John Banville - The Blue Guitar

But does that world exist, what I have here called world? Maybe the man on the railway platform is running towards someone who will never arrive, who will always be the distant beloved, an image he formed for himself, an image lodged inside him that he keeps trying to conjure into being, trying and failing, the image of a person who never boarded the train in the first place.

You see my predicament? I state it again, simply: the world without, the world within, and betwixt them the unbridgeable, the unleapable, chasm. And so I gave up. The great sin I am guilty of, the greatest, is despair.

Pain, the painster’s pain, plunges its blade into my barren heart.

Marcus beside me had fallen asleep. Dazed by alcohol and exhausted by his own misery he had let his head slump back on the sofa with his eyes closed, and now he was snoring softly, the empty brandy bottle lolling in his lap. I sat and thought. I like to think when I’m a little drunk. Though maybe thinking is not the word, maybe thinking is not quite what I do. The brandy seemed to have expanded my head to the size of a room, not this room but one of those vast reception halls that court painters used to be required to do in drypoint, rafters and leaded lights and groups of courtiers standing about, the gentlemen in thigh-high boots and fancy hats with feathers and the ladies flouncing in farthingales, and in the midst of them the Margrave, or the Elector Palatine, or perhaps even the Emperor himself, no larger or more strikingly attired than the rest and yet, thanks to the painter’s skill, the undoubted centre of all this grand, unheard talk, all this unmoving bustle.

How my mind wanders, trying to avoid itself, only to meet itself again, with a horrible start, coming round the other way. A closed circle — as if there were any other kind — that’s what I live in.

Marcus was bound to wake up sooner or later, and meanwhile I was again casting about desperately for something I might say to him, something neutral, plausible, calming. One has to say something, even if the something is nothing. To keep quiet would have been my best, my safest, recourse, but guilt has an irresistible urge to babble, especially in the early, hot stages. I knew the game was up. Polly, bless her honest heart, would not withhold for long the identity of her lover — she wouldn’t have the tenacity for it, would weaken in the end and blurt out my name. And what about me? I had been lying all my life, I swam in a sea of minor deceptions — thieving makes a man into a master dissembler — but could I trust myself now to keep my head above water, in these turbid and ever-deepening straits? If I flinched, if I made the merest flicker, I would give myself away on the spot. Marcus might be self-absorbed and generally unheeding, but jealousy when it really got its claws into him would give him a raptor’s unblinking, prismatic eye, and with it he would surely see what was, after all, plain to be seen.

I rose quietly, though not entirely steadily, and crossed to the window. There was a big, scouring wind blowing and by now it was a Poussin sky all over, blue as blue with majestic floatings of cloud, ice-white, bruise-grey, burnished copper. I would have done it with a thin cobalt wash and, for the clouds, big scumblings of zinc white — yes, my old standby! — dark ash and, for the glowing copper fringes, some yellow ochre toned up with, say, a dash of Indian red. One can always allow oneself a sky, even at one’s most determinedly inward. An airship was sailing past, at a considerable height, its battleship-blue flank catching the sun and the giant propeller at the rear a diaphanous silver blur. Would I include it in my sky, if I were painting it? Preposterous things, these dirigibles, they remind me of elephants, or rather the corpses of elephants, bloated with gas, yet there is something endearing about them too. Matisse put one of the now outmoded flying machines — how I miss them, so elegant, so swift, so thrillingly dangerous! — into a little oil study, Window Open to the Sea, that he did after he and his adored new wife, Olga, returned to France from London in 1919—see the facts I have at my fingertips?

Next thing I was rummaging among scores of old canvases stacked against the wall in a corner. I hadn’t looked at them in a long time — couldn’t bear to — and they were dusty and draped with cobwebs. I was after that still life I had been working on when I was overtaken by what I like to call my conceptual catastrophe — how much nakedness they cover, the big words — and my resolve failed me and I couldn’t go on painting, trying to paint. I must have done a dozen versions of it, each one poorer than its predecessor, to my increasingly despairing eye. But I could find only three, two of them merely exploratory studies, with more canvas showing than paint. The third one I pulled out and carried to the window, blowing at the dust on it as I went. It was a biggish rectangle, some four feet wide and three feet high. When I had set it down in the daylight and stood back, I realised it must have been the sight of the airship whirring past that had put me in mind of it. At the centre of the composition is a large, grey-blue kidney shape with a hole more or less in the middle and a sort of stump sticking out at the upper left side. When Polly saw the picture one day, before I had turned its face finally to the wall in disgust, she asked if the blue thing, as she called it, was meant to be a whale — she thought the hole might be an eye and the stump a finny tail — but then laughed at herself embarrassedly and said no, that when she looked more closely she could see that it was, of course, an airship. I wondered how she could imagine I would want to paint such a thing, but then thought, why not? When it comes to subjects, what’s the difference between a blimp and a guitar? Any old object serves, and the more amorphous its shape the more the imagination has to work with.

The imagination! Imagine you hear a hollow laugh.

Behind me Marcus stirred and muttered something, then sat up, coughing. The light from the window turned the lenses of his spectacles into opaque, watery discs. The brandy bottle tumbled to the floor and rolled in a half-circle, drunkenly. “Christ,” he said thickly, “did we finish it all?”

He seemed so helpless, so much at a loss, and I was moved, suddenly, and could almost have embraced him, as he sat there, drunk, desolated, heartbroken. After all, he was, or had been, my friend, whatever that might mean. But how would I dare offer him comfort? I felt as if I were standing outside a burning building, with the fierce heat of the flames on my face and the screams of the trapped coming out at every window, knowing it was my carelessly discarded match that had set the conflagration going.

I suggested we should go out and find something to eat, on the general principle, invented by me at just that moment, that grief always requires to be fed. He nodded, yawning.

As we were leaving, he paused by the scarred and stained oak table where I used to keep the tools of my trade — tubes of pigment, pots of upended brushes, so on. I still keep them there, along with general odds and ends, all in a jumble, but they’re no longer what they were. The energy has gone out of them, the potential. They’ve become over-heavy, almost monumental. In fact, they’ve come to seem like subjects for a still life, set out just so, waiting to be painted, in all their innocence and lack of workaday intent. Marcus, tarrying there, picked up something and looked at it closely. It was a glass mouse, life-sized, with sharp ears and tiny incised claws, a pretty thing, of no real value. “Funny,” he said, “we used to have one just like this — it even had the same bit missing from the tip of its tail.” I let my eyes go vague and said that was a coincidence. I had forgotten I had left it there. He nodded, frowning, still turning the thing in his fingers. He was welcome to have it, I said quickly and with much too much eagerness. Oh, but no, he replied, he wouldn’t dream of taking it, if it was mine. Then he put it back on the table and we went out.