The Children's Book (46 page)

When August Steyning arrived, they saw why he had picked this painting. He was accompanied by the puppetmaster from Munich, who had performed at the Midsummer party. Anselm Stern was soberly dressed in a black frock-coat and a wide-brimmed black hat. With him, thin and wiry, wearing a beret and a pale blue cravat, was a young man who was obviously his son, and was introduced as Wolfgang. They were neither of them tall: both had large dark eyes and sharp noses and mouths. Humphry asked Steyning and Stern to explain the painting, please.

“We can’t agree on anything. Is she alive, is she dead? Is he ignoring the flesh for art and if so is he culpable or to be admired? Could he animate the dead woman if he gave her the attention he’s giving the pretty doll? She looks damnably uncomfortable, as though she’ll skid off that couch any minute.”

Steyning laughed.

“It’s about the borders between the real and the imagined. And the imagined has more life than the real—much more—but it is the artist who gives the figures life.”

Olive said it was a pity more women didn’t paint allegories about the imagination. This woman was like clay in a stocking.

Everyone looked at Anselm Stern.

“What one gives to one’s art,” he said, in slightly uncertain English, “is taken away out of the life, this is so. One gives the energy to the figures. It is one’s own energy, but also kinetic. Who is more real to me, the figures in the box in my head or the figures on the streets?”

“You could see this artist as a vampire,” said Steyning provocatively. “He has sucked the life out of that poor girl and is giving it to wooden limbs and painted faces.”

“He has a good face,” said Stern, smiling slightly.

Philip pulled at Fludd’s sleeve and pointed out in a whisper that the draped Punchinello was the reverse image of the draped human woman.

“The message is,” said Stern, “that art is more lifely than life but not always the artist pays.”

•  •  •

It was not clear for some time whether Wolfgang Stern spoke English. Joachim whispered to Charles that Anselm Stern was an important figure in Munich’s artistic life—and a sympathiser with the anarchists and the idealists. “He is not your English Punch-and-Judy—he dines with von Stuck and Lehnbach—his work is discussed in
Jugend
and
Simplicissimus
. This I know. I do not know his son.”

Philip was the odd man out amongst the young men. He found himself frequently alone. Wolfgang Stern found him sitting on a bench, drawing, and sat down beside him.

“I may?” he asked. Philip nodded. Wolfgang said “May I see? I speak only little English, I read better.”

“I had a long talk in pictures with a Frenchman,” said Philip, flicking the pages back to his dialogue with Philippe; drawings, the Gien faïence, and the little grotesque figures of the majolica urns and dishes.

“You are artist?”

Philip made his signature gesture of hands inside clay cylinder rotating. Wolfgang laughed. Philip said “And you?”

“I hope to be theatre artiste. Cabaret, new plays, also
Puppen
as my father. Munich is good for artists, also dangerous.”

“Dangerous.”

“We have bad—bad—laws. People are in prison. You may not say what you think. May I see your work?”

Philip was trying to work out a new all-over pattern of latticed and entwined bodies, part-human, part-beast, part-dragon or ghost. He was making impossible combinations of the Gloucester Candlestick’s warriors and apes, the majolica satyrs and mermen, Lalique’s insect-women, and, more remotely, the naked women who sprawled and smiled and died on all the huge symbolist paintings. The drawing he was working on combined the limp puppet with the limp woman from
Les Fantoches;
he was paying too much attention to the female breasts, and the proportions were ugly. Wolfgang laughed, and touched a breast with a finger. Philip laughed too. He said

“I saw your father’s puppets in England. Cinderella. And one about an automatic woman. Sandman, or something. They come to life—and don’t come to life. Uncanny.”

“Un-canny?”

“Like ghosts, or spirits, or gnomes. More alive than us, in some ways.”

Wolfgang smiled. He said again “I may?”

and took Philip’s pencil, and began to draw his own trellis of forms—little grinning black imps, and bat-winged females. “Simplicissimus,” he said, which Philip failed to understand.

They went to the Rodin Pavilion in the Place de l’Alma. Here were gathered most of Rodin’s works in bronze, marble and plaster; the walls were hung with large numbers of his drawings. Vast forms of sculpted flesh and muscle loomed. Delicate frozen female faces emerged from rough stone, or retreated into it. Everywhere was appalling energy—writhing, striving, pursuing, fleeing, clasping, howling, staring. Philip’s first instinct was to turn and run. This was too much. It was so strong that it would destroy him—how could he make little trellis-men and modest jars, in the face of this skilled whirlwind of making? And yet the contrary impulse was there, too. This was so good, the only response to it was to want to make something. He thought with his fingers and his eyes together. He needed desperately to run his hands over haunches and lips, toes and strands of carved hair, so as to feel out how they had been done. He edged away from the Wellwoods and the Cains. He needed to be alone with this. Benedict Fludd too had edged away. Philip followed him. Fludd was considering
The Crouching Woman
, who squatted, clutching an ankle and a breast, her female opening displayed and lovingly sculpted. He spoke to Philip’s thought. “Shouts out to be touched,” said Fludd, and touched her, running his finger in her slit, cupping her breast in his hand. Philip did not follow his example, and looked around apprehensively for guards, or angry artist.

The artist was in fact in the pavilion, which he treated as though it was a studio. He was talking to two men, one of them tall and very shabby, with greasy long locks, muffled in an overcoat despite the warm weather. The other too was shabby and had wild jerky movements. They were standing in front of the ghostly white plaster cast of
The Gates of Hell
, and Rodin, red beard jutting, blue eyes glittering, was explaining it to them, showing them the grand design with sweeping and stabbing gestures.

“By God,” said Steyning, “that is Wilde. I’ve heard he sits in the cafés here and takes tea from Algerian boys. He hasn’t got any money, and people cut him in the street. He hides behind a newspaper so as not to embarrass his old acquaintances.”

“We should say good morning to him,” said Humphry. “He has paid a terrible price, and it is paid.”

Anselm Stern said that the other man was Oskar Panizza—“our own notorious writer of—obscene plays and satires—in banishment here in Paris. He is an alienist, a madman who studies the mad.”

“An anarchist,” said Joachim Susskind, “who believes all is permitted. We should say good morning to him also.”

Olive felt warm with admiration for Humphry as he strode forward, with August Steyning, to greet the great sinner. He was magnanimous. She loved him when he took risks. But she did not go with him.

The overpowering sensuality of the work had had its effect on Olive, too. She had managed to crunch, or tuck, her bodily memory of Methley’s unpleasantness into a kind of compressed roundel of brownish flesh, which could be avoided when it rose to consciousness—ah, that again, look the other way—but things like
The Crouching Woman
reanimated it, like a frozen snake warmed.
The Danaïde
was lovely. She was white and gleaming, her back arched in despair, her face against the rock, and her marble hair flowing down over her head in frozen white waves. She was a denizen of the underworld, damned with her fifty sisters for stabbing her husband, damned to attempt for ever to carry water in a leaking sieve, the image of eternal futility. But she was breath-takingly lovely. Olive touched her ear timidly with a gloved finger. Tom concentrated on her beauty. He wanted nothing to do with Oscar Wilde.

Julian would have liked to meet Wilde, though he did not like the idea of Wilde. He stood a few steps behind Steyning and Humphry Wellwood, as they shook the wanderer’s hand. They also shook Rodin’s hand, which he would have liked to do. Wilde looked appalling. His skin was covered with angry red blotches, which he had unsuccessfully tried to cover with some sort of powder or cream, or both. When he opened his fleshy mouth, he displayed a black space where his front teeth were gone, and had not been replaced by a plate. He said he was touched to be recognised by Steyning—“you have still great things to do on the stage, whereas I am rattling like dead leaves in the wind.” He introduced Panizza—“a fellow
poète maudit
, who is surprised by no human habit, and has studied them all—” When Rodin and Panizza turned away
Wilde came close to Humphry and breathed in his ear that he would be infinitely obliged by a temporary loan—his funds were much diminished and not reaching him. “He smelled horrible,” Humphry later told Olive. “I gave him what was in my pocket, because he smelled so bad that I felt guilty of his stink. There he stood, foul, in front of the Gates of Hell. He shuffled off—receiving embarrassed him horribly—muttering about sipping mint tea. His mouth itself is a Gate of Hell.”

They looked at
The Gates of Hell
. None of them saw the same thing as the others. The Gates were a ghost of what they would become. Many of the great forms of the beautiful and the damned were not yet fixed to the two white slabs, which had an almost abstract look, with mysterious swirls and rough spirals of plaster. But the rising columns of the frame and the receding space of the tympanum were full of swarming human forms attached to each other in all sorts of predatory, desiring and revolting ways. Julian knew Dante, whom he read in honour of his lost mother. He looked for the Circles of Hell which were not there, and got lost in the turmoil that was. Tom was puzzled that there were so many dead babies in Hell. Olive was grimly appalled by the figure of an old woman—a very old woman—rising or falling along the left pillar, with every detail of her fallen flesh remorselessly and lovingly recorded—flat, flaccid breasts, withered thighs, hanging bag of a belly. A dead child trampled her head, another pressed its face into her stomach. Olive stood there, in her pale pink dress, and her hat with roses, and gripped the pommel of her pretty blush-pink parasol. She felt anger with the sculptor for having observed the descent of flesh with such indifferent glee, neither love nor hate, she thought, but a pleasure in mastery, of every kind. And so she felt mastered, but stood there, pink and charming. She, like Charles/Karl, had observed the midinettes and the street-women, and had said to herself with Northern realism, there but for the grace of God, and her own lucky face and figure, and Humphry’s magnanimity and eccentricity, went she. She caught the sculptor looking at her out of the corner of his eye. Undressing her? What did he see, this man who could model gauche passion, and shame and shamelessness and voracity in women? She turned her face modestly down in the shade of her hat-brim, swung her bottom under her skirt, and moved off to talk to Prosper Cain.

Philip could not bear the Gates. They were more unbearable than
The
Crouching Woman
, because they, like what filled his mind, were a pattern of interlinked human figures. He could not discern or analyse the pattern, though its presence was overpowering and annihilated him. He wanted to tear up his sketch-book, but instead he doggedly got it out, and began to draw the one rhythm he was sure he could see, a dance of repeating rounds in the tympanum, breasts and buttocks, cheeks and curls, intermingling with grinning death’s-heads and grotesques. He thinks with his fingers, close-up, Philip knew. And one form gives him the idea for another, even before he is finished with the first. Is he ever at a loss for a form? I think not, I think he fears he will never get it out and down.

Drawing calmed him. He squatted on the edge of a plinth and devised a notation to get it down quickly. They would probably drag him off to eat French food, and he would not have seen.

A shadow fell across the paper. He looked up. Rodin was looking down at him, peering at the drawing. Philip grasped his sketch-book to his chest.

“Je peux? Ne vous inquiétez-pas, c’est bon,”
said the sculptor. Philip’s face was red and damp. Benedict Fludd came to join them. Rodin turned the paper.
“Ah bon, c’est intéressant. Un potier comme
Palissy.” Philip understood “Palissy.” He looked up at Fludd, and then automatically held out his hands to the sculptor, and made the airy shape of clay on the wheel with his fingers. Fludd laughed a deep laugh, made the same gesture, and said “Benedict Fludd,
potier, élève de
Palissy,
épouvanté par
Auguste Rodin.
Anglais
. Philip Warren,
mon apprenti. Qui travaille bien, comme vous voyez, je pense.”

Rodin said he knew Fludd’s work. He tapped the Gien-majolica-candlestick men with his clay-ingrained finger, and said they were interesting. Wait, he said, and opened a cupboard, and brought out a large celadon-coloured greenish jar, with a twisting female figure incised in the glaze. These, he said, he made himself at the Sèvres porcelain works.

“There is much to learn, in all forms of the clay,” he said. And to Fludd, “I know your work. You are a master.” Fludd ran his fingertips over the porcelain as he had run them over
The Crouching Woman
. He was in a good mood, alert and benign.

Out on the moving pavement, he began to look at the women, and comment to Philip in an undertone on their shapes and attitudes. He asked Philip if he was enjoying himself—and do look at that lovely
sulky little visage, the one with the shiny little hat—are you widening your knowledge of the world, would you say?

“It is all a bit much. Too much too good too new, all at once.”

“And too stimulating, I suppose, with all this flesh sailing past on the fast strip?”

“Sailing or standing,” said Philip with a sigh, “too much.”

“I think I should do my duty and see to your education,” said Fludd. “I’ll take you out tonight. Just you and me.”