Page 20 - Studio International - November 1967

drifting up like smoke candles, and in a blue sky as blue denote things correspond invariably to an intellectual
The painter in spectacles with long pieces of sooty cobweb floating notion, alien to our true impressions and compelling us
high up. Stars coming through like needle points; to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping
the novel green-blue and neon blue; and the river pouring quietly with itself...
Proust has adapted Turner's dictum 'My business is
along, as bright as ink out of a bottle.
(The Horse's Mouth-Joyce Cary) to paint not what I know, but what I see' to '... Elstir
The painter has the advantage of the writer in this reproducing some effect of perspective, painted for
question of immediacy. Of the painting we can say me not what I knew but what I saw.'
'I see' without going through the interpretative There is a wide range of manifestoes, of battle cries
gesture of image forming. This comes out in the differ- from the novelist's painter, but the thing seen, life
ent ways we talk about painting and writing: a painter itself, seems to be what painter, writer, spectator and
paints a man but a writer writes about a man. It is in reader alike are all after: life and meta-life.
the struggle to get rid of this barrier preposition about 'Living is like nothing because it is everything', says
that the writer finds it profitable to explore both Sammy Mountjoy, painter in William Golding's Free
methods of work and the psychology of the painter. Fall, and continues: 'Painting is like a single attitude,
Eva Tucker How do novelists see paintings, or rather, how do a selected thing.'
they think painters see paintings? Gully Jimson in What does this mean? To put a frame round, to put
The Horse's Mouth says: in inverted commas? But then, to do without frames,
'Don't look at it, feel it with your eye... and first you feel without inverted commas is one way in which painters
the shapes in the flat-the patterns, like a carpet... and writers have attempted to break through the
It is in the attempt to feel his way around the periphery And then you feel it in the round ...Not as if it were a barrier about into life, leading sometimes to the mis-
of the possible that the writer finds himself interested picture of anyone. But a coloured and raised map. You guided attempt to reproduce a same-size map of the
in the painter and perhaps envious of the more con- feel all the rounds, the smooths, the sharp edges, the world.
crete means available to him for getting images flats and hollows, the lights and shades, the cools and Casimir Lyppiat in Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay, that
across. For whether he is writing about painting or warms, the colours and textures. There's hundreds of archbuffoon with whom one may yet feel a sneaking
people, the writer has to leave the image liquid, the little differences all fitting in together.' sympathy, sings out:
form has to be built up out of words, that is sound. It And again You've got to get life into your art, out of passion and
is no use saying white, there has to be white. A picture isn't like an illustration in a magazine. You feeling; it can't come out of theories...passionately I
The players take the square and place it upon the can't get to know it by looking at it. First you've got to paint passion. I draw life out of life...'
oblong. They place it very accurately... the structure is get used to it—that takes about five years, then you As always, there is the obverse of the coin. Wyndham
now visible...we have made oblongs and stood them learn how to enjoy it and that takes you the rest of your Lewis in his novel Tarr puts forward the theory that
upon squares... Wren's palace, like the quartet played life. Unless you find out after ten years, that it's really the thing about art is death:
to the dry and stranded people in the stalls, makes an no good, and you've been wasting your time over it. Death is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is
oblong. A square is stood upon the oblong...' This might be called the optimistic detachment identical with the idea of permanence. Art is a continuity
(The Waves-Virginia Woolf) approach. But there is also the pessimistic involve- and not an individual spasm...Deadness is the first
All known all white bare white body fixed one yard legs ment approach, as in the Italian section of Anna condition for art: the second is absence of soul in the
joined like sewn. Light heat white floor one square yard Karenina: human sentimental sense.'
never seen. White walls one yard by two white ceiling During the few moments that the visitors stood looking But to talk of death implies life. Does he mean that the
one square yard never seen. Bare white body fixed only silently at the picture, Mihailov forgot completely all that act of painting kills? That if the painter pulls it off, he
the eyes only just. Traces blurs light grey almost white he had ever thought about the picture during the three gives his work a permanence which he himself will
on white. Hands hanging palms front white feet heels years he had been working on it; all its dignity and achieve only with death? It is certainly one way of
together right angle. Light heat white planes shining worth that he had so utterly believed in were gone-he getting through to oneself, for when art has been
white bare white body fixed. Ping fixed elsewhere. saw the picture from the point of view of the spectator, equated with death, the canvas has been pulled away
('Ping'-Samuel Beckett-Encounter March 1967) and it seemed to him that there was nothing good in it... from under one's feet, there is nothing left to paint.
Is Virginia Woolf telling the same story as Ben It seemed to him poor, badly drawn, gaudy and weak. This line of thought is followed up much more
Nicholson, Beckett as Francis Bacon ? And what does They would be justified in saying a few polite things in recently by Alberto Moravia in The Empty Canvas.
story mean? Does it help or hinder to see one in his presence and then laugh at him when they were Here the struggle for self-realization has come full
terms of the other? Or is it a stupid little party game? gone. circle. The painter has come to the end of himself:
What is it that gives each painting, each piece of Why does one get the feeling that it is the best The empty canvas that now stood on the easel was not
writing its style? Each word? Each brush stroke? painters who are most reluctant to talk about their just an ordinary canvas which had not yet been used;
Flaubert says: Words do not render thoughts but painting, either before or after they've done it? When it was a particular canvas that I had placed on the easel
distort them. To look at the words is as if to look at a they do, they often fail to do themselves justice. This at the termination of a long job of work...1 am no longer
painting in terms of its brush strokes.*-He never saw same painter, Mihailov in Anna Karenina, is subjected a painter, because I have nothing to paint, that is, I have
a Van Gogh. to a long tirade by a critic and is unable to say any- no relationship with anything real...It was because I
Professor Gombrich in Art and Illusion says: thing in his own defence. And indeed, why is it that felt that my pictures did not permit me to express
'The essence of pictorial art is that it is simultaneously painter and critic alike talk in terms of 'aesthetic myself.
what it depicts and the marks on the canvas by which it experience' only when they're not producing or In this book Moravia has used a painter to ramify his
depicts it.' having one? It is because the whole of aesthetics is a own personality rather than because he is specifically
This opens up a fundamental schism between distancing device, and what the painter needs is interested in the act of painting, which indeed hardly
painter and writer. The print on the paper is not the involvement, or at least the sort of commitment which takes place in the course of the whole book. It is in
writing. And it is just here that the writer occasionally leaves no room for talking about; and here we are this struggle towards creative self-realization which,
needs to lean on the painter, this is where it becomes back at the barrier preposition from which we started. as has been seen, may lead to a stalemate, that the
useful to have a painter in a novel: for it makes a kind Perhaps these views of painters are too crass, too writer comes nearest to sharing the problems of the
of double fortress to have a frame within the inverted two-dimensional. Perhaps only Proust comes any- painter. This struggle is most fiercely expressed in
commas. Instead of creating images by straight- where near to apprehending what a painter is: for he Somerset Maugham's Moon and Sixpence. When he
forward description, or by an intricately balanced never presumes that he can become the painter, he speaks of beauty here Maugham does not I think
pattern of words, the novelist can use a man who remains outside: where others have bent over back- only mean aesthetic beauty, but a kind of spiritual
actually uses colours and makes shapes; he makes wards to make the word image, he coolly makes the equipoise, what T. S. Eliot calls the intersection of the
an excuse for lavish use of colour words and shape image word: timeless moment:
words to help get the image through more quickly, The charm of each of them (Elstir's paintings) lay in a Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the
more immediately. sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the
Clouds all in blue and blue-and-soot. Blue-black smoke analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not
if God the Father had created things by naming them, given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat
it was by taking away their names, or giving them other the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to
names, that Elstir created anew. The names which you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want