John Banville - The Blue Guitar

Yes, quite a time we’ve had of it. I don’t know if my heart is in good enough shape for me to go back over it all, or all of it that seems to matter. In terms of duration it’s not much, weeks at most, though it might as well have been an age. I suppose I owe it to us, to the four of us, to give some sort of account, to record some sort of testament. When I was young, barely in my twenties though already puffed up with stern ambition, I had a memorable experience late one night, I hardly know how to describe it and perhaps shouldn’t try. I hadn’t been drinking, though I felt as if I were at least halfway drunk. I had started work at first light and didn’t stop until long after midnight. I worked too hard in those days, driving myself into a state of bleak, bone-aching numbness that at times was hardly distinguishable from despair. It was so difficult, sticking to the rules — I was no iconoclast, whatever anyone says — while at the same time struggling to break out and get beyond them. I didn’t know what I was doing, half the time, and might as well have been painting in the dark. Darkness was the adversary, darkness and death, which are pretty much the same thing, when you think about it, though it’s true I’m speaking of a special kind of darkness. I worked so fast, so feverishly, always terrified I wouldn’t survive to finish what I had started. There were days when the ruffian on the stair came right into the room and stood beside me at the easel, bold and insolent, jogging my elbow and whispering suggestively into my ear. Mind you, it was no symbol but death itself, the actual extinguishing, that I daily anticipated. I was the hypochondriacs’ hypochondriac, forever running to the doctor with a pain here, a lump there, convinced I was a terminal case. I was assured, repeatedly and with increasing exasperation, that I wasn’t dying, that I was as sound as a bell, as a belfryful of bells, but I wasn’t to be fobbed off, and sought second, third, fourth opinions in my doomed pursuit of the death sentence. What was it all about? What did I think was coming to get me? Maybe it wasn’t death but failure I was afraid of. Too simple, that, I think. Yet there must have been something wrong with me, to feed and nurture such a morbid obsession.

Anyway, back to that night at the weary close of a long day’s work. At the time I was embarked on something historical, what was it? — yes, Heliogabalus, I remember, Heliogabalus the bulbous boy. For months I was fascinated by him, that extraordinary head like a ripe pomegranate about to burst and shoot out its seeds in all directions. In the end I turned him into a minotaur, who knows why; you see what I mean about darkness. Where was I living at the time? In that festering den on Oxman Lane I rented from Buster Hogan’s mother? Let’s say it was, what does it matter. This was long before Gloria — have I mentioned how much younger than me she is? — and I was running after a girl who wouldn’t have me, another one out of Hogan’s harem, as it happens. Lot of water under that bridge, let’s not drown ourselves in it. There I was, with pins-and-needles in my painting arm and my legs like petrified tree trunks from standing for so long in front of Helio’s shining head, when suddenly it came to me, namely, the true nature of my calling, if we can call it that. I was to be a representative — no, the, I was to be the representative, the singular, the one and only. This was how it was put to me — put to me, yes, for it did seem to come from somewhere else, the injunction, the commission. At first I was nonplussed, that’s the word. The Virgin herself, discovered at her devotions by the genuflecting youth with flaxen wings, could not have been more at a loss than I was that night. What or whom was I to represent, and how? But then I thought of the caves at Lascaux and that famous prehistoric hand-print on the wall. That would be me, that would be my signature, the signature of all of us, the stylised mark of the tribe. This wasn’t, I should say, good news. It wasn’t good or bad. In a way, it wasn’t even to do with me, not directly. Stags and aurochs would leap from my brush, and what say would I have in the matter? I would be merely the medium. Yet why me? What do I care about the tribe, what does the tribe care about me? That, I suppose, was the point: I was no one, and still am. Just the medium, the medium medium, Niemand der Maler.

I think of these days, these present days, as the post-war period. The sort of exhausted calm that has descended has a lingering whiff of cordite, and we who did not die have the shocked air of survivors. My second return home, no more than a matter of weeks ago, was a démarche for peace. That’s how it is with me. I’m like an artilleryman who every so often glimpses through a rent in the flying cannon smoke a devastated landscape where wounded figures stumble blindly, coughing and crying. Sometimes you have to surrender, just walk out on to the battlefield with your hankie tied to the barrel of your musket. At the beginning, I mean at the beginning of my homecoming, I felt myself to be a displaced person, a refugee, one might almost say. After the débâcle at Grange Hall and that subsequent grisly confrontation with Polly — bloody skirmishes on all sides — I hid for a few days in the studio, bunking down as best I could on the love-stained sofa, where sleep was impossible and all I could manage were intervals of fitful dozing. Oh, those ashen dawns, when I lay under the big bare window in the roof, skewered to the worn plush, like a moth pinned to a pad, watching the rain falling in swathes and the gulls wheeling, and listening to their forlorn screechings. It was worse when I heaved myself over on to my front, for then my face was pressed into the worn green velvet that smelt so pungently of Polly.

Did I miss her? I did, but in an odd way that perplexes me. What I came to feel at the losing of her, at the loosing of her, wasn’t the furnace blast of anguish that might have been expected, but rather a kind of pained nostalgia, such as, oddly, I knew in childhood, sitting by the window, say, on a winter eve, chin on fist, watching the rain on the road like a corps of tiny ballet dancers, each drop sketching a momentary pirouette before doing the dying swan and collapsing into itself. Remember, remember what they were like, those hours at the window, those twilight dreamings by the fire? What I was yearning for was something that had never been. By that I don’t mean to deny what I once felt for Polly, what she once meant to me. Only now when my mind reached out for her it closed on nothing. I could recall, and can recall, every tiniest thing about her, in vividest and achingmost detail — the taste of her breath, the heat in that little hollow at the base of her spine, the damp mauve sheen of her eyelids when she slept — but of the essential she only a wraith remained, ungraspable as a woman in a dream. What I mean to say is, the loss of my love for Polly, of Polly’s love for me, was — something something something, hold on, I’m groping towards it. Ah, no good, I’ve lost the thread. But love, anyway, why do I keep worrying at it, like a dog gnawing at its sores? Love, indeed.

A TREATISE ON LOVE, SHORTER VERSION

All love is self-love

There, does that nail it?

I couldn’t remain for long at the studio, sneaking out to buy the few essentials for survival and scuttling back again and huddling at the cluttered table drinking milk straight from the bottle and nibbling on crusts of bread and bits of cheese, like old Ratty, my friend and mascot from gate-lodge days. There was no Maisie Kearney nearby to make clandestine sandwiches for me. Also it was very cold. The heating system, such as it was, seemed to have broken down entirely, and if it hadn’t been for the fug of warmth seeping up through the floorboards from the laundry below I might have died — is it possible to be indoors and yet perish from exposure? And there was nothing to do, either, except brood, surrounded by what seemed the rubble of my life; the canvases stacked against the walls looked as if they had turned their faces away in shame. Conditions were primitive, as you would expect. Don’t enquire about hygiene. I hadn’t even a toothbrush, or a clean pair of socks, and for some reason never thought to purchase such items on my hurried outings to the shops. Mrs. Bird, the launderer’s wife, very kindly came to my rescue. I relinquished my clothes to her, passing them to her round the doorpost in a bundle, and she washed and dried and ironed them while I sat upstairs wrapped in a rug, sighing and sneezing. That was a low point, the very nadir, I would say, except that there was worse to come.