by JH Fletcher
About Sun in Splendour
Born amid the violence of the Paris Commune, smuggled out of France and raised in the Blue Mountains, Marie Desmoulins becomes one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
Overcoming the restrictions to which women were subject during her youth, Marie moves to Sydney, then travels to the Paris of the 1920’s, Kashmir in the days of the Raj and, finally, home again to Australia. Along the way, she has relationships with a wide variety of people: Eugénie, willing to exchange her children for the financial security that ultimately eludes her; Aline, who abandons her art for luxury; Martha, whose disfigured body could not conceal her generous spirit; Katie, model, close friend and confidante; Neil whom she marries; and finally, Mark, destined to become the most significant man in her life…
One of Australia’s finest authors brings us a profoundly moving account of one woman’s creative life and the true price of artistic genius.
CONTENTS
About Sun in Splendour
Epigraph
PART I Escape
PART II Renewal
PART III The False Path
PART IV Seeking
PART V Intimations of Darkness
PART VI The Promise Renewed
PART VII Facing the Challenge
PART VIII The Harrowing of Hell
PART IX The Gardener in White
PART X Return to the Source
PART XI Nightride and Sunrise
PART XII The Way to Zion
EPILOGUE
About JH Fletcher
Also by JH Fletcher
Copyright
The burnt land, the colours of the sea! Turquoise, ultramarine, sapphire. White like a cry of purity against the blue.
— Tom Roberts (View from the Beach)
PART I
ESCAPE
C’est tout à fendre l’âme … (It’s all heartbreaking …)
— Claude Monet, in a letter dated 27 May 1871 to Camille Pissarro, about the violent suppression of the Paris Commune
Alan
I have told him no.
You would think that my track record would give me the right to be believed, but it is not so.
‘My dear, I simply cannot accept that.’ Giles Kingdon, plump, soft face, plump, soft laugh. ‘You owe it to the world. And the timing could hardly be better. Such a demand for your grandmother’s work! The Metropolitan was telling me only last week …’
The Metropolitan. The Musée d’Orsay. The Modern Tate. On and on.
Giles disgusts me. I do not like plump, soft men — although his mind, I admit, is scalpel-sharp. Like a surgeon, he understands how to probe and slash to get what he wants. I do not know which I find more distasteful: those with minds that ooze, wet as tears, or the Giles Kingdons of the world, eviscerating others for their own ends.
He will not eviscerate me.
I have told him repeatedly that I shall not write my grandmother’s biography, for him or any other publisher.
‘There are too many books already. And her paintings have been analysed to death. We want no more of it.’
Too many books, indeed. About her childhood and its impact on her psyche. About her times in Europe. In Kashmir. In Australia. Her relationship with the Outback. Her technique. Her philosophy and theories. Let me tell you something: she had no time for philosophies or theories. All her life she mistrusted isms and those who bray about them, their jabber of impressionism and post-impressionism, cubism and existentialism, realism and surrealism.
‘What nonsense …’ I can hear her saying it now. ‘I paint what’s in front of me. What I see and feel. The aura that lies between me and the subject. That is all. That is all it has ever been.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve never been smart enough to understand what the critics are on about.’ This, from one of the smartest beings God put upon the earth. ‘Or to care. Thank God, I’ve always been too busy painting to worry about their nonsense.’
How she despised them! The Ern Malley scam delighted her. ‘Took them down a peg or two, didn’t it? Presuming to tell us what art is and what it’s not.’ And laughed, scornfully.
Inside my head, my room of memories is papered by the laughter with which she dismissed all the untalented hangers-on who thought they could control her and the world of art. A young writer friend was ignored by the critics because she sold well; such nonsense was meat and drink to Marie.
‘My dear, popular fiction …’ And wilted, tulip-like, in contemptuous parody of those who presumed, ignorantly, to judge. Always, her wisdom was illuminated by laughter; for all her fame, she was the least pretentious of women.
It is this type of anecdote that the Giles Kingdons of the world desire so fervently.
‘There’s been nothing written about her that’s really personal,’ he tells me, persistent as any gadfly. ‘Inside knowledge, the good oil: that’s what the world wants.’
He tries to place his hand on my arm; I evade him. ‘The gospel according to Private Eye?’
‘Exactly!’ My comment washes off him, as I had known it would. ‘The insider’s view is flavour of the month,’ he squeaks, my plump mouse. ‘That’s why your unique contribution is so important. After all, she was the greatest artist Australia has ever had.’
Great, certainly. But greatest? How do you measure such things? And what does it matter?
‘Some people might challenge that,’ I tell him.
Instead he challenges me. ‘Name an alternative.’
‘Boyd, Nolan, Jessop —’
‘Modernists.’ He dismisses them.
‘She was modern, too, in her day.’
He ignores me. He claims to know what the art world wants, is still bound by his vision of — at last! — the definitive biography of Marie Desmoulins, artist and Australian, never mind her French birth. He is entranced, too, by his image of himself, greedily harvesting kudos as well as dollars for having published it.
‘Imagine!’ he says. ‘The woman behind the artist, revealed by the grandson who knew her so well. Even perhaps’ — he shoots me a coy glance — ‘what made her do what she did at the end. Eh? An explanation, after all this time.’ His fat jowl shakes, his lips spray moisture. ‘What a contribution that will make to art, to Australia, to the world!’
That will make. Even in the face of my refusal, he cannot bring himself to admit that it is out of the question, that it will never be done. Thirty years ago my fists might have sorted out his determination to rip the flesh from my grandmother’s memory — I had a name for it — but at sixty-five I am wiser, or at least more cautious. There is no cure for age and nowadays it is easier to ignore the unacceptable.
I tell myself it does not matter. I shall write nothing, instead shall remember all that Marie Desmoulins and my mother told me, all that I heard from others or worked out for myself.
Giles is right about one thing: no-one is better qualified than I, when it comes to memories. Being the person she was, my grandmother moulded my life as well as her own, and more comprehensively than I could have done it for myself.
Over the years I have dreamed of her a thousand times. Even before the night came upon her, there was a shadow in her life, her vision. The famous Triptych, the early self-portrait — if that was what it was — that scandalised a generation, already contained an intimation of the skull within the sunrise. Afterwards, when for her the sun gave way recurrently to darkness …
I shall not think of that. Perhaps later I shall make myself do so because, without it, my memories of Marie Desmoulins will be incomplete. For the present, let me concentrate instead upon the cataclysmic events of 1871, one hundred and thirty years ago. Marie was only a few months old at the time, far too young to remember them, but their impact on her subconscious may
well have contributed to the sombre insights that haunted her maturity. They certainly changed her life, bringing her, with her mother and sister, from the country of her birth to this land of Australia where, as Marie so often said, she was destined to be reborn.
Eugénie
1
Eugénie Desmoulins awoke to the harsh crackle of rifle fire. She turned over at once to assure herself that the two girls were safe. Aline, aged three, and Marie, four months, were sleeping peacefully in their cots, as was Alain in the bed beside her, and she relaxed, or came closer to it than she would have thought possible only a week before. It showed that you really could grow used to anything; in what in this month of May 1871 people were already calling la Semaine Sanglante — the Week of Blood — the sound of gunfire had become as familiar as the stench of burning buildings.
Of course, growing used to something did not mean becoming reconciled to it. With great sections of Paris aflame, the echo of shots a dirge, sporadic but seemingly unending, for the passing of the doomed Commune, they had been forced to come to terms with what was happening in the world outside their tiny apartment. Marie, mercifully, was still too young to understand, but Eugénie herself, Alain and even Aline had learned to conceal their fear from each other, from themselves. They had not got rid of it altogether. It lay deep inside each of them, a monster hiding at the bottom of a well, but the monster was still alive, and it would take very little to bring it to the surface again.
As now.
Eugénie lay in the half-light of dawn, listening to her pounding heart and wondering what it was about the ominous crackle of the guns that had reawoken terror.
For two months the city had been governed by a revolutionary committee, democratically elected. As during the Prussian war so recently ended, the capital of France had been cut off from the rest of the country. The difference was that this time the authorities had been able to do something about it. A week ago government troops had broken into the city and the street fighting had begun.
House by house, street by street, faubourg by faubourg, the Communards had been forced back. Street blocks, hastily thrown together out of scrap iron, furniture, building materials, carts, had been breached or simply bypassed, the troops working their way through the lanes and alleys that lay behind the facade of grandiose buildings put up fifteen years before to demonstrate to the world the glories of Napoleon III’s Empire.
A year ago that empire had been destroyed by the Prussians in just six weeks; now the French government seemed determined to finish the job. In Eugénie’s opinion the Empire was no loss. For all its boastful glitter of uniforms, its bands and parades, the poor had remained poor. In many cases they had grown poorer still and, in the whole of Paris, there was no-one poorer than the artists.
Alain, Eugénie’s husband — all legal, which was more than you could say for most of their friends — was one of them. In her heart Eugénie despised him for it, as she despised all the daubers and scribblers who seemed forever dropping by in hopes of a free drink, a free meal, a free anything: shameless men like Auguste and Claude, neither of whom in Eugénie’s opinion could have drawn a line to save their lives.
Auguste had called in only two weeks earlier, raising the roof about how he’d been arrested for sketching the Seine.
‘Thought I was a spy …’
At least they hadn’t shot him, Eugénie thought. With the government soldiers it would have been a different story. Shoot first and ask questions later — that was their motto or, more likely, don’t bother with questions at all. Just shoot, and kill, and burn. Men, women, children, cats and rats and mice — kill everything and everyone in order to smash the Commune and the spirit of anarchy and independence that it represented.
Eugénie wondered why any of them had expected anything different. All governments were the same: not that she had experience of other governments, but her instincts told her it was so. Governments were made up of rich people, governing for other rich people, and the rich always looked after themselves.
Not that she would have given two sous for the Commune or anyone in it. Neither she nor Alain was in the least political, thank God. They had been involved in none of the goings-on. A lot of people would be up to their necks in trouble when the shooting finally stopped, but the four of them would have nothing to fear beyond the normal ration of hunger and insecurity. A grim enough prospect, admittedly, but a lot better than it might have been.
Eugénie had shacked up with Alain when she was eighteen; a year later, with Aline on the way, she’d got him to marry her. In those days she hadn’t minded being poor — it had all been part of the huge adventure of being alive, young, in love — but now she did. Perhaps it was having the kids that had done it or simply that, at twenty-three, she was older and possibly wiser. All she knew was that she was heartily sick of always being cold, famished … These days, even the stink of oil paint was enough to drive her crazy, which was why Alain had joined forces with a bunch of friends to rent a broken-down stable from Jean Louis, their landlord.
They called it their studio. Studio, Eugénie thought. Why not the Louvre, while they were about it?
How she wished that Alain would get a proper job, with regular wages, in a factory or shop. Anything, so long as there was money to put food on the table. As it was, all they had was her wages from dressmaking, and that was precious little. Who, in these days, could afford new dresses?
Admittedly, she had a bit of money put aside for emergencies, but not even Alain knew about that. One day she was sure she would need it to drag them all through some real crisis; in the meantime, she intended to hang on to it and kept its existence to herself. It would be gone, quick as a wink, if she did not. That was all she needed, to come home one day and find that her crazy husband had squandered it on paints or canvas or some other crap. Alain had never been one to look ahead, whereas Eugénie, with her peasant background, knew that the first rule of survival was to take care of number one and never mind romantic dreams about art.
In the meantime, they would get by as best they could. She would pinch and scrape and, somehow, they would survive. If only we could lay our hands on some regular money, she told herself yearningly, but did not bother to finish the thought. With Alain the way he was, they had more chance of flying to the moon.
The infuriating thing was that it needn’t have been like that. Eugénie had a cousin who worked for a blacksmith on the outskirts of the city; only a few months ago, Michel’s boss had promised to find a place for Alain, if he wanted it.
‘Give up my work?’ Alain, the idiot, had stared as though she were the mad one. ‘Never!’
And away to the studio he had gone, squared shoulders shouting outrage that she should even suggest such a thing, for God’s sake, leaving her to work out what new lie to tell the storekeeper to enable them to eat that night.
No doubt it would be the same again today, but at least this time it wouldn’t be Alain’s fault. Getting out of the house at all was likely to be a problem, the way things were hotting up outside.
The gunfire came again; once more Eugénie tried to work out what was different from what she had been hearing all week. She put her hand on Alain’s shoulder and shook him. ‘Listen …’
For a moment he did not move, then stretched and opened his eyes. ‘What?’ He spoke loose-lipped, still half-asleep, but alarm had seized her and she had no mercy on him.
‘I said listen!’
‘What’s going on?’ Irritably; Alain never at his best first thing.
‘The gunfire …’ Suddenly she knew what had been troubling her. ‘It’s so regular.’
All week the shooting had been sporadic, bursts of fire from one side or the other, punctuated by long periods of silence. Now it came in sustained, disciplined volleys that brought her heart into her throat. These days, any change was reason for alarm.
Grumbling under his breath, Alain got out of bed and padded on bare feet to the window.
‘Be careful.
’
Marie was whimpering; Eugénie picked her up before she could wake her sister, undid the front of her nightdress and began to feed her, wincing a little as the toothless gums took hold. She supposed she should feel guilty that she got no fulfilment from one of the most basic of maternal actions — all the women she knew claimed to love breast-feeding — but she did not. To Eugénie it had always been no more than an uncomfortable nuisance. The milk was free, but that was the only good thing to be said for it.
I am not very maternal, she told herself, as she did every day, and did not care.
At the window Alain was trying to see what was happening in the street below. About his feet the early morning sun cast a golden rectangle of light upon the bare boards. In its rays, motes of dust gleamed like sparks from a fire.
‘Be careful,’ Eugénie said again. But she spoke automatically, attention concentrated upon the fingers that were pressing her breast away from her daughter’s nose. The apartment was high up, with roofs all around; she didn’t think there was any real danger. Not much chance of finding out anything, either, when all you could see from the window was a tiny corner of the Père Lachaise cemetery, five floors below. Bunch of tombstones, Eugénie thought. Fat lot he’ll learn from them.
But it seemed he did.
‘Oh my God …’
‘What is it?’
He was staring down through the glass, fingers clamped on the window frame. He turned towards her. ‘They’re killing …’ He did not finish the sentence, his voice horror-stricken.
Frowning, apprehensive, Eugénie slipped her bare feet from beneath the covers and laid the baby on the bed. Face contorted in outrage, tiny fists clenched, Marie shrieked at this interruption to her breakfast, but Eugénie took no notice. She walked across to join Alain at the window. She stood on tiptoe, craning her neck to stare down at the cemetery.
