John Banville - The Blue Guitar

But wait, wait, I’m getting confused in my chronology, hopelessly confused. That insight didn’t come until much later, and when it did, it left me blinded. So maybe, all those years ago, I wasn’t such a perceptive little genius after all. That’s a fortifying thought, though I can’t think why it should be.

—

Somewhat later. I made myself go for a walk. It’s not a thing I often do, the reason being that it’s not a thing I do well. That sounds absurd, I know — in what way would a walk be done well or ill? Walking is walking, surely. The point, however, is not the walking, but the going for a walk, which in my estimation is the most futile and certainly the most formless of human pastimes. I’m as ready as the next man to savour the delights that Mother Nature spreads before us with such indulgence and largesse, probably readier, but only as an incidental pleasure in the intervals of the everyday. To set out with the specific purpose of being abroad in the clement air under God’s good sky and all the rest of it smacks to me of kitsch. I think the trouble is that I can’t engage in it naturally, without self-consciousness — that’s what I mean by speaking of it being done badly. I look with envy upon others I meet along the road. How heartily they tramp, in their knee-breeches and rain-proof jackets, fearlessly wielding those pairs of long, wonderfully slender walking-sticks, more like ski poles, with leather loops on the handles, and not a thought in their heads, it seems, their faces lifted with blameless smiles to the bright day’s blessing of light. I for my part skulk and sweat, mopping my streaming brow and clawing at a shirt collar that indoors was an easy fit but that now seems intent on throttling me. It’s true, I could pluck it open and snatch off my tie and cast it from me, but that’s just it. I’ve never been the unbuttoned type. I may look like Dylan Thomas in his premature decrepitude but I haven’t got his windy way.

What it is, you see, about being on a walk — I’m sorry to keep tramping on about it — with no other purpose than being on a walk, is that I feel watched. Not by human eyes, or even by animal ones. For me, nature is anything but inanimate. Today as I strolled — I do not stroll — along the back road that skirts the wood I felt the life of things thronging me about on every side, crowding me, jostling me: in a word, watching me. Why, I wondered uneasily, is there so much of it? Why is there grass everywhere, covering everything? — why are there so many leaves? And that’s not even to consider the goings-on underground, the rootling beetles, the countless squirm of worms, the riot of thready roots striking deep and deeper into the earth in search of water and of warmth. I was appalled by the profusion; I felt pressed down upon by the weight of it all, and soon turned about and scurried back to the house and fled indoors, with a tremulous hand pressed to my racing heart.

Yet when I painted I painted nature best, and most happily. There’s a paradox. Mind you, when it comes down to it, what else is there to paint? By nature, need I say, I mean the visible world, the entirety of it, indoors as well as out. But that’s not nature, strictly speaking, is it? What, then? It’s the all, the omnium, that I’m thinking of; the whole kit and boodle, mice and mountain ranges, and us, wedged in between, the measure of all things, God bless the mark, as they say in these parts.

There’s nothing to eat in the house. What am I to do? I could go out into the wood, I suppose, and forage for sweet herbs, or delve for pig nuts, whatever they are. Autumn is supposed to be the season of mellow fruitfulness, isn’t it? I’ve never been any good at looking after myself. That was what womenfolk did, they took care of me. Now see what I’ve become, a mute and lyreless Orpheus who would lose his head for sure, were he so foolish as to venture back among the maenads. O god departed! O deus mortuorum! To thee I pray.

—

My thoughts have turned yet again to that tube of zinc white I filched from Geppetto’s toyshop. I can’t seem to leave it alone. I’ve come definitely to the conclusion that it didn’t in fact constitute my first legitimate theft. Granted, the tube of paint was the first thing I stole, so far as I remember, but I stole it out of childish covetousness, and the deed had nothing in it of artistry and lacked the true erotic element. These vital qualities only entered in with Miss Vandeleur’s green-gowned figurine. Ah, yes. I have her still, that little porcelain lady, after all these years. What a sentimentalist I am. Or, no, that’s not right, what am I talking about? — sentimentality doesn’t come into it. The things I’ve kept I haven’t kept out of nostalgic attachment; as well suggest to the high priest of the temple that the holy relics he looks after and jealously watches over are mere mementoes of the mortal men and women, their original owners, who were destined one day to be elevated to sanctity. Wait! — there it is again, the hieratic note, the summoning of the sacred, while in fact the true end of stealing is mundane — transcendent, yet at the same time earthbound. Let me state it clearly. My aim in the art of thieving, as it was in the art of painting, is the absorption of world into self. The pilfered object becomes not only mine, it becomes me, and thereby takes on new life, the life that I give it. Too grand, you say, too highfalutin? Scoff all you like, I don’t care: I know what I know.

Miss Vandeleur, the Miss Vandeleur I’m speaking of, not that there could have been so many others by that name, kept a boarding house in a village by the sea. She was related to my family in some way that I never did get to the bottom of. I suspect her relatedness was notional. There was an aunt on my father’s side, an elderly, genteel lady who dressed in muted shades of mauve and grey, and wore — can it be? — button boots, that were delicately craquelured all over with a web of waxy wrinkles. She used to give me sixpences warm from her purse, but could never remember my name, and I’ve returned the compliment now by having forgotten hers. It seems to me Miss Vandeleur had been companion of long standing to this venerable spinster — as to precisely what variety of companion she was I’m not going to speculate — and on the old girl’s death had become attached to us, a replacement, as it were, for the woman who had died, a sort of honorary aunt. At any rate, in the flat weeks towards the end of the season, when she had rooms standing idle, Miss V. would graciously invite us down to stay, at greatly reduced rates, which was the only way we could have afforded such a luxury.

Miss Vandeleur was a large, fair person with a mass of artificial blonde hair, which she wore loose and flowing. She must have been a beauty when she was young, and even yet, in the days when we knew her, she had the look of a ravaged version of the flower-strewing Flora to the left of the central figure in Sandro Botticelli’s much admired if slightly saccharine Primavera. I suspect she was aware of the resemblance — someone once, a suitor, perhaps, must have drawn her attention to it — given that unlikely mass of carefully kept corn-coloured hair and the high-waisted, diaphanous dresses that she favoured. In temper she was volatile. Her predominant mode was one of stately benevolence, out of which she might erupt at the slightest provocation into slit-eyed, venom-spitting rage. There had been a tragedy long ago — a pair of twins had deliberately drowned a playmate, as I recall — in which Miss Vandeleur had been somehow implicated, wholly unjustly, she insisted, and chance reminders or even the unbidden recollection of this injustice were the underlying cause of many a flare-up. Her dispiritingly unlovely house, which was called for some reason Lebanon, was roomy and rambling, with numerous tacked-on extensions and annexes, so that it seemed not to have been built but rather to have accumulated. Her private quarters were at the back, in what was little more than a lean-to of laths and tarred felt precariously and leakily attached to the kitchen. At the heart of this lair was what she called her den, a small square dim room stuffed with her treasures. Everywhere there were objets, of gilt and glass, of faience and filigree, crowding on sideboards and small tables, standing on the floor, nailed to the walls, suspended from the ceilings. Here was her private place, here she indulged her mysterious, solitary pleasures, and we were given to understand, we children especially, that any violation of its sanctity would bring down upon us immediate and frightful retribution. I hardly need say how much I itched to get in there.