Iain Pears - The Portrait

WHEN I MAKE all these sniffy remarks about the French, I do not mean to denigrate them, you know. Fine to be French; it is the faux-français that revolt me. Paris was a good time, my liberation. Not as a painter, as I learned next to nothing there and had to spend years getting rid of what I did absorb. But as a man, it was crucial. I went there nervous, shy, uncomfortable, and came back—myself. In all my ostentatious glory, swaggering around the London stage proclaiming myself. I became a character, what the artist should be. It was only a stage show, but worked well enough as that. Some hated me, and thought me fraud or fool, some found me entertaining. But everybody noticed me; and that is the key to success in the world these days. Far more important than actually being good. To impose yourself, to take the public by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shaking; to scream in its provincial little ear that I am a genius. And if you scream loud enough and long enough, it believes you. Establish that, and in the public mind a good painting becomes a masterpiece, a failure becomes a bold experiment. I saw that in Paris, and learned how to shout.

You watched my transfiguration and guided it; I can remember how it felt, when the penny dropped. It was in a bar, not far from the atelier, and there was a group of us talking. A long day’s work, our eyes still tired from strain, the smell of paint and turpentine hanging over us. Each of us marked by our filthy, blackened fingernails, multicoloured hands. The exuberance of noisy conversation after a hard day, for we were serious, you know. We worked hard eight, ten, sometimes twelve hours a day in summer, learning our craft and trying to equip ourselves for the battles to come, when we had to put it into practise. I can’t remember who was there; Rothenstein for one, I imagine, prim and proper as he always was, making his pursed and always slightly flattening comments, taking the joy out of the occasion by always insisting on thinking about what he said. McAvoy, perhaps, with his disconcerting habit of interjecting a comment that had nothing to do with what we were talking about. Evelyn was certainly not there; she packed her bags at the end of the day and went home. She was always a thing apart, never one of a group. We were drinking and I could not take my drink; my puritan blood was not used to it. A little went a long way, and after two glasses I was roaring drunk while everyone else was still stone cold sober. My tongue loosened, and I said something perfectly absurd; the sort of thing that my normal self would never have dared think, let alone say.

I can’t remember what it was, but I remember the formula: take any major artist and stress a weakness, real or imagined. Build yourself up by diminishing others greater than yourself. The critic’s trick. So what was it? Manet would be a great artist if only he could control his line. Rembrandt’s lack of structure precludes him from being considered a true genius. Raphael’s weakness was that he lacked a Venetian’s sense of colour. Some nonsense like that. And to my surprise I found people nodding, not daring to make the obvious response that I was talking rubbish. Not because they agreed with me, either; but because I had spoken with such vehemence. I was allowed to say drivel, even encouraged to do so. I had come into my birthright.

I felt ashamed of myself, and even more ashamed of those who didn’t stop me, but it was a touch of power, and out of that moment grew the artist I became. I learned to impose myself, force myself on other people, bully them with my presence and my convictions and, in so doing, convince myself as well. I became a boor and found that people flocked to me, wanting me to do violence to them or, if not that, to be around while I assaulted others.

Except for prissy little Evelyn, of course, who missed my artistic birth in the bar. I took her out one evening, in Paris. She was lonely, and I decided she was ripe for assault. I would attack, overwhelm and achieve a grand victory over her. What was she, after all? I wanted to try out my new persona on an easy target, and she seemed perfect for it. I was even prepared to spend money, although getting others to spend it for me soon became a part of my reputation. It is strange how others feel in your debt if they pay for you in restaurants.

It wasn’t high elegance, though, that evening. We went to a bouillon which I liked because it was the Paris of the people, the sort of place where not even English painters could be found. No tablecloths, waiters even rougher than the clientele, mainly used by people without any means of cooking themselves who ate en pension there, keeping their knives in their own wooden box by the entrance. I frequented many of them, but my favourite was down by Bercy, where you could sit next to the wine men and hear the accents of Burgundy and Bordeaux. The whole place stank of rancid wine and sweat from their clothes, but the food wasn’t bad and the wine was better than you get in many a fine restaurant. No women there at all, ever: this was a place for men to eat.

That was part of my plan, of course, the first stage in my scheme to intimidate. Evelyn, I decided, would be so scared of being in such a place that she would look to me, would shrink against me in that hostile, violent place. I would become her protector, and once that was established, all else would be easy.

It started well, because she dressed in her best for the occasion. Not elegantly, of course, she had no good clothes in that sense. Plain, comfortable garb, almost masculine in style which she rescued from ugliness with a touch of colour or detail—she somehow managed to make an artificial flower in her hair seem charming, a cheap necklace seem stylish. She had a way of putting things together on her body which suggested a sensuality which was the more intriguing for being so carefully hidden. Something she wanted to advertise but was afraid of at the same time. It was what made her so proper and seemingly so mousy, until you got to know her and realised she was nothing of the sort.

I had not reckoned, of course, on her ability to call on the inherent sense of superiority of the middle-class English female to protect her in hostile territory. She comes from the class of women who made the empire, who can sail through the much more unfriendly waters of a charity bazaar or Park Lane tea party and emerge unscathed. Half a hundred burly French drunks are as nothing to such people; in fact, she blossomed under the challenge. All her natural shyness vanished as she settled into a role she understood all too well. She sat down at her table, and straightaway asked the man next to her—an enormous, scowling Parisian who could have crushed her in one giant paw—if he would be so kind as to stop smoking.

A silence fell. Someone sniggered, but stopped dead when she fixed him with a steely glance and slightly raised eyebrow. The cigarette was dropped to the floor and crushed out with the heel of a huge boot. The conversation resumed once more and, now that Evelyn had established herself as the hostess of our little table, she held court for the rest of the evening, genteelly receiving compliments and, it seemed, quite enjoying herself. Every five minutes, a fresh glass of wine would be presented to us by our new friends, then the cognac merchants weighed in and a tide of brandy rolled over us, propelled by the irresistible force of amiable sentiment. Her French was much better than mine; I became her companion, tolerated because I was with her, not the other way round.

The end was inevitable; Evelyn, I discovered, could drink even a stevedore under the table. She came from a long line of heavy drinkers and it seemed to have no effect on her. You remember what it did to me. My plans were in disarray; I was humiliated, exposed as a fraud—and I knew that she saw, and understood, everything. She all but had to carry me out, and when, in my befuddled state, I hurled myself on her, she sidestepped daintily and I fell, heavily, onto the ground. It took me some time to get up again, and when I rolled over I saw her sitting on a stone wall looking at me as though I was a six-year-old who’d just dropped some chocolate on the Wilton.