exploiting what he knew to be a very common trick of the mind before imaginative writing? Is there not something to be made of this?

  Yes! A man who seemed to find his own very innermost soul laid bare in a novel picked up by chance, and who sought out the novelist (a stranger) under the immediate impulse of this impression. But with what issue? All morning the little fountain has seemed to murmur the answer, but in tones too low to be distinguishable. No good going nearer. The strained-after words become mere tinkle and splash.

  I strain indeed – and how different, oh how different, was it once! Remember how all, yes all, of Lucia’s Changeling rose up before me, as I stood in the thunderstorm at Sirmione and glimpsed the dark hair of a sleeping child.

  If my novelist, when sought out in the circumstances here propounded, should prove – all-unexpectedly and upon the opening of a door – to be a woman; and one plainly not of a sort, or age, interesting to reviewers alone? Alas! when the questing fancy takes a vulgar turn like this the whole glimmering conception is only too likely to be quenched for good.

  But say that my novelist (a man) in his turn discerns in his visitor not at all the supposed congruity with something he has already created, but the revelation of a (quite different) character towards which he is already obscurely groping for a future book.

  Considerably later (as I suppose it must be) the novelist realises that he is in danger of presenting to his new friend (as his visitor must now have become) a positively lethal dose of truth. He therefore suppresses his now completed or nearly-completed work, and leaves his friend with the illusion which was the cause of their first acquaintance. Would there not be a vivid interest in recording the emotions attendant upon the fo
undering, because of personal complications, etc., of what might possibly be a chef-d’oeuvre?

  The secretive phase persists with Anthea. I glimpse her in the cortile searching out with ingenuity fresh hiding-places for her playthings – herself the plaything of my own fantasy the while. What perversity, what morbidity frames for her in the silent theatre so many sombre issues, strange predicaments? Story of a writer who allows himself thus to spin destinies for his two children. He loves them equally, but is impelled to evolve for them strikingly contrasted fates, happiness and misery. They grow up and the predictions show signs of fulfilling themselves. The father watches with a mounting sense of guilt and superstitious horror. Then the twist or irony, the respective fates of the children being by some unexpected event interchanged. Extremely tricky. And must it not be this final exhaustion of old age that now so largely confines my imagination to stories of writers and painters?

  Imperfect Artists:

  Two species are of particular interest to me:

  1. The writer no sentence from whose pen is without its pungency, felicity, near perfection; whose page however lacks something of purposiveness, vitality; whose larger conception, from which the work as a successful totality must proceed, is tenuous, fluctuating, or non-existent.

  2. The writer whose donne has magnitude and complexity; who must struggle to select and isolate even the grand elements of his design from amid an embarras of soliciting possibilities; whose page is awkward and whose sentences throw up the sponge!

  There was never any doubt where my own danger lay. Like Coleridge – with whom, indeed, in too great kindness my friends would sometimes compare me – I could claim kinship with the Surinam – if, 1 hope, with no other – toad. This creature secretes its eggs dispersedly about its person, and when these hatch they afford the spectacle of a toad sprouting toads all over. To the life-cycle of this strange creature, if shown in accelerated motion, my imaginative processes, such as they have been, might well be assimilated by a whimsical spectator. Toads sprouting toads sprouting toads! And only a few of them, I might myself well add, getting enough to eat, so that they were always prone to turn awkwardly cannibal. A sea of projects; or, better, a whole menagerie of manuscripts prone to raven each on the other: as such I can look back upon my middle time, and wonder that ever I got through. A tiny spot of creative ferment, a harassed novelist living amid a muddle of unfulfilled intentions – the spectacle can have been scarcely of an order the most impressive. Yet it did – it did all sacredly and wonderfully – miniature for me that great creating nature so grandly imaged by Milton as ‘quite surcharged with her own weight, and strangled with her waste fertility’.

  A morning so still here on the terrace that I have waited almost with a sense of mounting tension for the familiar midday gun and the answering bells. Gino and his boy spray the vines. I can see nothing else moving – not so much as the dart of a lizard. The cypresses in ones and twos stand on the hill slopes like presences. Toiling upward to join their massed fellows on the ridge, they might have halted to mark the passing of some supersensible but mortal thing. The olives too are interested in the invisible cortege: the old olives strain to bear up the young olives in their arms. All my thoughts drift to the endings of things. I would do better, no doubt, to consider their ends.

  W.D. came up yesterday, and we had a little talk, much in this lugubrious key. He spoke, I thought perversely, of friendship, maintaining that in his own country—but how can he, after all those years, know anything about it?—friendship is becoming entirely a function of contiguity. He means that one’s best friend is by definition the man who works nearest to one at the bench. Change benches and you change best friends. But this, he declares, is not to say that friendship has been replaced by mere acquaintance. The sentiment can be strong and the relation close. There is merely an importation of discontinuousness. I did not care for this talk. D. and I have never been mechanics intimately linked by what is called, I believe, a conveyor-belt. But we are assuredly friends who have drifted apart. The realisation of this always pains me. Seeking another topic, I asked whether he had news of young Garth, who must by now be eight or nine – by five or six years Anthea’s senior. But at this he fell merely silent. I tried his work – having marked with pleasure that he had brought up a portfolio under his arm. But he would show only one sketch – the mere ghost of a sketch – showing the head of a beggar-boy indecisively placed upon a large available picture- space. It came to me that D. is supremely the other sort of imperfect artist described in my note of a day or two ago. He could not draw an ugly line – and he has scarcely ever completed a picture.

  I urged upon him a project that came to me shortly before my departure for Siena. Across the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata – surely the most coherently lovely of the Florentine squares – there still comes daily from the Spedale degli Innocenti the little toddling band of orphans, marshalled by the good nuns to the intent of saying a pater noster in Michelozzo’s stately church. In summer these little worshippers are in blue and white – and in the spandrels above their heads as they file from under the colonnade are the blue and white medallions bearing the divine children of Andrea della Robbia. The hospital, I suppose, has sent out the same small moving file for just five hundred years, and for almost as long the immortal babes in their swaddling-clothes have presided over the scene. Here, I had felt, was the perfect blending of an imaginative with a purely visual or plastic appeal. I grew warm no doubt in urging my proposal, and D. heard me in silence. But not quite in silence to the end. I was halted by a strange sound. It was not repeated. But when I looked at him it was to see that my old friend’s eyes were filled with tears. Turning away, he murmured whimsically that I was no understander of daubing and sketching, however surely I could penetrate to a dauber’s or sketcher’s heart. It had always, he said, been literary conceptions – and of the grandest – that I had propounded to him; and the true fire was in me still.

  Need I hesitate to confide to this private page how touching and how saddening this strange little incident has appeared to me? He feels having achieved nothing. And there – I thought when I had bidden him good-bye and was watching his light, almost wraith-like progress downhill to our wretched little tram – there, but for the grace of God, goes Mark Lambert.

  This morning [2] I awoke to the immediate knowledge of great physical weakness. During much of the day – spent in bed – I believe my mind to have been clouded; now, with evening, an answering phase of clarity has set in. It seems to me that for a long time I have been only an automaton, going through mechanically (or as a mere matter of conditioned reflexes in the current phrase) pursuits, engagements, gestures which were once a living man’s. This notebook, for as far as I care to turn back the pages, I suspect of being a simulacrum, a dream of what it was, and – in its character as a prospectus of future achievement – but a flattering index to the direful pageant of my physical and mental decay. Some degree of intellectual infirmity, indeed, may have been a lurking guest with me these many years – or at least my mind has long borne small areas of confusion allied to the pervasive confusion in which much of today has passed.

  Later:

  Timor mortis conturbat me. That, Lord help me, looks like the shabby truth. Wishing to confide in none here, and acting upon impulse, I have sent Gino’s lad along the ridge to Fiesole on his bicycle, bearing a cable begging C.S. to come out. I have an urgent sense of many arrangements to make; of much to tell him; of practical problems of some intricacy if my books are to continue for a while to bring even some small income to those I shall be leaving. Here, thank God, are considerations both sensible and with some grain of manliness. An awkward sentence – but I have not the strength to mend it.

  I have been up and about—but only from a compelling sense of the need to make various dispositions which decency and order seem to require. For after much deluding of myself the truth has come to me; and this morning, looking down from the terrace on the beloved city, disp
osed like a dull red wheel round the hub of the Duomo, I looked, too, straight through the dark portal that must lead me to oblivion. I shall quite soon be dead—at one in the dust with many, many artists who have toiled to add something to that ideal order of which, for me, Florence itself has always been a symbol unchallenged and supreme. Among them what name shall I leave?

  There is a mass of papers which I have little hope of reviewing, and to which Charles and my agent must attend as they may. But there are some things that I can and must do.

  I rise painfully, pass through the loggia and take a turn in the cortile – glancing round as if with some reason to be ashamed, fearful that the household should observe the extent of my weakness and take alarm. What stock of courage do I possess? I have loved life and dealt with it variously and fully in my time, heaven knows. It has brought me in its multitudinousness puzzles enough – but nothing as puzzling as The End of It All. Perhaps Charles will help. I don’t know what, if anything, my family guesses; or what degree of shock the truth will bring. I am, after all, an old outmoded man, who may well exaggerate the interest anybody takes in him.

  What dismal stuff is here! I have shaken off what I believe to have been a bad chill, and it is likely that I shall be back at work before the end of the week. Can anything fresh be done with the old theme of the sick man (or woman), who, contrary to expectation, does not die? James once confessed to me having toyed with the idea of giving Milly Theale’s story this twist in The Wings of the Dove: the designing young man – rather the designed-for young man – would marry the mortally sick heiress, who would promptly recover as a result. James dismissed the notion as vulgarly ugly. And so in his large and noble world it well might be. But perhaps we must not all be so fastidious.