Ali Smith: Autumn

The bomb was going to drop. They’d maybe only a few years to live.

A boy asked her, why do you wear so much bright red lipstick , all the better to kiss you with she said and jumped out of her chair and came after him, he ran away, he was actually sort of terrified, she chased him out of the college and across the grass and up the pavement till he leapt on the back of a passing bus and she stood holding herself, she was laughing so much. A man, quite an old one, a very nice one, had made her laugh like that too by crawling towards her on his hands and knees across the room kissing the floor between him and her as he did; he was the songwriter, came to the flat, she called him Gershwin for fun. He asked her, looking at her Belmondo with the hat, who’s he ? Film star, French, she said, that picture’s all heart-throb versus cunt-throb don’t you think? and poor old Gershwin blushed all the way to his tips — ears, toes, everywhere he had a tip blushing, sweet older chap he couldn’t help it, he was from another time. Well, they almost all were. Even the people meant to be from now were really from then . He was in the studio the other day, looked at 5 4 3 2 1, what does it say ? he’d said and he’d read it out loud. Oh for a fu—. Oh. Ah. I see. How very, ah, Shakespearianly put . Well, if you’re Gershwin, she said, I’m the Wimbledon Bard-o. Get it? Oh yes, he said, Bard, Bardot. How apt.

He liked her a lot.

Oh well.

Couldn’t be helped.

Imagine if pictures in a gallery weren’t just pictures but were actually sort of alive.

Imagine if time could be kind of suspended, rather than us be suspended in it.

She had no idea sometimes, to be honest, what she was trying to do. To be vital, she supposed.

Low in confidence, only sixteen, when a tutor suggested to her stained glass isn’t just for churches, it can be for anywhere. It doesn’t have to be for holy things, it can be for anything . High in confidence leaving the little corner on The Only Blonde In The World just the bare canvas like a corner of the painting had come away by itself, trompe l’oeil like you could peel them off and know that’s what they were, images. Marilyn all dazzling, hurrying by in Some Like It Hot, cutting through abstraction with her brightness. Could you paint the female orgasm? It was Marilyn. It was coloured circles, lovely, lovely, and everything was exciting, TV was exciting, radio was exciting, London was exciting, full of exciting people from all over the world, and theatre was exciting, an empty fairground was exciting, cigarette packets were exciting, milk bottle tops were exciting, Greece was exciting, Rome was exciting, a clever woman in a hostel’s shower room wearing a man’s shirt to sleep in was exciting, Paris — exciting ( I am alone in Paris!! wherever I go I am followed or asked to take coffee etc. etc. otherwise Paris is marvellous, the painting — no words possible ). High in confidence, art could be anything, beer cans were a new kind of folk art, film stars a new mythology, nostalgia of NOW. It was exciting when she worked out the photographers taking the photos of her couldn’t cut her art out of their pictures if she posed as part of her art.

(Wrong.

Blast.

They still managed to cut round her and slice the art out and away, leaving the breast and the thigh bits, of course.)

Get my paintbrushes into the shot, will you, Mike?

She was wearing a hat, a shirt and her underwear, mimicking as closely as she could Celia in the portrait, except she’d taken her jeans off to be sure they’d keep both her and the picture in the picture. But Lewis and Michael were great boys, she kind of liked them immensely. They let her tell them how to set up the shots and mostly they did as she asked. Happy to pose nude. I like nakedness. I mean who doesn’t, to be honest? I’m a person. I’m an intelligent nakedness. An intellectual body. I’m a bodily intelligence. Art’s full of nudes and I’m a thinking, choosing nude. I’m the artist as nude. I’m the nude as artist.

A great many men don’t understand a woman full of joy, even more don’t understand paintings full of joy by a woman. It’s really all based on sex the whole thing, look, the bananas and fountains and that huge mouth and the hand, well, they’re all phallic symbols. Well, anyway , they say, I’m a man, and being a man is lots better than being a woman .

She saw the notice pinned to the side of the building, bright yellow, saying in different coloured letters CRAZY COTTAGE then underneath in blue the bigger letters BRIGITTE’S BIKINI then small in faded black COME IN & SEE then a little THE on the side then huge in red SEX KITTEN. Take my photo looking at this, please, Mike, she said. She came right up to the side of the building as if she were coming round its corner and simply sort of reading the sign because that’s what she was, a girl reading the world.

But love was terribly important. She didn’t mean romantic love. Generalized sort of love. Enjoying oneself was terribly important. Sex could be as varied as being alive could be varied. Passion always sounded to her like something without humour in it. A passionate moment for her –

I can remember once sitting opposite my brother and feeling so much love for him that it was almost as though I was knitted to him.

This lovely feeling (she’d say to the writer interviewing her for a book) lasted for, say, half an hour. But she’d married her husband because he liked women, he knew they weren’t things , or something you didn’t quite know about. He accepted me intellectually, which men find very difficult.

High in confidence. Low in confidence. Her mother was out in her father’s English rose garden pruning the roses; her mother made the dresses and made the meals. Out in the Carshalton garden with the pruning shears her mother said it way before James Brown, it’s a man’s world , moving the mark on the sherry bottle so her father wouldn’t notice, her mother, Veronica, banned back in the day from taking a place at the Slade by her own father, grieving for that place all her secateur life, working on Pauline’s father to let her, Wimbledon Art School. It was her mother took her to America on the QE2, her mother listening to Maria Callas at full volume (when her father was out), shouting at the radio news (in the kitchen when her father wasn’t in the kitchen), her mother who fell ill, Pauline was eleven, endless X-rays for everyone, scans, her mother who was going to die. The family went to chaos, it was good the chaos, except for the depressions. No, it was formative. Lost a lung, her mother, but she was kind of perfectly all right, she was keeping a scrapbook of the cuttings from the papers. PAULINE PAINTS POPS. And ALL MY OWN WORK. (That was the headline on Pauline hanging an abstract in the London Labour Party Trades Union Congress Headquarters.) Actresses often have tiny brains. Painters often have huge beards. Imagine a brainy actress who is also a painter and also a blonde.

Imagine.

Her father was stern. Her father disapproved. Her father had very strong reservations. Desirable? a semi? I daren’t say anything or daddy will be upset. Half Belgian, half Persian, staunch British conservative, he’d seen the Himalayas and Harrogate and had chosen accountancy. His father’d been killed by pirates (true). His mother’s family had been shipbuilders on the Euphrates. So the Norfolk Broads is where he kept his own boat, and the rules of cricket, the making of tea the way it should be made were what to measure life by.

He didn’t even want me to work when I left school.

The fights were sort of huge, often before breakfast, the stupidest worst time to fight with him. Her older brothers flinched and shook their heads. Her brothers had it too, men had it too, maybe even worse — the brother who wanted to go to art school, their father made him an accountant. She got to go eventually, well, after all, not a proper job, so it was maybe more okay, for a girl, to.