The Unsettled Dust (22 page)

I find also that I have no difficulty in writing these things down. On the contrary, I find that I like it. I fancy that I could produce a quite long narrative about my own inner feelings, though this is obviously not the occasion, for I think I have already said all that is necessary. I have to strike a balance between clearing my own mind and imparting facts to
strangers
. I conceive of this narrative, if I finish it, as being read only by myself and by strangers. I should not care for someone intimately in my life to read it – if there ever is such a person. I doubt whether there ever will be. Sometimes this frightens me, but sometimes it reassures me.

At this point, I remember to mention, for the strangers who may read, that both my parents died seven years ago in an aeroplane accident. It was my Mother who insisted on their going to Paris by air. I was present when my Father argued with her. It was the usual situation between them. All the same, I loved my Mother very much, even though she was as bossy towards me as she was towards my Father. No doubt this has affected me too. I fear that a woman would steal my independence – perhaps even kill me. Nor, from what I have seen, do I think these particularly unreal fears.

On the whole, I do not like people. I seem incapable of approaching them, but I find that when they approach me, I am often quite successful with them – more so, indeed, than many of those who have no trouble with bustling in and making the first gesture. When once I am started, I can talk on fluently and even amusingly (though I believe inwardly that I have no sense of humour at all), and frequently, usually indeed, seem to make a strong impression. I suppose I must get some pleasure out of this, but I do not think I ever exert any real influence. It is almost as if someone else were talking through me – wound up by an outsider, my interlocutor. It is not I who talk, and certainly not I who please. I seriously suspect that I myself never speak, and I am certain that if I did, I should never please. This is, of course, another reason why I could not sensibly think of living with anyone.

Similarly with my art. My pictures are visionary and
symbolical
, and, from first to last, have seemed to be painted by someone other than myself. Indeed, I have the greatest difficulty in painting anything to command. I am useless at portraits, incapable of painting at all in the open air, and quite indifferent to the various kinds of abstract painting that have followed the invention of the camera. Also I am weak on drawing, which, of course, should be a hopeless handicap. I have to be alone in a room in order to paint, though then I can sometimes paint day and night, twenty hours at a stretch. My Father, who was quite sympathetic to my talent, arranged for me to attend a London school of art. It was quite pointless. I could achieve nothing, and was unhappier than at any other period of my life. It was the only time when I felt really lonely – though worse may, of course, lie ahead. I am thus almost entirely self-taught, or taught by that other within me. I am aware that my pictures lack serious technique (if there is a technique that can be distinguished from inspiration and invention). I should have given up painting them some time ago, were it not that a certain number of people have seemed to find something remarkable in them, and have thus
identified
me with them and made me feel mildly important. If I were to give up, I should have to give up altogether. I could not possibly paint, as so many do, just as a hobby or on Sundays only. I am sure that soon I
shall
give up – or be given up. When I read about the mediumship of Willi and Rudi Schneider, and of how the gift departed first from one brother and then from the other, and when both were quite young, I felt at once that something of the same kind will happen to me, and that I shall settle down, like Willi Schneider, as a hairdresser or other tradesman. Not that I wish to suggest any kind of mediumistic element in my works. It is simply that they contain a glory which is assuredly not in the painter, as the few who know him will confirm. It is a commonplace that there is often more than one soul in a single body.

I must admit also to certain ‘influences’. This sounds
pretentious,
but it has to be said because it explains what I have been doing in Belgium and how I came to visit Madame A. I find that certain works, or the works of certain painters, affect me strongly, almost agonisingly on occasion, but only
certain
pictures and
certain
painters, really very few. Art in general leaves me rather cold, I regret to say, especially when put on public display to crowds, most of them, inevitably,
insensitive
. I am sure that pictures should always belong to single individuals. I even believe that pictures suffer death when shared among too many. I also dislike books about art, with their dreadful ‘reproductions’, repellent when in colour, boring when not. On the other hand, in the painters who
do
affect me, I become almost completely absorbed; in their lives and thoughts, to the extent that I can find out about these things or divine them, as well as in their works. The look of a painter and the look of the places where he painted can, I think, be very important. I have no use for the theory that it is the picture only that matters and the way the paint has been stuck on it. That idea seems to me both lazy and soulless. Perhaps ‘my’ painters are my true intimates, and them only. I cannot believe I shall ever be so close to any living person as I was to Magnasco when first I sought him out. But there again, I should emphasise that these ‘influences’ seem to me far from direct. I can see little sign of other people’s
mannerisms
in my own pictures. The influence is far deeper than that. The ‘only-the-picture’ people would not understand at all.

It has been possible for me to travel a little in search of my particular pictures because at all times I live simply and spend hardly anything. It was to look at pictures that I have been to Belgium: not, needless to say, the Memlings and Rubenses, fine though I daresay they once were, but the works of the symbolists and their kind, painters such as William Degouve de Nuncques, Fernand Khnopff, Xavier Mellery, who said (and who else has ever said it?) that he painted ‘silence’ and the ‘soul of things’; above all, of course, James Ensor, the charming Baron. I had worked for months before I left, to equip myself with a list of addresses, many of the finest paintings of the school being happily still in private hands. Almost everyone was kind to me, though I can speak very little French, and for the first fortnight I was totally lost and absolutely happy. Not all the owners gave signs of
appreciating
their various properties, but, naturally, I did not expect that. At least they were prepared, most of them, to leave me alone and in peace, which was something I had seldom found among the private owners who survive in Italy. Of them many seemed to think they might sell me something; most made a great noise; and all refused me privacy.

One of the Belgian authorities with whom I exchanged letters, told me that the widow of a certain painter of the symbolist school still survived in Brussels. Not even to myself, in the light of what has happened, do I wish to write the name of this painter. I shall simply call him A., the late A. The informed may succeed in identifying him. Even if they do, it will not matter so much by the time they are likely to read this report. If strangers read sooner than I expect, it will only be because I am dead, so that the burden of discretion will be upon them and not upon me.

The Belgian authority, without comment, gave me an address in Brussels to which I wrote from England in my basic French, not seriously expecting any kind of reply. My habitual concern with the lives and personalities of ‘my’ painters may, however, have made me write more urgently and persuasively than I supposed. It seemed a considerable opportunity for me. Despite my great interest, I had never met one of my particular painters nor even a widow or relative. Many of the painters, in any case, had lived too long ago for such a thing. If now I received no reply, I was quite prepared to stand about outside the house, and consider in the light of what I observed, how best to get in. That proved unnecessary. Within three days, I heard from Madame A.

She wrote in a loose, curving hand, and confined herself to the centre of a large sheet of dark blue paper. Her letter looked like the springs bursting out of a watch in a
nineteenth-century
comic drawing. It would have been difficult to read even if it had been in English, but in the end I deciphered most of it. Madame A. said she was extremely old, had not left the house for years or received any visitors, but was enchanted that anyone should go out of his way to see her, and would receive me at six o’clock on an evening she named with exactitude. I had given her the dates of my proposed stay in Belgium, but none the less was surprised by her decisiveness, because it was without precedent. People with pictures had always left to me the time of a visit, and an embarrassing responsibility I had often found it. Madame A. ended by asking how old
I
was?

When the time came, I spent the afternoon at the Musée Wiertz, because it seemed to be in much the same part of the city as the abode of Madame A. ‘Weitz’s work is noted rather for the sensational character of his subjects than for artistic merit’, states, in true Beckmesser fashion, the English guide book I had borrowed from my public library. Possibly it is true in a way. It was not true for me. I was enthralled by Wiertz’s living burials and imminent decapitations; by his livid gory vision of that ‘real’ world which surely is livid and gory, though boring and monotonous also, which Weirtz omits. Weirtz’s way of painting reality seems to me most apt to the character of reality. I was delighted also by the silence and emptiness of Wiertz’s enormous, exciting studio. His official lack of merit keeps out the conducted art-lover.

All the same, anxiety was rising in me about my
commitment
with Madame A. I had remained fairly confident through most of my visits to picture owners, even in Italy, but these had been accepted as business transactions, and I had had no difficulty in concealing that for me they were stations on a spiritual ascent. With Madame A. I might have to disclose much more of myself and find words, even French words, for comments that were not purely conventional. She might be very infirm and intractable. It was probable that she was. It is September, and I sat on a bench before ‘The Fight for the Body of Patroclus’, all alone in the high studio, except for the attendant, who was mumbling to himself round the corner, while evening fell and the many clocks chimed and boomed me forward to my ambiguous assignation.

The power of solitude, not least in the Musée Wiertz, delayed me, in fact, too long. I found that I had
underestimated 
the distance from the Rue Wiertz to the street in the direction of the Boulevard de Waterloo where Madame A lived. They are beautiful streets through which I walked, though unostentatious; quiet, well-proportioned, and warmly alive with the feel of history. I have seen no other part of Brussels that I like so much. I loved the big opening windows, filling so much of every façade and so unlike England. I even thought that this would be a perfect district in which to spend my life. One never really doubts that one will feel always what one feels at any given moment, good or bad; or, when the moment is good, at least that one
could
always feel it if one might only preserve the attendant framework and
circumstances
. The activity of walking through these unobtrusively beautiful streets quietened me. Also I commonly notice that for the
very
last stretch, I cease to be anxious.

Madame A. lived in just another such house: only two storeys high, white and elegant, with rococo twirls in the fanlight above the handsome front door, a properly sized front door for a house wide enough for a crinoline, tall enough for an admiral, not a mere vertical slit for little men to steal through on the way to work. The houses to left and right repeated the pattern with subtle minor variations. I am glad to have been born soon enough to see such houses before either demolition or preservation: so far all was well.

There was a light in an upper window. It was of the colour known as old gold.

There was a bell and I heard it ring. I expected some kind of retainer or relative, since I visualised Madame A. as almost bed-ridden. But the door opened, and it was obvious that this was Madame A. herself. She looked very short and very square, almost gnomelike in shape; but the outline of her was all I could see because it was now almost dark, the street lighting was dim (thank goodness), and there was no light at all in the hall.

‘Entrez,’
said Madame A. in her distinctive croak.
‘Entrez,
monsieur.
Fermez
la
porte,
s’il
vous
plait.’
Though she croaked, she croaked as one accustomed, if she spoke at all, to speak only in terms of command. Nothing less, I felt at once,
interested
her in the context of human discourse.

Up from the hall led a straight, uncarpeted staircase, much wider than in an English house of that size, and with a heavy wooden baluster, just visible by a light from the landing above.

‘Suivez,
monsieur.’

Madame A. went clambering upwards. It is the only word. She was perfectly agile, but curiously uncouth in her
movements
. In the dim light, she went up those stairs almost like an old man of the woods, but I believe that age not infrequently has this effect on the gait of all but the tallest. I should say that Madame A.’s height was rather under than over five feet.

The light on the landing proved to hang by a thick golden chain in an art nouveau lantern of lumpy old gold glass speckled with irregular dabs of crimson. I followed Madame A. into a room which traversed the whole depth of the house, with one window on to the street and, opposite it, another at the back of the building. The door of the room was already open. Standing ahead of me in the big doorway, Madam A. looked squatter than ever.