My father was always a mystery. He seemed content to paint and sketch in his retirement from official life, always smelling of books, or saturated oils and rich pigments. There was one large canvas of his that hung above the lumped ashes of our spacious fireplace, the ‘hellmouth,’ as he called it, and which was a very fine example of what my father, rightly, I think, acknowledged as his ‘detestable painting.’
It was St Anthony, aghast in a disastered desert, hunched in the overwhelming night with a stab of shine that marked his fisted crucifix, a dead Joshua tree intruding its bone-dry root into the background, while a gibbering Devil, spare and dangerously red as a side of slaughtered beef, dangled a whirlpool of temptations from a bright string, a tornado on a rope holding ‘images of all that could be desired.’ All of Anthony himself was cloistered in blackness in the moonless desert night; only the charm of the crucifix, the tortured whirl of the temptations, the Devil’s hide, and, here and there, sharp highlights of Anthony’s tormented face were dimly visible in the voluptuous midnight.
The thing always seemed to me to be no more than a grown schoolboy’s nod to God, until early one evening, I found my father out in the dark garden in his discarded cassock, his ‘painting frock,’ as he called it, hunched over a newly numinous canvas, just stretched in the potting shed that afternoon, and begun in a quiet frenzy as the sun bled out of the sky, and the world was once again turned over to shadows.
The evening was one my mother, pale angel, would have described as ‘splooched with dew.’ My father was quiet, concentrated–a large man in his overhanging cassock, intent, ‘at work.’ Beyond the black tempest of his shoulder, I could see the strange myrtle blotch of a bacchante gripping a thyrsis instead of St Anthony’s crucifix, and surrounded by a bowing crowd of blobby cupids adorned with rose complexions and miniature erections. Instead of a desert, there was a rich and wild Grecian countryside, like the uneven hills upon which Bryon battled before he died in a fever swamp.
My father went on painting for some hours, possessed by his subject, and undeterred by the evil mimicry of the mockingbirds that inverted the songs of the dawnsingers, or by the myriad bites of the mosquitoes that enticed them and made his hand start away to the kill again and again. Eventually the night itself mitigated against his continuance, and with the moonset and the failure of any more illumination, even I could no longer see him from my anxious perch at the window in my nightshirt, where my sleepless cheek rested against the cool windowledge. When, at last, he came through the house and passed my room in the hall, I could hear him laughing lightly to himself a strange whistling laugh, and then the loud slam of the bedroom door, and the softer slamming of his closet door in the bedroom where, after his death the next year, I discovered he had always kept the picture, and where, years after that, I learned from my mother, he would often shut himself in with a lamp and a bottle of heavy vintage.
After such an unveiling, when I roam again in my mind past my father’s more orthodox composition, standing before the decayed fireplace, I begin to understand Gautier’s comment about himself: “Why should my prose be easy to the apprehension? I am saying–simply–things which I do not believe.”
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