Mark de Silva - Square Wave

But Lewis’s unease was shapeless. He could convince no one of the problem, nor offer any real explanation as to what had gone wrong. At least he noticed. Brilliant wealth seemed not to blind him. That was a talent. Since some things can only be achieved through brilliant wealth, all the better if you could see too.

It was Kames who first gave form to Lewis’s intuitions. Lewis attended a Wintry lecture on literature and politics simply to accompany a friend whose father was close to Kames. After the meeting, Lewis felt more himself, and it was through someone else’s words. Here was a man, self-effacing, unpretentious yet bold of idea, who might help him arrange his thoughts. In this sense Kames was an architect.

He spoke that day of the mythologies of a pat secularism; the seductions of the managerial state, of taking ways of life for lifestyles and ethics for a mostly private affair, which was in truth impossible. Ethics implicated the collective, it couldn’t be cordoned off, and political morality was quietly, sometimes silently, at work in the functioning of every public institution. The only question was of its truth, not its existence. Could we do better, once we gave up the fool’s errand of collapsing the domain of “ought” in the world to a private sphere? Was that narrowing of the concept the very reason for the slow loss of credibility that every modern republic had experienced?

Remarkably, all of this was extracted from a critical reading of A Farewell to Arms and The Crying of Lot 49 . His friend didn’t seem to take much from the night, but Lewis was invigorated, by Kames and his manner especially, though he grasped only some of what he’d heard. A slew of Wintry lectures over the next years fixed this. His sense of the political grew as rich as his feeling for art, painting, in particular. He got his father, Leo, to come along to some of these talks, which pleased them both, for different reasons. After a time they got to know Kames, to the extent he was willing to be known. He’d been bred the same way they had, but in an intellectual register, not a commercial one. Leo, who was roughly his age and in fact had friends in common, admired, even envied Kames. There couldn’t have been a shortage of meaning in his life, he thought.

There were other shortages, though. Like the liquidity to extend the recently founded Wintry Institute beyond Halsley (the endowment was still tied up by its executors). It was the sort of thing Kames wouldn’t canvass people about, for fear of tainting the institution’s intellectual credibility. But friends were another matter. Here Leo could do something for Kames, and more important, something for his son. Lewis headed off to Brown and RISD and Leo financed a Providence chapter of the Wintry. Kames even came up to lecture there occasionally, and Lewis helped organize speakers from the nearby universities: sculptors, biologists, philosophers, anyone with a heterodox point of view.

Lewis would take degrees in political science and visual art, but halfway through college it became obvious that art was his real strength. It was where his natural capacity for invention lay. He was best off filtering his political imagination through his paintings, he thought, as many an artist had. So, with some reluctance, he abandoned plans of a senior thesis in government.

He also stopped attending lectures at the Wintry. He’d learned a lot through Kames and the Institute, but after a point, there was no use in talking, thinking, politics anymore. You had to do something, whatever it was. He felt that was the implicit point of the Wintry as well.

What Lewis knew how to do was paint, so that’s what he did. His senior show consisted of a dozen diptychs of B- and C-list actors on unprimed canvas, in which the expressions on each of a pair of faces was balanced against the other in peculiar ways. Uneasy resonances resulted. Partly this was because the expressions were ones never seen on those particular actors’ faces before: a pneumatic bimbo looking scholarly, a sitcom comedian looking noble and detached. But a kind of interaction was also present, though the actors occupied separate spaces and looked out from the canvas only toward the viewer, not each other. Somehow, you could read Hollywood’s schizophrenia off these pairs, Janice said. Lewis’s mentors in the art department agreed. His show received a distinction.

And then his father fell into ruin. Since Lewis was no longer financially assured, Leo urged him to reconsider his chosen vocation, transform it into an avocation, and use his A.B. in politics, coupled with the value of his portfolio, as a stepping stone to a career in business or law.

Lewis balked. Unlike his set, which treated work in the arts or at the nonprofits as luxury pursuits to be quietly set aside when capital, the life-giver, the buffer and balm too, waned, he had always thought (and declaimed) that art couldn’t properly be a hobby or diversion, whatever the change in circumstances. If it was art, it was life.

His father’s financial collapse would be the test of his conviction. Lewis was determined to pass. After graduation, he nursed his portfolio, living only as the interest allowed, so he might devote his energies to painting as completely as possible. He moved in to a tumbledown apartment in Halsley with Janice, who’d transferred out of RISD and graduated from the culinary-arts school at Johnson & Wales after finding that her real talent was with food not paint. At the time, she might have been even more impractical than he was, though nothing in her background entitled her to it. They made sense to each other, together.

Leo eventually found a place at another fund, but he refused on principle to grant Lewis any support after he’d set a course so reckless. In fact it took only a few years for his father to grow quite wealthy again. But there was no thaw. Lewis spoke to him only cursorily now, though without hostility or open resentment. He refused to ask for anything more from him.

Lewis’s mother was gentler toward him, and it was her affection that underwrote a future reconciliation between father and son. But Lewis felt the affection was sustainable only for being generic, blood-fueled. She had little understanding of his projects, being mostly consumed by her role on the board of a charter-school fund and not something in the arts. He didn’t hold this against her, though. He barely understood them himself anymore, and he doubted whether working with the museums, say, would have helped her with this.

He’d been living this way now for a decade, in an aging, under-furnished apartment, in a manner entirely at odds with how he might have lived had he been willing to seek rapprochement with Leo. The only virtue of the place was its fourteen-foot ceilings. He and Janice had converted the second bedroom into a studio for him, and the correspondingly tall windows ensured that his canvases would be awash each day in the creamy light of late afternoon he liked to work in.

Besides Matisse, his early hero had been Paul Klee, that painter with few ancestors and fewer descendants. In college, he flirted with Bacon, whose canvases, though formally rich and possessed of a cultural resonance that was unlikely soon to fade, struck him as indefensibly sunless. There were fewer ideas in them, and less feeling, than they at first seemed to hold.

Lately, though, it was the work of Denis Peterson that occupied him. He was taken first by the hyperrealist paintings, where signage dwarfed subject. But it was the homelessness series that reshaped him, through its moral demands, the urgency Peterson brought to his subjects, though in a peculiarly clear-eyed way. The series lived at the nexus of pathos and precision: compassionate, yet insulated against all sentimentality by its exactitude.