What's Bred in the Bone

  HE LOST NO TIME in bringing this interview to the attention of Ross. He had to translate it, because Ross had only a smattering of tourist-Italian; he was always meaning to learn the language properly, so that he could read things like Libro Nero, but he never did so.

  “What do you make of that?” said Francis.

  “I make nothing whatever of it,” said Ross. “You know how artists are; they have bad days and fits of self-doubt and self-accusation when they think their work is rubbish, and abase themselves before the artists of the past. Often they are trying to coax whoever they are talking to into contradicting them—giving them new assurance. I suppose Papini, whoever he may be, caught Pablo on a bad day, and took all that rubbish for his real opinion.”

  “Papini is a rather well-regarded philosopher and critic. He doesn’t write to create sensations and I am certain he would have asked Picasso to reread and consider such a statement as this before he published it. You can’t brush it aside as a passing comment, made in a fit of depression.”

  “Yes I can. And I do. Listen, Frank: when you want opinions about an artist’s work you don’t ask the artists for them. You ask somebody who knows about art. A critic, in fact.”

  “Oh, come on! Do you really think artists are inspired simpletons who don’t know what they’re doing?”

  “Artists have tunnel vision. They see what they are doing themselves, and they are plagued by all sorts of self-doubt and misgivings. Only the critic can stand aloof and see what’s really going on. Only the critic is in a position to make a considered and sometimes a final judgement.”

  “So Picasso doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he talks about Picasso?”

  “You’ve put your finger on it. He is talking about Picasso the man—troubled, influenced by ups and downs in his health, his love-life, his bank account, his feelings about Spain—everything that makes the man. When I talk about Picasso I talk about the genius who painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the master of every genre, the Surrealist, the visionary who painted the prophetic Guernica—one of the greatest things to come out of this rotten era—The Charnel House, the whole bloody lot. And about that Picasso, the mere man Picasso knows bugger-all, because he is sitting inside himself and has too close a view of himself. About the artist Picasso I know more than Pablo Picasso does.”

  “I envy your assurance.”

  “You’re not a critic. You’re not even a painter. You’re a craftsman, a creation of that old scamp Saraceni. And you ought to understand this, Frank, because it’s part of the truth. A very big part of it. Too much rides on the reputation of Picasso to allow any rubbish like that interview to rock the boat.”

  “Money, you mean? Fashion in taste?”

  “Don’t be cynical about fashion in taste. Among other things, art is very big business.”

  “But what about what he says about seeking consolation and exaltation in art?”

  “That was the fashion of an earlier day. That was probably true about the Age of Faith, which has been bleeding badly ever since the Renaissance, and which got its death blow with the revolutions in America and France. The Age of Faith took a deadly disease from the Reformation. Ever see a really great picture inspired by Protestantism? But the passing of the Age of Faith didn’t mean the death of art, which is the only immortal, everlasting thing.”

  “But he says in so many words that he was serving fashion, pleasing the crowd, devising absurdities and puzzles.”

  “Don’t you hear what I’m telling you? What he says is rubbish. It’s what he does that counts.”

  FRANCIS COULD NOT WIN the argument, but he was not convinced, and it was his determination that consolation and exaltation must somewhere and somehow be the chief care of the artists that pushed him to his decision to return to Canada, where art was still not big business, where art was indeed little considered, and where therefore art might be persuaded to remain true to the path he was convinced was the right one.

  He could not embark on this great missionary journey, this return to his roots, quickly or easily. First of all he had to detach himself from MI5, and to his surprise Uncle Jack was not willing to release him without argument.

  “My dear boy, perhaps you feel that you’ve been neglected—not pushed ahead in the profession as you might have been. But you don’t understand how we work—how we are compelled to work. We get a trustworthy, first-rate man in a key job, and we leave him there. You are just what we need in this art connection. Knowledgeable, respected, but not too visible; able to go anywhere without making too much of a stir; a Canadian and therefore supposed to be a bit dumb by people who value a glittering cleverness above everything else. You’ve got enough money not to be always nagging me for extras. I’d describe you as ideal for what you are doing. You’ve provided quite enough useful tips about dangerous people to have fully earned your passage in this work. And now you want to throw it up.”

  “Nice of you to say all that. But where does it lead?”

  “I can’t possibly promise that it leads anywhere other than where you are at present. Doesn’t that satisfy you? Your father never worried about where things led.”

  “For him it led to a knighthood.”

  “Do you want a knighthood? What would you get it for? Most of the chaps you are keeping an eye on are pestering for knighthoods for themselves. A thing like that would tip off every clever rogue that you were something more than you seemed.”

  “Well, I’m grateful for everything, but in fact I am certain that I am something more than I seem, and I want to go home, and be what I am in my own country.”

  That would have been that, if another upheaval—not a blow or a misfortune, but a disturbing change of circumstances—had not shaken Francis profoundly.

  Saraceni died, and as his wife had died in the Blitz, and his daughter had died from a less dramatic cause, Francis discovered that he was the Meister’s sole heir.

  That meant going to Rome and spending long hours with Italian lawyers and civil servants who explained to him the complexities of inheriting a large private collection of art—not all of it art of the highest quality but every bit of it of museum quality—in a country that had been virtually beggared by a war it had never really wanted.

  The Italian lawyers were rueful, and very courteous, but firm that the law must be served in every respect. Serving the law in Italy, as in every civilized country, was an extremely expensive business, but Saraceni had left plenty of money to take care of that and leave some over. What the Italian lawyers could not control, though they tried, was whatever Saraceni had deposited in numbered accounts in Switzerland.

  This was what shocked Francis, for he had never thought of the Meister as a very rich man. But the Meister must have made some remarkably good deals with the people who paid him and Prince Max and the Gräfin for the pictures that had made their way to England from Düsterstein. When he made himself known to the quiet men at the banks, and established his undoubted right to Saraceni’s wealth, Francis could not believe the record of millions in good hard currency that were his. He came of a banking family and money in substantial sums was not strange to him. But until now his income had reached him from Canada without any necessity for him to think about the capital sums that generated it. Money, to him, meant a lump that appeared in his account every quarter, a lump from which he allotted sums for the miserable estate in Cornwall that never fulfilled the promises that were made for it by Uncle Roderick, and an increasing sum for the maintenance of Little Charlie, who was now almost grown up and appeared to eat money, so great were the demands made on her behalf by aunt Prudence. Francis, who thought of himself as “careful”, sighed and sometimes cursed whenever he signed these cheques, and although he never spent anything like the remainder of his income, he considered himself as a man financially somewhat straitened.

  It was a two-year job to shake himself loose from MI5 and make the best he could of Saraceni’s estate, but at last it was done, and he returned to the
land of his birth.

  THE LAND OF HIS BIRTH had not stood still in the years since Francis had left it to go to Oxford. The war had taught it something about its place in the world, and about the exploitative attitude taken by great countries toward small countries—small in population and influence, however gigantic they might be in physical dimension. Canada the wide-eyed farm boy was becoming street-wise, though not truly wise. Large numbers of immigrants from every part of Europe saw a future for themselves in Canada, and their attitude was understandably exploitative and somewhat patronizing. Nevertheless, they could not wholly abandon the sort of intelligence they had gained as a birthright in Europe, and in some respects the Canadian surface became observably smoother. Perhaps the most significant change, in the long term, was that of which Ruth Nibsmith—intuitive as always—had spoken at Düsterstein; the little country with the big body, which had always been introverted in its psychology—an introversion that had shown itself in a Loyalist bias, a refusal to be liberated by the military force of its mighty neighbour from what the mighty neighbour assumed was an intolerable colonial yoke—was striving now to assume the extraversion of that mighty neighbour. Because Canada could not really understand the American extraversion, it imitated the obvious elements in it, and the effect was often tawdry. Canada had lost its way, had suffered what anthropologists call Loss of Soul. But when the Soul was such a doubting, flickering, shy entity, who would regret its loss when there were big, obvious, and immediate gains to be had?

  Thus Francis returned to a homeland he did not know. His real homeland, compounded of the best of Victoria Cameron and Zadok Hoyle, of the broad adventurous spirit of Grand-père, of the sentimental goodness of Aunt Mary-Ben, was nowhere to be found in the city of Toronto. Like many another, Francis thought his homeland was the world of childhood, and it had fled.

  What he did find in Toronto was a new version of the Cornish and McRory family, with Gerald Vincent O’Gorman a very big man in the financial community and a power of great but undefined influence in the Conservative Party. If the Tories ever came to power, Gerry was a sure bet for a seat in the Senate, an appointment safer and richer than a knighthood of St. Sylvester, and something which would, in his opinion and his wife’s, make him the true successor to Grand-père. Gerry was Chairman of the Board of the Cornish Trust, which was now very big business; the President, succeeding Sir Francis (who had died while Francis was deep in financial affairs in Rome, and could not return to Canada), was a Tory senator of unimpeachable dullness and respectability, and he gave Gerry no trouble. Gerry’s sons Larry and Michael were high in the Trust and they were as friendly to Francis as he would allow them to be. But he missed his younger brother Arthur, who, with his wife, had been killed in a car crash, leaving their son Arthur to the care of the O’Gormans, who did their best, but confided Arthur chiefly to men and women Trust officers. Francis didn’t want any help with his money; his fortune from Saraceni was the first money he had ever possessed—apart from the miserable stipend paid him by M15—that was not controlled and managed by the family, and he was determined not to reveal its extent or let any part of it be ruled by another hand.

  “Frank, you must do as you think best, but for God’s sake don’t get skinned,” said Larry.

  “Don’t worry,” said Francis. “I’ve been skinned enough in my time to know my way around.”

  As soon as it could be managed he settled a modest—in the light of his wealth, a mingy—sum on Little Charlie, and informed Uncle Roderick and Aunt Prudence that the girl was to be maintained out of the interest on it until she was twenty-five, when she could take over the management of it herself. He also informed them that under his new circumstances—which he did not explain—he could no longer provide anything more than a very small annual sum for the maintenance of the estate, and he left unanswered the wailing, beseeching letters that followed. He thought it was good of him to give them anything at all.

  He then settled himself to the task of devoting his very large income (for he never thought of touching his correspondingly larger capital) to the encouragement of art in Canada, and the experience was like that of a man who bites into a peach and breaks a tooth on the stone.

  It was not that the Canadian painters whom he very quickly sought out were disagreeable, but they were strongly independent. More accurately, the good ones were independent and the ones who responded with glee to the appearance of a possible patron were not good. Francis could not get rid of his money because he would not divorce it from his advice, and the painters did not want advice. He tried to band some of them together to do work that consoled and exalted, and his words fell on politely deaf ears.

  “You seem to want to create a new Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,” said one of the best, a large man of Ukrainian antecedents named George Bogdanovich. “You can’t get away with it, y’know. Buy some pictures. Sure, we’re glad to sell pictures. But don’t try to be a big influence. Just leave us alone. We know what we’re doing.”

  What they were doing was respectable enough, but it did not appeal to Francis. They were utterly in love with the Canadian landscape, and tried to come to terms with it in a variety of ways, some of which, Francis knew, were admirable, and a handful splendid.

  “But no people ever appear in your pictures,” he said, again and again.

  “Don’t want ’em,” said Bogdanovich, answering for all. “The people stink. Most of ’em, anyway. We paint the country, and maybe after a while the people will learn about the country from the pictures, and stink a little less. Got to begin with the country. That’s consolation and exaltation. We have to do it our own way.”

  There could be no quarrelling with that. There were painters, of course, who followed the newest, fashionable trends. Without being pressed, they would explain that they dipped deep into their own Unconscious—a word that was new to Francis in this context—and drew up conceptions that were expressed in pictures that might be gaudy and rather messy rearrangements of what they saw, or felt; some were carefully wrought arrangements of colours, usually dingy. These messages from the Unconscious were deemed to be infinitely precious, evoking in sensitive viewers some hint of an Unconscious deeper than any they could explore unaided. But Francis was not impressed. What had Ruth said? “You can’t talk to the Mothers by getting them on the phone. They have an unlisted number.” These delvers clearly did not have the number. It was such fakers of a chthonic inner vision whom Francis grew to detest above all others.

  So Francis had to content himself with buying pictures that he thought good, but did not much like. Without being quite sure how it happened he found that he was taking pictures from painters who lived in inaccessible places, and keeping them in his Toronto dwelling, where from time to time he was able to sell them and remit the money to the painter. He took no fee, but in a way he was a dealer. The world of collectors, not large in Canada, understood that he knew a good picture when he saw one, and his recommendation was a guarantee of quality. But this did not satisfy him, though in a desultory way it occupied him.

  His satisfaction came from the pictures that had been in Saraceni’s collection, which he was able to sneak into Canada by not altogether blameless means, and store in his Toronto headquarters.

  These headquarters were on the top floor of an apartment house he owned in a decent, though not a fashionable, part of Toronto. He had bought it, years before, on the advice of his cousin Larry, who had told him that he ought to diversify his holdings, and get some good real estate. There were three apartments on the top floor of the dull building, product of an unadventurous period of architecture, and Francis spread his possessions among all three. To begin, this top floor looked like a richly if oddly furnished large single apartment, but as time went on the rooms became more and more cluttered, and the space in which Francis lived grew smaller and smaller.

  “God, what a magpie’s nest,” said Aylwin Ross, the first time he visited it. “ ‘Blind Fortune still bestows her gifts on such as can
not use them.’ Jonson, not me, but apt, I’m sure you will admit. Where in God’s name did all this stuff come from?”

  “Inherited,” said Francis.

  “From Saraceni. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “In part. Much of it I have bought.”

  “With the ghost of Saraceni looking over your shoulder,” said Ross. “Frank, how do you endure it?”

  Frank endured it because he never thought of it as a permanent state. He was always meaning to go through his possessions carefully, banishing some to storage, perhaps selling some others, and arriving at last at a dwelling space over-furnished and over-decorated, perhaps, but recognizable as a human habitation. Meanwhile he lived in something like an antique dealer’s warehouse, to which he was continually adding the contents of new crates, cartons, and parcels. It was fortunate that his apartment house possessed a freight elevator, as well as the shuddering, murmurous bronze cage in which visitors ascended to what Ross named The Old Curiosity Shop.

  Ross was a frequent visitor, for he had taken to returning to Canada several times a year, to give a lecture here, offer advice to an aspiring municipal or provincial gallery there, and contribute articles to Canadian periodicals on the state of art and the dizzy ascent of art prices in the international sale-rooms. He brought Francis the gossip of the art world—the sort of thing that could not be printed—and stories about its personalities, some of whom were people Francis had watched on behalf of Uncle Jack. Not that Francis ever mentioned his real London work to Ross; he was as close-mouthed as ever about that, and he was expert in deflecting delicate inquiries that might give a hint as to the extent of his fortune. But it could not be concealed that he was rich, and very rich, for such eccentricity as he was developing could not be sustained by less than a large fortune. He bought pictures at Christie’s and Sotheby’s at high prices, and although he did so through an agent, Ross was the kind of man who could ferret out who the real buyer was. What Ross did not know was that such heavy purchasing was Francis’s way of assuaging the great yearning he felt to paint himself. More than once he tried to find a new style, and every time he gave it up in disgust. The Mothers would not speak to him in a contemporary voice.