18. In the second volume we’re also introduced to a character called Elstir...

The eighteenth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero meets the painter Elstir and recalls fond adventures with his father.

In the second volume we’re also introduced to a character called Elstir, an artist based in part upon the American painter James Whistler, with a touch of Monet and Gustave Moreau thrown in for good measure…

Famed for his brilliant seascapes, his work finds its way into many of the best houses in Paris, including that of the Duchesse de Guermantes. His entry into the story immediately brought to my mind my father, who’d been a painter of some promise in his younger days, but whose talent had remained a raw, untutored thing. I can always remember his pictures peppered around our first house; dream-like depictions of the world askew, strange landscapes, incongruous architectural features, cantilever cranes, triumphal arches, ruined castles, and always two figures, so similar in their appearance as if almost the same person, facing one other, something unspoken between them, some shared secret, memory or experience.

He told me many years later that he’d wanted to go to art school, but when my mother became pregnant, that was the end of that. Still both teenagers, they were soon married and so he buckled down, did what was expected of him, and got a job in a local factory making electrical components. But his offbeat character meant it didn’t last. And so, many more jobs came and went. Perhaps because he was clever; and good looking, with an otter-like athleticism and confident way of carrying himself, there came to exist a general belief that he thought himself too good for our little town (which may have been true).

Of course, in the early years of my life, I was oblivious to all this. Like sons the world over, the first incarnation of my father, the first mantle thrust upon him, was as a kind of colossus, to whom I would cleave instinctually, recognising that, like the moon and the earth, we were made up of the same essential matter. There was, naturally enough, nothing strange or different about him to me. He was the magnetic centre, the person I idolised above all others.

Aside from painting, he loved sport; a passion he quickly inculcated in me, as soon as I was old enough to understand what was going on. When I wasn’t reading, I spent much of my time consuming every ounce of coverage that television in the 1980s had to offer. This meant watching a lot of darts. It meant spending hours watching Steve Davis pot snooker balls into pockets, John McEnroe shout at umpires, and Australian batsman compile double centuries against ineffectual English bowling attacks.

When there was no sport on the box, we’d make up our own games to play, which usually involved incorporating pieces of furniture, structural features of the house, bastardising equipment from other sports, as well as the creation of arcane sets of rules, which were as much a part of the fun as playing the game itself. And when we weren’t doing that, we’d be out walking; usually down to The Dog and Duck, but often beyond, out into the verdant countryside on great perambulations that would last hours, until the sun fell below the horizon and we found ourselves enveloped by the mysterious darkness, and having to find our way back by torchlight.

I later realised this was another of his strategies to escape the parochialism that surrounded him, a chance to feel the beat of the land and dream of a life beyond the insular world in which we lived. I found out from my aunt that he’d been doing this for years, taking increasingly long walks to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Catholicism which hung over the family home. Hence my parents’ early marriage; but also, my father’s determination to banish religion from the lives of his new family. In walking he found a measure of the spiritual nourishment he required, along with alcohol, and reading (especially science fiction), which together formed the constituent parts of his own personal trinity.

And so, as I got older, weekends typically consisted of following my increasingly inebriated father from pub to pub, hilltop to hilltop, as he battled with a small transistor radio in an increasingly futile attempt to find a clear signal in order to listen to the football results. I can still see him striding up ahead of me, swaying slightly in the wind, head bent sideways, pressing the speaker to his ear, turning his body this way and that, quietly cursing to himself. How funny and annoying and loveable it all was, even then. I realise how obvious it is to say this now (but so much that’s true is obvious), and despite the times when it rained, or when my legs hurt, or when we’d become lost because he was so drunk; or the times when it was more annoying than funny or loveable, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier than I was back then, when it was just the two of us, the open country, the endless sky, the crack of static, the voice of James Alexander Gordon, and nothing else.

As with the sport and the walking, my love of books also came from him, although it was only later when, after reading of the young Narrator’s fascination with the Arabian Nights, that I pictured again in my mind the three wooden bookcases in our living room, and that I remembered our copy of this same book, with its patterned arabesque cover, and all the other books collected there, many bearing fantastical depictions of distant planets, star cruisers, and alien civilisations, and the equally alien-sounding names of the writers my father loved: Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin. These were the books that I would ask to be read from at bedtime, and it only struck me much later, as I plunged deeper into Proust, how much my thoughts and feelings about this world were mingled with thoughts and feelings about these other strange worlds, and how little I sometimes distinguished between them.

This tendency to fantasise was only reinforced by my burgeoning enthusiasm for horror, which seemed a natural corollary of the science fiction tales I loved, and became a way for me to externalise, and perhaps manage, the terrors that so often plagued my sleep. I remember the two of us staying up to watch The Curse of Frankenstein one night and being struck by the deeply charismatic presence of Peter Cushing. Something in his fidelity to the craft, and to the story, moved me deeply.

It wasn’t long after this that I first saw Star Wars and my obsession with him was solidified. Whatever part Cushing played, he always brought the perfect combination of authority, energy and charm (and where necessary, menace) to his roles. To watch him act was to confront a kind of tripartite phenomenon; an utterly convincing portrayal of character; a man at work, committing everything to the idea of performance; and finally, the moral core of this same man, conveyed without his awareness, but bursting from the screen nevertheless. Here was that rare example of an actor whose own personality inhabits a character to such an extent that this enhances, rather than diminishes, his art.

By the time Star Wars was made, I later discovered, his wife, Helen, had been dead for six years. I can still recall his heartbreaking words on the subject. ‘Since Helen passed on,’ he once said, ‘I can’t find anything; the heart, quite simply, has gone out of everything. Time is interminable, the loneliness is almost unbearable and the only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that my dear Helen and I will be united again someday. To join her is my only ambition.’

One of the reasons this struck me so forcefully, was that it was around the time when the idea of death, of what death meant, was starting to properly coalesce in my brain, transitioning from a vague and amorphous notion – of Alfred living underground, of phantom forces filtering through my dreams – to something definitive and concrete. Frankenstein’s creature was dead but had been given life, which could then be taken away again. Death was destruction and absence and oblivion; death thrust unwelcome grief into the life of the living.

My father showed a passion for anything that impassioned me, especially when that thing was in some way contrary to received opinion or expectation. He could never curb his radicalism. And so, whether that was my growing fascination with the garish covers of the video nasties that bedecked the windows of the new rental store which had recently opened on the high street, or my morbid interest in nuclear Armageddon, which included making odd sculptures out of wax, ash and spent matches, he encouraged and engaged with whatever strange things I showed an interest in.

Amid all this, in that first decade or so of my life, there grew something unspoken between us, a sort of pact or promise, never vocalised, but palpable and real. And as I got older, the thought of breaking this compact became unthinkable to me, the equivalent of a cenobite renouncing his god. I loved him in the same obsessive way I loved the plangent world of which he was a part and which he embodied. I loved him because I understood that we were made of the same stuff and so there was vanity in my love. I loved him because he was a father who never felt the need to enforce or play up to the role of a father. I loved him because he afforded me freedom and respect. And I loved him because he loved me back, without equivocation.

As it turned out, he never made anything of his painting, but I still think of him as an artist; one of those rare people whose work remains intangible because it had more to do with the act of living than the impression of it. And even if his particular brand of barfly artistry and occasional nihilism ultimately contained a certain refutation of that life, there was also a sense of life deeply ingrained within it; which is to say, a sort of fatalistic wisdom in which living is all and death is nothing, because death is all and living a kind of cosmic joke.

I wasn’t sure why, but I could hear something of my father’s sometimes melancholy voice in Elstir, especially during a scene in which the Narrator realises that one of the pictures in his studio is a portrait of Odette, and that he must be the very same ‘foolish, corrupt little painter’ who’d been part of Swann and Odette’s social circle all those years before he achieved fame and renown.

‘There is no man,’ Elstir explains, ‘however wise, who has not at some period in his youth, said things or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man – so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise – unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, and effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory. I can see that the picture of what we once were, in early youth, may not be recognisable and cannot, certainly, be pleasing to contemplate in later life. But we must not deny the truth of it, for it is evidence that we have really lived, that it is in accordance with the laws of life and of the mind that we have… extracted something that goes beyond them.’

My father was forever caught up in that same struggle for victory and wisdom. It never ends, is never realised, and is called living. But children, suffering from a certain optical impediment, rarely understand this about their parents until much later in their lives, and often, as in my own case, only after it’s too late.

I think for him the past was always present; a mutable substance out of which he spun new narratives for himself, as if, as the reliance on alcohol proved, his immediate reality was never enough. It was, of course, only in retrospect that I realised this. But what emerged were patterns of reinvention first visible to me in the skewed morality tales that were the stories he’d tell me about his youth, and which were often strange conflations of entrepreneurship and rebellion.

The one I remember most clearly involved him syphoning off spirits from his father’s drinks cabinet, replacing the stolen liquor with water, and selling the booty to his teenage friends. The suggestion was always that he was one step ahead of everyone else, but I’m not sure that was ever true. If I’m honest, their telling usually lacked the humility Elstir describes; perhaps because when he first told them to me he was still so young, perhaps because he always needed to remind himself of these early triumphs against convention, because that was always his true nemesis, and it seemed only to grow in potency as the years slipped by.

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Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.