That’s not what I mean, she said.
When she had said earlier that she wasn’t interested in his paintings what she was trying to say was that she wasn’t interested in them objectively, as art. They were more like thoughts, thoughts in someone else’s head that she could see. It was seeing them that had enabled her to recognise that those thoughts were her own. In the gallery, the curators of the exhibition had mounted various critical commentaries and biographical notes on the walls. She had begun to read them as she passed from one room to the next, and initially had been disappointed to realise that her life and Marsden Hartley’s in fact had nothing in common at all. His mother had died when he was small; hers was still alive and well in Tunbridge Wells. His father, when he was eight or nine, had remarried and simply abandoned the boy, moving with his new wife to a different part of the country and leaving him to be brought up by relatives. When he grew up, it was to become a gay man who only ever succeeded in consummating his sexuality a handful of times in his life; Jane, female as well as thoroughly heterosexual, had slept with more men than she would care to count, even if she could have remembered them all. For most of his adult life he lived in virtual poverty, spending long periods in France and Germany and only returning to America when he had run out of money; she was a middle-class Englishwoman with a small but steady income who, though she liked travel, would never consider living abroad. Most of all he had associated with many of the luminaries of his time – famous painters and writers and musicians – and this was something Jane found it almost painful to consider, for one of her greatest complaints, if she were honest, about her own life was the lack of interesting people in it. Her longing to belong to the kind of world Marsden Hartley had frequented was such that she felt held in a perpetual, frustrated state of readiness, of alertness, as though she feared she might blink and find that she had missed that world passing right by her. Unhappy as Marsden Hartley’s existence had been, it had, unlike hers, contained those kinds of consolations and opportunities.
Also, Jane said, he’s dead.
We sat in silence for a while. Jane held her teacup as though it had nothing to do with her, while the liquid cooled inside. She had returned to the paintings, she went on, to their strange, slightly lurid colours and mounded shapes, to their interiority and yet the simple childlike honesty of their forms, while she tried to process this sense of combined familiarity and dissonance. Many of the paintings were of the sea, which deepened her confusion even more: she had never lived near the sea nor been particularly compelled by the maritime landscape. Then, finally, she came across a small oil painting that showed a boat in a storm. It was painted in a naive style – the boat was like a child’s toy boat and the waves were the curlicue kind of waves a child would paint, and the storm was an enormous white blobby shape overhead. She read the commentary beside the painting, which told the story of Marsden Hartley’s yearly visits to Nova Scotia, where he lived for the summer weeks with a local fishing family in their cottage, and where – in this family’s company – he had found the only real happiness and sense of belonging he had ever known. The sons of the family, as well as numerous male cousins, accepted and befriended him, he a wan, neurasthenic, troubled artist and they strapping good-looking rural men of liberal passions: in that wild remote spot, their home was as warm and physical as an animal’s den, the very opposite of Gertrude Stein’s sofa in Paris – where Marsden Hartley had on occasion found himself sitting – and there was some suggestion that this warm animal playfulness had even extended itself into Marsden Hartley’s sexual loneliness (they were as likely, he once recalled, to have joyfully had intercourse with a woman, or a horse) and alleviated it. During one of those summer visits, while Marsden Hartley remained painting for the day at the cottage, the brothers sailed to Halifax, along with one of their cousins, to offload their catch and all three were drowned in a ferocious storm.
It was this story, Jane went on after a while, that caused the cataclysm of realisation – what she had called the revolution – to occur. Rather than mirroring the literal facts of her own life, Marsden Hartley was doing something much bigger and more significant: he was dramatising them.
I asked her what it was about this particular story that had brought her to that conclusion.
It seemed so pointless, she said, so futile and sad. It was almost too awful to be true. I was trying to work out what it meant, why it had happened to him, after all that he’d already gone through, rather than to someone else. He’d lost his mother and his father had abandoned him, he’d failed time and again to find and keep a lover – even a friend of his, someone who cared about him, once wrote that it was impossible not to reject him, that the friend himself had rejected him, that something about him just made people do it. Reading these things, she said, I began to understand: when he loved something, he drove it away. I realised, standing there, that if I had to describe my own life – even though, as I say, the examples would be much less dramatic – I would use exactly those same words.
While she had been speaking, a powerful, rancid smell had been filling the sitting room. It was emanating from the basement flat. I apologised and explained that the people downstairs sometimes cooked things that – at least from a distance – smelled pretty unpleasant.
I wondered what that was, Jane said, with an unexpectedly mischievous smile. It must be something they caught in the garden, she added, because I don’t know anything else that smells that bad when you cook it. When she was a child, her mother used to boil animals’ skeletons – squirrels, rats, even once the head of a fox – in order to paint them. The smell was just like that, Jane said.
If she objected, I said, we could easily go out and find a café somewhere in order to finish our conversation.