I wonder what my first painting was of. Can’t remember. Some sylvan scene, I imagine, with leaves and stiles and moo-cows, all laid out perspectiveless under a goggling egg-yolk sun. I’m not sneering. It’s true I was merely happy at first, dabbling and daubing, and happiness, of course, in this context, doesn’t do at all. I spent more time, I think, in Geppetto’s treasure-house than I did in front of my easel — yes, she bought me an easel, my mother did, and a palette, too, the elliptical curves of which caused in me, and cause in me still, for I still have it, a secret amorous throb. The smell of paint and the soft feel of sable were to me what marbles and toy bows-and-arrows were to my coevals. Was I only at play, then, all innocently? Maybe I was, yet I did better work then, as a child, I’ll wager, than later on when I got self-conscious and began to think myself an artist. My God, the horror of trying to learn even the bare essentials! To re-learn them, that is, after the lucky flush of my carefree years came to an end. Everybody thinks it must be easy to be a painter, if you have some skill and master a few basic rules and aren’t colour-blind. And it’s true the technical side of it isn’t so difficult, a matter of practice, hardly more than a knack, really. Technique can be acquired, technique you can learn, with time and effort, but what about the rest of it, the bit that really counts, where does that come from? Borne down from the empyrean by plump putti and scattered upon the favoured few like Danaëan gold? I hardly think so. An early facility is cruelly deceptive. It was as if I had set off heedlessly up a gentle grassy slope somewhere in old Alpinia itself, plucking edelweiss blossoms and delighting in the song of the lark, and presently had come to the crest and stopped open-mouthed before a terrifying vista of range upon range of flinty, snow-clad peaks, each one loftier than the last, stretching off into the misty distances of a Caspar David Friedrich sky, and all requiring to be climbed. I suppose I could flatter myself and say I must have been wise beyond my years to recognise the difficulties so early on. One day I saw the problem, just like that, and nothing was to be the same again. And what was the problem? It was this: that out there is the world and in here is the picture of it, and between the two yawns the man-killing crevasse.
But wait, wait, I’m getting confused in my chronology, hopelessly confused. That insight didn’t come until much later, and when it did, it left me blinded. So maybe, all those years ago, I wasn’t such a perceptive little genius after all. That’s a fortifying thought, though I can’t think why it should be.
—
Somewhat later. I made myself go for a walk. It’s not a thing I often do, the reason being that it’s not a thing I do well. That sounds absurd, I know — in what way would a walk be done well or ill? Walking is walking, surely. The point, however, is not the walking, but the going for a walk, which in my estimation is the most futile and certainly the most formless of human pastimes. I’m as ready as the next man to savour the delights that Mother Nature spreads before us with such indulgence and largesse, probably readier, but only as an incidental pleasure in the intervals of the everyday. To set out with the specific purpose of being abroad in the clement air under God’s good sky and all the rest of it smacks to me of kitsch. I think the trouble is that I can’t engage in it naturally, without self-consciousness — that’s what I mean by speaking of it being done badly. I look with envy upon others I meet along the road. How heartily they tramp, in their knee-breeches and rain-proof jackets, fearlessly wielding those pairs of long, wonderfully slender walking-sticks, more like ski poles, with leather loops on the handles, and not a thought in their heads, it seems, their faces lifted with blameless smiles to the bright day’s blessing of light. I for my part skulk and sweat, mopping my streaming brow and clawing at a shirt collar that indoors was an easy fit but that now seems intent on throttling me. It’s true, I could pluck it open and snatch off my tie and cast it from me, but that’s just it. I’ve never been the unbuttoned type. I may look like Dylan Thomas in his premature decrepitude but I haven’t got his windy way.
What it is, you see, about being on a walk — I’m sorry to keep tramping on about it — with no other purpose than being on a walk, is that I feel watched. Not by human eyes, or even by animal ones. For me, nature is anything but inanimate. Today as I strolled — I do not stroll — along the back road that skirts the wood I felt the life of things thronging me about on every side, crowding me, jostling me: in a word, watching me. Why, I wondered uneasily, is there so much of it? Why is there grass everywhere, covering everything? — why are there so many leaves? And that’s not even to consider the goings-on underground, the rootling beetles, the countless squirm of worms, the riot of thready roots striking deep and deeper into the earth in search of water and of warmth. I was appalled by the profusion; I felt pressed down upon by the weight of it all, and soon turned about and scurried back to the house and fled indoors, with a tremulous hand pressed to my racing heart.
Yet when I painted I painted nature best, and most happily. There’s a paradox. Mind you, when it comes down to it, what else is there to paint? By nature, need I say, I mean the visible world, the entirety of it, indoors as well as out. But that’s not nature, strictly speaking, is it? What, then? It’s the all, the omnium, that I’m thinking of; the whole kit and boodle, mice and mountain ranges, and us, wedged in between, the measure of all things, God bless the mark, as they say in these parts.
There’s nothing to eat in the house. What am I to do? I could go out into the wood, I suppose, and forage for sweet herbs, or delve for pig nuts, whatever they are. Autumn is supposed to be the season of mellow fruitfulness, isn’t it? I’ve never been any good at looking after myself. That was what womenfolk did, they took care of me. Now see what I’ve become, a mute and lyreless Orpheus who would lose his head for sure, were he so foolish as to venture back among the maenads. O god departed! O deus mortuorum! To thee I pray.
—
My thoughts have turned yet again to that tube of zinc white I filched from Geppetto’s toyshop. I can’t seem to leave it alone. I’ve come definitely to the conclusion that it didn’t in fact constitute my first legitimate theft. Granted, the tube of paint was the first thing I stole, so far as I remember, but I stole it out of childish covetousness, and the deed had nothing in it of artistry and lacked the true erotic element. These vital qualities only entered in with Miss Vandeleur’s green-gowned figurine. Ah, yes. I have her still, that little porcelain lady, after all these years. What a sentimentalist I am. Or, no, that’s not right, what am I talking about? — sentimentality doesn’t come into it. The things I’ve kept I haven’t kept out of nostalgic attachment; as well suggest to the high priest of the temple that the holy relics he looks after and jealously watches over are mere mementoes of the mortal men and women, their original owners, who were destined one day to be elevated to sanctity. Wait! — there it is again, the hieratic note, the summoning of the sacred, while in fact the true end of stealing is mundane — transcendent, yet at the same time earthbound. Let me state it clearly. My aim in the art of thieving, as it was in the art of painting, is the absorption of world into self. The pilfered object becomes not only mine, it becomes me, and thereby takes on new life, the life that I give it. Too grand, you say, too highfalutin? Scoff all you like, I don’t care: I know what I know.