John Banville - Ghosts

Statues. I am thinking of statues. I have always found something uncanny about these sudden, frozen figures, the way they stand so still among moving leaves, or off at the end of an avenue, watching something that is not us, that is beyond us, some endless, transfixing spectacle only they can see. Time for them moves as slow as mountains. I am remembering, for instance, that great photographer old Père Atget’s matutinal studies at Versailles and St Cloud of rainstained Venuses and laughing fauns, Vertumnus removing his winter mask, that rapt Diana with her bow starting out of the shrubbery into the sunlight beside the motionless pond; how vivid and rounded his lens makes them seem, how immanent with intent, these bleached, impetuous creatures poised as if to leap down from their plinths and stride away, trailing storms of dust behind them. Diderot developed a theory of ethics based on the idea of the statue: if we would be good, he said, we must become sculptors of the self. Virtue is not natural to us; we achieve it, if at all, through a kind of artistic striving, cutting and shaping the material of which we are made, the intransigent stone of selfhood, and erecting an idealised effigy of ourselves in our own minds and in the minds of those around us and living as best we can according to its sublime example. I like this notion. There is something grand and tragic in it, and something of essential gaiety, too. Diderot himself had great reverence for statues; he thought of them as living, somehow: strange, solitary beings, exemplary, aloof, closed on themselves and at the same time yearning in their mute and helpless way to step down into our world, to laugh or weep, know happiness and pain, to be mortal, like us. Such beautiful statues , he wrote in a letter to his mistress Sophie Volland, hidden in the remotest spots and distant from one another, statues which call to me, that I seek out or that I encounter, that arrest me and with which I have long conversations … I like to picture him, that cheerful philosophe , at St Cloud or Marly or the great park at Sceaux, talking to the cherubs on a carved vase or lecturing a stone Pygmalion on the hegemony of the senses.

What statue of myself did I erect long ago, I wonder? Must have been a gargoyle.

Here’s a story. Chap I knew in Spain once, in a previous life, painter, not very good, got a commission to do a portrait of a local bigwig in the village where we were both scraping a living at the time. My pal would go to the old boy’s house in the mornings and work on the canvas for an hour or so while it was still cool; he had not much Spanish and anyway in those parts they spoke an incomprehensible dialect, so conversation was at a minimum. For a long time the work did not go well. It was very hard to fix a likeness. The mayor, I think he was the mayor, an ugly old peasant with enormous hands and a simian brow, would sit very stiffly in his best blue suit in a white room staring fixedly before him with a hunted look, as if, said my friend, he were at the oncologist’s waiting to hear the worst. Some subjects, my friend explained, simply do not look like themselves; shyness, embarrassment, self-consciousness, something compels them to put on a mask and hide behind it; they will look like their mothers, their siblings, complete strangers, even, but not themselves. With such sitters the painter must coast along, biding his time, waiting for them to relax and forget themselves for long enough to be themselves. The mayor was such a one. He just sat there like a stuffed barbary ape, blank, featureless, folded up in himself. Until one morning my friend arrived and found him transformed; he was no more animated than at other times, but suddenly at last his face was open, the mask cast aside, his character — violent, rapacious, fearful, melancholy — legible in every wrinkle and mole and ill-shaved whisker. Well, the portrait was finished within the hour — and damned good it was, too, according to my friend — yet still the mayor sat there, gazing before him with a pensive and faintly puzzled look. You know of course what had happened, you saw it coming, didn’t you: the old man was dead, had died calmly of a stroke a few minutes before the painter arrived. You see, you see what I mean? To thine own self be true, they tell you; well, I allowed myself that luxury just once and look what happened. No, no, give me the mask any day, I’ll settle for inauthenticity and bad faith, those things that only corrode the self and leave the world at large unmolested.

I am reading Diderot on actors and acting, too. He knew how much of life is a part that we play. He conceived of living as a form of necessary hypocrisy, each man acting out his part, posing as himself. It is true. What have I ever been but an actor, even if a bad one, too much involved in my role, not detached enough, not sufficiently cold. Yes, yes, it’s so. You think me cold? I am not. Harsh, perhaps, uncaring of the proprieties, too apt to make poor jokes, but not cold, no. Quite the opposite, in fact, hot and sweating in my doublet and hose, trying not to see the upturned faces beyond the footlights, the eyes greedy for disaster fixed on me as I stumble among my fellow players, stammering out my implausible lines and corpsing at all the big moments. This is why I have never learned to live properly among others. People find me strange. Well, I find myself strange. I am not convincing, somehow, even to myself. The man who wishes to move the crowd must be an actor who impersonates himself. Is that it, is that really it? Have I cracked it? And there I was all that time thinking it was others I must imagine into life. Well well. (To act is to be, to rehearse is to become: Felix dixit , or someone like him.) This has the feel of a great discovery. I’m sure it must be a delusion.

Do you notice how the gull’s cry echoes through these pages, sounding its note of hunger and harsh beseeching? It is my emblem; my watermark. Next morning it was everywhere around me, a disembodied keening in the calm, white air. The wind had died and there was a kind of luminous, faint fog. I walked along the pier again, carrying my suitcase, but in daylight now, the scene a developed print of last night’s heartsick negative. The boat was a blunt vessel with a rusted chimney and a limp flag dangling in the cordage. When I arrived it was already loaded up with a cargo of tomatoes and potato crisps and bales of toilet paper and mysterious, complicated machine parts, all gleamingly, implausibly new. The skipper, a big-bellied man with a red face, stood in the wheelhouse and yawned. (If I were a visitor from another planet — but then, am I not a visitor from another planet? — I think that of all the earthlings’ quirks it is the act of pandiculation that would surprise and fascinate me most, that slow stretch and then the soundless ape-howl, in which they indulge themselves with such languorous relish.) There was a boy also, a nimble, bow-legged fellow with red hair and buck-teeth; he did all the work, scurrying about the deck and cursing violently to himself while Bulkington in the wheelhouse watched him with amusement and a kind of fond contempt, taking a quick nip now and then from a secret bottle stowed under a shelf behind the wheel. I seemed to be the only passenger. As soon as the cargo was loaded we got under way. I always feel a childish surge of excitement when the last mooring rope is cast off and the boat backs away shudderingly from the dock. We swerved into the middle of the harbour and swung about smartly and headed out past the lighthouse into the open sea. I stood in the bow and watched Coldharbour turn into a miniature of itself, complete with smoking chimneys and bristling masts and tiny figures moving on the quayside. I spotted Billy’s van, still parked outside the pub. Probably he had slept in it last night, huddled on the back seat with that wobbly spring sticking up and his knees in his chest, I, of course, had passed the hours of darkness in my accustomed fashion, hanging upside down under the tavern eaves wrapped in my leathern wings.