In the bleak early years of World War Two, getting middle-aged and fat, seeing the European civilisation he adored tearing itself to pieces with no seeming alternatives but the menacing tyrannies of fascism and communism on the one hand and the smiling tyranny of capitalist consumerism on the other, Cyril Connolly slipped into a pseudonym (Palinurus), gathered around him some shreds of wisdom from French and Latin verse, from pessimist philosophers and Buddhism, and interleaved them with his own royally pissed-off musings to make his book The Unquiet Grave. He quotes Chamfort: ‘A man must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes to be sure of finding nothing more disgusting before the day is over.’ ‘My heart is dry as a kidney,’ he laments. His weary revulsion is deep and wide as the ocean itself:
‘Why do sole and turbot borrow the colours and even the contours of the sea-bottom? Out of self-protection? No, out of self-disgust.’
At which point, I surmise, he burst out laughing. There is something ludicrously egotistical about the suggestion that the whole of creation, even turbots on the deep sea bed, must reflect a middle-aged litterateur’s grumpiness, which I am certain was not lost on him. This is another thing creativity does. It forces you outside your own pre-occupations and focusses your attention instead on the wider reality, both the subject you are considering and the form of the thing you are trying to make. It’s a psychological health-cure. As Azar Nafisi explains, ‘In all great fiction, regardless of subject, there is an affirmation of life … The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness of subject-matter.’ The very act of striving to get a sentence right is an affirmation of objective reality, an admission that there is a right, that one has some power to make something right.
The most astoundingly gloomy work of literature I know is the magnificent long poem The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson, a powerfully rhythmic fantasy of a funereal city very like Victorian London, presided over by Durer’s figure of Melancholia, whose grim demeanour he describes:
But as if blacker night could dawn on night,
With tenfold gloom on moonless night unstarred,
A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,
More desperate than strife with hope debarred,
More fatal than the adamantine Never
Encompassing her passionate endeavour,
Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:
The sense that every struggle brings defeat
Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
Because they have no secret to express;
That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
Because there is no light beyond the curtain;
That all is vanity and nothingness.
But amidst all the fog and the bleak, black hopelessness, there sits Thomson hammering his doom-laden lines into shape, seeking the right word for the rhythm and the rhyme, sparking a tiny firework of satisfaction in his heart each time he finds it. He contradicts himself even as he writes. If all were truly vanity and nothingness he wouldn’t bother taking such agonizing pains to say so. Hope flickers on: there’s still a chance of getting the next line right. He’s not cheerful, and it would be heartless to blame him – raised in an orphanage though not an orphan, living on the breadline in the grim, reckless London of Dickens and Mayhew, the most rapidly, insanely-acculturated city in history. No sun-through-skeins-of-mist for him just fog, no trees except in cemeteries, no hosts of angels just other poor sods wandering the streets as bewildered as he is. [Footnote: of course, the cemetery trees are just as miraculous as those outside my window or David Jones’s Vexilla Regis, but it’s a struggle to see that in such circumstances as he endured. He would have regarded STA as insulting, as his contemporary Richard Jefferies (with plenty of his own problems including TB, but brought up in the countryside) would have thought it obvious.] But instead of giving up, he focusses on the world around him and tries to make something out of it. And, in doing so, just about saves himself, for the time being at least. As Howard Jacobson says, ‘We make art to be better than we are when we are not making art’ (and art, in this context, includes all forms of making – boat-building and cookery as well as dance and poetry).
Cézanne described his own work as ‘making harmonies parallel to nature.’ Poor Thomson saw no nature, only industrialization, and he found the same disharmony there as in his own battered psyche, which was of course his real subject. (It is impossible to know and unnecessary to speculate how far the urban grimness polluted his mind, how far he was already damaged and used the city as an allegory of his alienation. Either way, his indefatigability in wringing such misery into fifty pages of verse is heroic.) Cézanne’s vision of the world may have been unique (everyone’s is). It may have been egregiously unique – he had a famous tempérament – but it was a vision of the world and not self-consciously a version of himself. ‘He must have sat there in front of it [an apple] like a dog,’ said the artist Mathilde Vollmoeller at the first Cézanne retrospective in 1907, ‘just looking, without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive.’ Cézanne does not fantasise the inner lives of his sitters, or of his apples. ‘You don’t paint souls,’ he expostulated. ‘You paint bodies; and when the bodies are well painted, dammit, the soul – if they have one – shines through all over the place.’ Like Albert Schweitzer, albeit in more forceful language, he respects the modesty of the soul. He paints what he sees, or at least what he experiences, not as individual objects or people but as the piece of the universe in front of him. The taches, the daubs of colour spread all over the canvas, so that the green in the background reappears in splodges on the sitter’s nose and forehead, show the unity of the single experience, and beyond that the unity of all things, animate or inanimate – not programmatically, but experientially, not out of duty to a creed, but because this is a way that works. Like any artist (but more consciously than most) he translates the idioms of three-dimensional reality and of his mental impressions into a language of two-dimensional art. Look at his final self-portrait below: in 3D, even in his seeing, there is no black blob on his earlobe. In his translation there is. It helps express the ineffable, like the parables
Jesus told which are not literally true but are a technique to translate the inexpressible truth into everyday human images. Surely, what he sees is mediated through his own personality – that is a condition of being conscious – but he does not project himself; in fact, he has forgotten there is a self for him to project. The inquiétude with which he is always described is not a neurosis. It is, or developed into, a determination to look anew rather than to repeat commonplaces, generalisations and presuppositions. He never accepts what he has been told, but looks for himself.
Cézanne, Self-Portrait with Beret (Museum of Fine Art, Boston)
Cézanne’s portrait of Ambroise Vollard remained unfinished even after 115 sittings, according to the probably unreliable sitter, who asked him why he couldn’t just fill in the blanks where the canvas showed through. ‘Just understand,’ replied the artist ominously, ‘if I put something there at random, I shall have to go over the whole picture again starting from that spot.’ So he too saw the interconnectedness of all things, in art as in nature, as Virginia Woolf and Ruskin have already testified. Giacometti – a great Cézannian devotee – wrote, ‘The more one works at a picture, the more impossible it is to finish it. The more you close in, the further away you are.’ (Which reminds us of Pwyll and Rhiannon again.) If an artist’s brush or a writer’s pen is like a cotton-bud delicately revealing more and more of the universe (rather than a fire-hose dowsing us all in his opinions), the task is clearly inexhaustible. Nature never ‘finishes a project’ (for an acorn is as ‘complete’ as an oak-tree, a child as a pensioner). All arts face the insoluble problem of representing a process by a project. The painting can never be finished; the artist simply stops. ‘And still would remain My wit to try – My worn reeds broken The dark tarn dry – All words forgotten – Thou, Lord, and I.’ The ultimate unfinishability of any work that attempts to reflect reality brings us back to the brahmodya and Socrates’s admission that he knew nothing. The blank places on the canvas are the apophatic silence in the sanctum. Art’s own translation of the Uncertainty Principle.
Last week I made a swift day-trip to see the Cézanne exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Although there were hordes engaged in the most un-Cézannian pursuit of working round the rooms as bidden by their audio-guides, being told what they were seeing before they had begun to look for themselves, it was a superb show, expansively arranged. The art works slowly on the viewer. There are no shocks, no gasps of astonishment, just each canvas slowly absorbing you and drawing you into its world. It was an expensive but worthwhile trip. Back home that night and tired after the long journey, I settled down to watch the latest episode of David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II. Cézanne was wonderful; but actually Blue Planet II was more wonderful. Cézanne himself, though not inclined to underestimate his work, (‘all my compatriots are arseholes beside me’) would be the first to recognise that nature was the greater marvel. Of course it is. Ruskin is vehement, as ever, on this point: ‘There is nothing that I tell you with more eager desire that you should believe … than this, that you will never love art well, till you love what she mirrors better.’ The point of art is not the looking at it, but the doing. In his maturity, Cézanne did not paint pictures so that people had something to look at. When in his mid-fifties he was finally given an exhibition, he didn’t bother to go. He stayed at home. He climbed a mountain; he tried to climb a pine tree (and failed); he painted. There was the thing in front of him – often something he’d painted scores of times before – and there was him. Nothing else mattered. Just Cézanne and the apple hoping for the best from one another.
Looking at pictures is a fine and useful thing – Cézanne spent hours poring round the Louvre – the primary imagination acknowledging the unity of creation, and the dedicated artist studying how his forebears have found the best ways of expressing that – but only if the experience is absorbed and used, wrapped up, taken home and even lived by. Otherwise, gallery haunting is just highbrow window-shopping.
the aesthetic point of view is sacrilegious … it consists in amusing oneself with beauty by handling it and looking at it. Beauty is something to be eaten; it is a food. (Simone Weil)
This also explains why, despite forty years of astonishing revelations about the natural world, beautifully filmed and explained with great clarity, David Attenborough’s hugely popular TV series have not persuaded its millions of viewers to protect the planet’s future. It’s telly. It is an essentially sedentary, passive experience. The meerkats and sea-dragons are ‘images on the surface of a stream’ quickly dispelled by comedians, newsreaders, and celebrities making cakes. Spectating is not enough; it’s the doing that counts.
Some years ago, a friend’s brother, Peter, left the wilds of County Cork for the first time in his life and came to visit us in London. We took him to a West End musical Five Guys Named Moe. We even booked central stalls. He loved it. He loved it so much that he felt compelled to join in, clambering over the seats and on to the stage to dance with the now slightly alarmed cast. At which point we were all thrown out.
A West End theatre is an acculturated place. The management didn’t warm to Peter’s natural creativity. It wasn’t part of their business model. Although I doubt they expressed it in these terms, they wanted Peter to display Coleridge’s ‘primary imagination’ – an appreciative but purely cerebral response – without his ‘secondary imagination’ – active participation. In the circumstances I can’t blame them, but we are physical creatures in a material universe, and real creativity, as Peter instinctively understood, must absorb our whole haecceity, mind and body. ‘Contemplation is not the doings. It doesn’t get there,’ says the painter Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth. A concept is not enough in itself. It must be fully and physically realised.
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