Dan Simmons - Drood

Tell the dear children that the only way they can serve their parents is to obey them in all things; let Charley find out the passages in the Scripture where this duty is most strongly insisted on, and write them down for me.

And in a separate letter to my brother and me, one still in my possession and reread frequently, William Collins showed the true spirit of his religious intensity—

Your mother’s account, in her last letter about you both, pleased me very much. Go on praying to God, through Jesus Christ, to enable you, by his Holy Spirit, to be blessings to your parents; and then you must be happy.

True to his beliefs, my father became known for his denunciations. His tolerance for tolerance was very low. Once when our close neighbour, the artist John Linnell (who had painted several of our portraits), was seen working on Sunday—nailing his peach and nectarine trees to his northern wall—my father not only upbraided Linnell but denounced him to a visiting Congregational preacher. Father also believed and spread the rumour that Linnell had cheated one of his gardeners out of his wages, and when Linnell challenged him on the fact, Father cried, “Of what consequence is it, whether you cheated a man out of his wages or not, when you are constantly doing things ten times worse?”

The things-ten-times-worse included working on Sunday and becoming a Dissenter.

I was with my father when we met the poet William Blake in the Strand, and when Blake—an acquaintance—hailed my father and offered his hand, my father deliberately ignored him, turning his back on the poet and leading me away before I could speak. Blake, you see, was carrying a pot of porter in the hand he was not offering in friendship.

Later, when I was in my early twenties and writing my father’s memoirs after his death, I realised how jealous of him many of the so-called great artists of the period were. John Constable, for instance, an acquaintance of many years, was receiving only a few hundred pounds for his cloudy, obscure paintings during years that my father earned over £1,000 a year on commissions for what Constable sneered at as “pretty landscapes” and “flat, soulless, fashionable portraits.” When Constable could find no patrons at all (due, largely, to his persisting in painting such unpopular works as his Corn-Field at the same time that my father had his finger on the pulse of patrons’ and the Academy’s desires for more decorative works), the frustrated landscape painter wrote the following in a letter that was made public, much to my father’s fury— “Turner exhibits a large picture of Dieppe… Calcotte nothing I hear… Collins, a coast scene with fish as usual and a landscape with a large cow turd at least as far as colour and shape is concerned.”

I mentioned earlier that my father decided when we were still quite young that Charley, not I, would be the real inheritor of his artistic talents and career, despite the crib-side assurances of Sir David Wilkie, my namesake. Father enrolled Charley in a private art school, spent much extra time with my brother during our long trips to Europe—analysing paintings in cathedrals and museums (although my father loathed entering Papist churches)—and helped Charley gain acceptance into the prestigious Royal Academy.

Father never really spoke to me about my future or how I would fill it, other than one suggestion, when I was thirteen, that I might consider going to Oxford with a view to entering the Church.

It was when I was thirteen, in Rome during one of our long family stays in Europe, that I experienced my first full love adventure. I remember telling the details to Charles Dickens precisely seventeen years later, during my next visit to Rome and my first trip there with the famous author, and Dickens was so pleased with the amatory precociousness of the affair that he later told me he had informed his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, sparing her, he said, only the details of “how the affair had proceeded to the utmost extremities.” He chuckled when he described how Georgina had blushed when Dickens had summarised my first complete physical encounter by saying, “Our young Willy came out quite a pagan Jupiter in the business.”

At any rate, even at age thirteen I had no intention of entering Oxford with an eye on going into the Church.

Artists are notoriously sensitive—at least to their own feelings—and young Charley was more sensitive than most. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was a doleful child, constantly brooding about this or that, and both of my parents—but especially my mother—took this incessant unhappiness (bordering on sullenness) as a sign of his artistic genius. He also disliked women and girls.

I interrupt here, Dear Reader, to beg your indulgence on this point. Were this not a memoir consigned to the distant future, I would not mention it at all, but—as perhaps you have already detected in this memoir—there was a deep and constant tension between Charles Dickens and his son-in-law, Charles Collins, and I fear that this small matter of Charley’s aversion to women (if not outright misogyny) may have played a part in Dickens’s prejudice. You see, however such things have played out in your distant time, it was not uncommon in our era for young men to go through long periods where they much preferred the company of boys and men to that of women. Given the limitations to education of women in our time, much less the obvious difficulties of the fairer sex in acquiring and mastering more difficult aspects of learning throughout history, it was logical that thoughtful, sensitive men should focus their energies and intercourse on other men.

I remember once when Charley was about fifteen and I came across some of his sketch diaries, left lying about in his room in an uncharacteristic manner (he was always secretive and neat), and I joked with him about the fact that all of the figure studies in his drawing book were of nude men.

Charley had blushed crimson but said with real emotion, “I hate drawing women, Willy. Don’t you? I mean, they are all heavy and pendulous and baggy and bulbous where the human body should not be. How much more delight I take in firm, flat buttocks and muscular thighs and flat bellies and masculine chests, rather than those appalling feminine absences and fleshy protuberances and miserable saggings.”

I was searching for some humourous comment worthy of a sophisticated nineteen-year-old gentleman such as myself when Charley went on, “I mean, Willy, Michelangelo’s female nudes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—even Eve—are actually all paintings of naked men. Even the great Michelangelo disdained nude women! What do you say to that, Brother?”

I was tempted to say that I had been there in Rome that hot, muggy day years before when our father taught both of us that salient fact. But I resisted the temptation. All I said that afternoon in my brother’s room as he tidied up the sketch diaries and set them away in a locked drawer was—“Those are very good drawings, Charley. Very good indeed.” I did not comment at all upon the fact that not only had my brother violated the unwritten rule that an artist was not to show male genitalia in one’s figure drawings—leaving an absence of graphite if nothing else, drawing a modest loincloth the preferred method—but Charley had drawn some of the male organs in an obvious state of excitement.

It was not too many months after this encounter that some revelation of the sort—perhaps a similar indiscretion in Charles’s drawings, or in his comments—became apparent to my father. I remember Charley being called in to my father’s studio one morning and the door being closed and then repeated screams from my brother as my father whipped the sensitive lad with either a branch, cane, or T square.