Judith Maclean Miller

Under-reading Urquhart, Horwood and Rumi

A small-boned dark-haired woman-from Haiti-she says, sits in the Bingo parlour on a Wednesday night. She has eight cards spread out in front of her, and daubers: fluorescent pink, bright blue, luminescent green, sun yellow, cherry red. On the table beside the cards sits a small doll, wrapped around in the same colours, bright once, but faded now, from long company and much handling. My grandmother's, she tells me. It brings me luck. Her eyes are reading the cards and the caller's voice. Intricacies of numbers and letters. Called out into smoke-filled air. Dancing on her cards. As she watches, she knits. A bonnet she says. For my granddaughter. Lace. Knitted lace. Patterned holes and scallops and waves. She is also reading the bonnet.

A larger-boned fair-haired woman-from Canada -1 sit in my sitting room on a winter afternoon in January. Four books are spread out in front of me on a footstool. I am reading them all: more or less at the same time. The Essential Rumi. Evening Light, a novel, by Harold Horwood. The Underpainter, by Jane Urquhart. The Moosewood Cookbook, by Mollie Katzen. Other books fill shelves around me. On the table beside me is a greystone carving. Soapstone carving that I have always called "The Grandmother." She keeps watch. I am knitting grey and white work socks. For my son. I would like to put a strip of red into them, here and there-or just along the top rim. But he likes them soft in grey and white. So I have four needles and two balls of yam: one grey, one white. I am knitting socks. For my son.

  
   The movement of your finger
   Is not separate from your finger.
   -Rumi (151) 

That seems true efiough to me, as I loop wool over the needles. Move one stitch and then the next, from one needle to another, so that pattern and sock are created. Text-ile.

  Your intelligence is marvelously intimate.
  It's not in front of you or behind,
  or to the left or the right.
  -Rumi (151)

That was exactly true of that woman in the Bingo parlour. Fierce and sure of what she was doing. All those many tasks at the same time. Her intelligence radiated from her hands as she worked. Darted from card to card as she marked them with all the colours of the daubers. She knew exactly what she was doing, and her intelligence glowed around her. So that I kept going back to her table, lingering there, in the light that gave me such pleasure. Watching the bonnet grow under her hands. Admiring the colour lines on the Bingo cards. Artifacts.

I have finished the cuff now, and tomorrow I will turn the heel. Creating the right angle of the ankle, of all those delicate balancing bones.

 Observe the wonders as they occur
 around you. Don't claim them. 
 Feel the artistry moving through,
 and be silent.
 -Rumi (153)

I do feel that artistry moving through. And I don't think I claim the wonders for myself. But I do like to share them. I find it very hard to be silent. Look, look, I say. See how she manages all those cards and daubers and the knitting needles. And the patterns. No one seems interested. No one else sees that beautiful intelligence. Hovering all around her.Part of her.Her.But I mostly say it inside my head. Or I write it onto a page. Does that count as silence? That not speaking it aloud, but setting it down on the page. Where it is quiet. Does that count? I suspect not. But I cannot help it, Rumi-not yet. As long as I have breath, I will keep wanting that connection, those connections, filigree of pattern which delights me. Of form. And I will want to share it. I am not able-yet-to keep it silent. My delight.

  Looking up, he understands that the 
  dancing lights are shaped by the
  curtains blowing in the breeze,
  but most ofwhat he sees andfeels as he
  crawls on the floor he accepts without
  explanation.  The universe still runs
  on magic.  Beams falling through dust 
  motes, shining like paths in the air, 
  petals drifting through the windownone
  of this appears to have a cause, only
  a being. -Harold Horwood (7)

  They think the designs on the curtains
  are what's eing concealed.
  -Rumi (152)

This child is not confused by the curtains-or by the light behind them. He, simply, knows both. The curtains in this sitting room are ragged. I have mended them, reversed them, washed them, and finally opened them wide, tight up against the wall so that they do not show much. The light does not shine through them. There are no designs on these curtains. I will need to replace them soon. I saw a different path on the air, once, like those childhood paths of motes in the sun: moonpath across the water of the Bay of Fundy, lifting into the space between the water and the fullmoon. Dark heads bobbing in the water were seals playing in the water, in the moonpath.

  "Although an even north light is 
  preferable in the greater number of
  cases, direct bright sunlight is
  sometimes useful in examining blacks
  and other very dark colours.  "
  -Ralph Mayer.  Quoted by Jane
  Urquhart (Epigram)

This north light is even over my shoulder. It gets caught in the grey and white yam. The same colour. Soft with memory of snow and rock, of freezing mist in the.evening and in the early early morning.

  The woman is standing near the window
  in the downstairs front room of a log
  house on the north shore of Lake
  Superior. -Jane Urquhart (1)

That room is cold as only a room in a northern place can be cold, where she can see her breath inside, even though the stove has been burning all night. As a child, I woke on winter mornings to my breath hanging in the air and to intricate patterns of stars and ferns and snowflakes ice-crystalled onto the inside of my window. Like the pattern on the white lace bonnet the woman knits in the Bingo parlour. Lately, I have been wanting red berries against the grey and white of my winter garden.

  Strawberries. Red. Very scented. They
  hang by ones and twos, hidden beneath
  the leaves. You must crouch right down
  to find them, or better, crawl on your
  belly feeling the plants prickling your
  skin, smelling the scent, stuffing the
  berries into your mouth, greenleaves
  getting in there too by accident-no
  matter,- hisfather will wash him off
  later.
  -Harold Horwood (8)

I take the dog out into the woods, into the greylight. Chickadees are in th( woods--and bright red high bush cranberries ' vivid in the dimlight and th( snow. I pick some. To put in my garden. The birds in the woods only eai them if they get desperate because they are bitterly sour; nevertheless, I pick only a few. No matter. The birds in my garden get hungry too. Parts of the creek are still open, running dark water, until the place where the banks widen out and the water is quiet, frozen, with snow cover marked by crisscrossing animal tracks. In my garden, I weave the red berries in among the branches. Chickadees land close by, and one cardinal. Red surprise in this monochrome landscape.

  It was during what would be my final
  summer at Silver Islet Landing that a
  stylistic change caught my mind, 
  pulling me from realism towards the
  concept of formal ambiguity.  This
  freed me, or so I thought, because,
  unlike a figure or a landscape, a
  concept can be carried anywhere.
  -Jane Urquhart (10)

Socks-in-the-knitting can be carried anywhere. At least, that's what I always thought.

I As the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text and relates the different views and patterns to one another he sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too (Iser, 21).)

(If we return to the old home as to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, because the home of other days has become a great image of lost intimacy (Bachelard, 100).}

Interesting that I picked up Harold's language in my own mind: "No matter." A pivot happens there. A place to swing around on. Not a phrase I would ordinarily use. I will make place for it in my vocabulary. Also, Jane's phrase "towards the concept of formal ambiguity." It echoed in my mind as I thought about Don Mackay's "Virtual Landscapes." People are puzzled when he insists that they are a formal construction, that they do not "represent" anything. They are, in fact, formal ambiguity. These books are beginning to move for me-and to move me.

I was a little suspicious, at the beginning of Harold's and Jane's books, that I was looking at Edenic images-perfect home-places, nests. Both works undercut that image almost immediately. The child Jonathan feels the cut across his bottom of his mother's temper. Sara's head and shoulders are bent toward a folded and glued piece of paper, a telegram, which she holds in her hand. Wonder why I am suspicious about an "Eden" image. I guess it's okay, as long as the snake is not ignored-or forgotten. I suppose without it there would be stasis. No setting into motion.

 There are guides who can show you 
 the way. Use them. But they will not
 satisfy your longing. 
-Rumi (152)

Hmm. This longing which keeps me reading? Keeps me engaged in pattern, in making?

    Muhammed said, "Don't theorize
    about essence!" All speculations
    are just more ers of covering.
    Human beings love coverings!
    -Rumi (152)

OK. I will not theorize about the essences. At least, not much. But I do want to describe them, record them. Write my way into knowing something about what they are. And their ways of playing through these books. It is true, I guess, that this writing is patterning this reading, which is shaping this writing-and this place where I live.

  Cabbages, hard and white, green leaves
  picked off and left in the garden, each
  head wrapped in newspaper and taken to
  the cellar. By now he can comment on
  what he sees in abbreviated sentences:
  Cabbages like footballs.
  -Harold Horwood (8)

The child, early on, not theorizing maybe, but commenting. On what he experiences. But is this any child? Any boy? I begin to believe that this is Künstlerroman, the novel of the writer-as-a-young-boy: "Early morning, the air cold, cold, feathers of frost on the kitchen window" (Horwood, 9) 1 begin to understand that I am reading place. North place. Winter place. My place.

{ To localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others. But hermeneutics, which is more profound than biography, must determine the centers of fate by ridding history of its conjunctive temporal tissue, which has no action on our fates. For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates (Bachelard, 9).)

As Horwood is showing me.
Comforting. Since I have a peculiar notion of time. It telescopes into places. Like this snowy morning when the trees are heavy with white. We may not have sunshine. But we do have snowlight. And the crystal forms of icicles to catch it-even, sometimes, to turn it to rainbow. On the radio last night, we talked about chapbooks, which in this place have become artform: Trout Lily Press. I wonder what Muhammed would have thought about ice feathers on the inside of the window? Or on the outside, for that matter.

(By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. To the function of reality, wise in the experience of the past, as it is defined by traditional psychology, should be added afunction of unreality, which is equally positive ... Any weakness in the function of unreality, will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee (Bachelard, xxx). I Jonathan is an imaginative child, in a world which feeds his imagining, his observing, which roots him firmly in place. A place which gives a child space-and freedom to be who he is, and who he begins to imagine himself to be. And the person I begin to imagine, to follow up and down the cliffs and out-onto the ocean.

Strange narrative voice in this book. Ostensibly third person, distanced, observing, but seeing through Jonathan's eyes. Intimately. Seeing/ experiencing his realities and his unrealities.

     EGGPLANT DIPS
  Baba Ganouj ("Ga-NOOSH")
     The classic Middle Eastern eggplant
  appetizer, plus a few variations on
  the theme.  The instructions call
  for baking the eggplant, but if you
  have the opportunity to grill it over
  hot coals or to roast it over a
  directflame, the Baba Ganouj will
  taste even better.

 a little oil, for the baking sheet
 I medium (7-inch) eggplant
 2 medium cloves garlic, minced
 1 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
 1 1/4 cup sesame tahini 
 1 1/2 tsp. salt
 black pepper and cayenne, to taste
 olive oil
 freshly minced parsley

1) Preheat oven to 350F. Lightly oil a
  baking sheet.
2) Slice the eggplant in half lengthwise,
  and place face-down
  on the king sheet. Bakefor thirty
  minutes or until very tender. Cool
  until it's comfortable to handle.
3) Scoop out the eggplant pulp, and
  discard the skin.  Place the pulp
  in a food processor or blender,
  and add the garlic, lemonjuice,
  tahini, andsalt.  Puree until
  smooth. (Anotheraltemative is to mash
  by hand, leaving the eggplant a little
  chunky.)
4)	Transfer to an attractive serving
  dish, cover tightly, and chill Drizzle
  the top with a little olive oil and
  sprinkle with mincedparsley just
  before serving.  Serve with crackers.
  -Mollie Katzen (104)

I can imagine this, I can even foresee it, but can I produce it? It would be good to eat Baba Ganouj while I read Rumi. For reasons of place.

 When light returns to its source,
 it takes nothing
 of what it has illuminated.

 It may have shone on a garbage dump,
 or a garden, or in the center of
 a human eye.  No matter.

 It goes, and when it does,
 the open plain becomes passionately
 desolate, wanting it back.
 -Rumi (212)

"No matter." No wonder the ancient Greeks believed in coincidence. But. Rumi, what if that light has shone on a wide open field of snow, late in the day, with a silhouette of Old Order Mennonite farmers in a horse drawn buggy? Surely at least a memory of that goes with the light as it withdraws. And some of the smell of snow.

 There were many things that they never
 discussed at all.  When they played at
 experimental sex, at the novelties of
 the Kama Sutra, fetishism and
 sexfantasies, they never discussed
 them.  There would always be such
 elements in their relationship,
 presumably, but they remained unspoken.
 Jonathan supposed that this might be a
 residue from thepuritanism that had
 pervaded North America for centuries.
 In his early teens he had almost
 broken out ofit, but complete escape
 from deeply imprinted culture is very
 difficult, and you are more than likely,
 in the fullness of time, to find
 yourself repeating the errors ofyour
 parents.
 -Harold Horwood (53-54)

What is a statement like the last sentence above doing in a novel/memoir? It helped me to understand Muhammed's injunction not to theorize. It gets caught in the delicate fabric of the book. I know-from bitter experience that the statement is correct. I have done it. More than once. Repeated the errors of my parents. But this preaching, in this place, somehow ignores Jonathan, sets him aside. In a way he does not deserve.

(Paradoxically, in order to suggest the values of intimacy, we have to induce in the reader a state of suspended reading. For it is not until his eyes have left the page that recollections of my room can become a threshold of oneirism for him. And when it is a poet speaking, the reader's soul reverberates; it experiences the kind of reverberation that, as Minkowski has shown, gives the energy of an origin to being (Bachelard, 14).}

This passage from Bachelard helps me to appreciate a kind of veering away which I have been noticing in Horwood's book. Watching other boys playing in the water, Jonathan observes that they are beautiful. And says little more. He tells a brief story about a conversation with his grandfather. And I understand a great deal more. He tells me-sort of-about his first love for a young woman, and I experience it all. I wondered why he did not linger longer. But I realize that in leaving me space to stare out the window, this narrator (and Horwood) opened out the place where these stories reverberate, where they fill themselves in.

{Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, hi,, roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engravec in his soul (Bachelard, I 1).)

In this sharp cold, there are not many roadside benches, but there is a parl bench by the side of the creek where I walk with the dog. And there art roads and crossroads through this reading, along which I am making m, way. Horwood has given me a clear sense of the Newfoundland roads ani paths a child like Jonathan follows. And Urquhart has shown me Sara looking back over the trail of her snowshoes. All of these roads and path become mine also.

 Tomorrow I will begin the underpainting
 for my nextpicture. I will paint Sara,
 the inherited house, the fist of Thunder
 Cape on the horizon, thefrozen lake, her
 hands, the Quebec heater, the slowly
 fadingfires. I will paint the
 small-paned window, the log walls, a
 curtain illuminatedfrom behind by winter
 sun, the skein of grey I never saw in
 Sara's hair. Then carefiilly,
 painstakingly, I will remove the realism
 from it, paint it all out.
 -Jane Urquhart (15)

Partly memory. Partly imagination. Partly envy? And then the attempt to transmute it all to something else. Like Jonathan, this artist man whose name I still do not know, is looking back over his life. He moves in and out, from the present, to the past, telling his story. Resisting realism. Which creeps into his telling even as it steals into his painting.

  The previous night an ice storm had
 coated everything in silver and we
 had awakened in the morning to a
 tinsel world.
  When we left the house my mother
 exclaimed at the beauty.  "This Is
 what happens, " she said, "when you
 live in the north.  Everything can
 change in the most magnificent way,
 completely, overnight.  " We were
 walking slowly because of the ice
 underfoot.  "We live as far north as
 possible, " she said.  "Aren't you
 glad?"
  She had eitherforgotten, or was
 choosing to ignore, Canada.
 -Jane Urquhart (26)

Canada. Where an ice storm can go on for several days, where it can wipe out electrical power to a great city, where people can be without heat or warm food or light for six weeks, because of torrential, frozen, damage to the high wires. Not all that easy to ignore. I peel an orange and stare out into the snowlight while I wonder at this southern flavour which fills my mouth. I puzzle over the serendipity which has led me to these two books in the middle of the deepfreeze which has been January, rolling over slowly into February and a groundhog who has predicted six more weeks of winter. I stare at the red berries in my tree, thinking of the scarlet fever which has killed this man's mother. His meditations on red. All the hues and shadows of it. Of alizarin crimson:

 It is alizarin crimson that I now
 associate with my mother, her life,
 the disease, her death.  A colour so
 unreliable it could practically be
 called fleeting, it disappears in less
 than thirty years.  No amount of
 varnish can protect it.  Turn itfrom
 the light and it stillfades with a
 determination that is almost athletic.
 And yet it is the most beautiful of the
 reds; dark, romantic, andfragile, it is
 an outburst ofjoy among the other
 colours on the palette, though chances
 are the artist will live to see it
 weaken, deteriorate, andfinally vanish.
 It is impossible to keep.
 -Jane Urquhart (31)

So are red cranberries woven into cold branches. The houses in Jonathan's world are all full of warmth and things and people. They are Bachelard's dimly remembered but comforting places. As houses can be especially, perhaps, in a cold place.

 Jonathan was still carrying the baby,
 a towel around her for warmth.  She had
 stopped sucking his shirt, and had gone
 to sleep on his shoulder.  The wind
 howled.  The snow beat against the
 windows.  Everything was beautiful.
 -Harold Horwood (93)

This is a new bom baby, only minutes old, held in a safe and warm place, at the centre of a blizzard, surrounded by love and warmth, the kind of bulwark that is family in Eastern Canada. The houses the Underpainter describes are claustrophobic, imprisoning, or they are empty and echoing with memories, where no relationships happen, where they are, in fact, carefully avoided. Not a place for a child to root in, to grow whole in. Brave of Urquhart to write about an unattractive man, a man obsessed with himself, who thinks he is devoted to his art. He speaks often of Robert Henri, his teacher, and I remember a book: The Art Spirit, by Robert Henri. Which meant a great deal to me a few years ago. I dig it out.

I have always been surrounded by such books, such teachers. But I learned reading from a woman in a Bingo pariour. She showed me how to do many things at once-in public. How not to be ashamed about this way of doing. The way of all the women in my family. But they did it In private. In public, they did only one thing at a time. Graciously. With a great wide open space around them, where all the otherduties hovered, wondering at this idleness. She-shamelessly-was reading many texts at the same time. Simply being there and doing what she was doing. In public. In a Bingo parlour. Where I was selling tickets to raise money for youth soccer. Doing only one task, idle, watching her. Learning.

 Ten years before, I had bought the house
 built by the famous modem architect, the
 house in which I now live. Long and low,
 spacious and angular, it is completely
 out of character in this neighbourhood
 of mock Tudor revival and large, ornate
 nineteenth-century houses. Like this
 architect, Ifind that the upholstered
 fumiture and useless gadgets, the kept
 things that decorate most houses,
 depress me. I need space around me, and
 light. Air. Like him, I want a lot of
 emptiness between me and any object in
 a room.
 -Jane Urquhart (32)

Yup. I may not like him much, but I agree with him. Maybe that is why the wide fields comfort me, with only a tree here and there, far apart. Every morning I tidy this room, throw out all the accumulations of the day before. Create open space. For light. On the page. On grey and white yam. On a bowl of lentil soup. With cumin.

The remembered. The imagined. The obliterated. This man's struggle to understand art, to find his way into it. To protect himself against emotion. Interesting. Jonathan does not obliterate it, but he does veer away from it, disengaging the reader from the page. Am I reading writing? Am I reading painting?

At a gathering on Sunday, Isabella Stefanescu talked about "the artist's book," and showed us hers. Full of sketches, of scraps of perception, of clippings, letters, scraps. Collage. Archaeology. The remembered. The imagined. The collected. "The Artist's Book." A treasure which was, wonderful to hold in my hands.

 "Cy would be disappointed with me,"
 Jonathan told her, "and Grandfather too.
 They wanted me to be a sailor. They gave
 me whatever they had to give, and told me
 I had the makings ofa really first-class
 salt water man. And I believed them. But
 I allowed Father to send me off to
 university and turn me into a professor.
 -Harold Horwood (116)

Therefore, I was wrong. I thought I was reading Künstlerroman, a book about the development of the writer as a young man. A portrait of the artist. Why was I so sure? Partly because I know that Harold Horwood grew up in Newfoundland and that he loves it. So I made the error I wam my students about: I fused the author and the narrator.

I should know better. But, there were other reasons. I suppose I know that the kind of child Jonathan was usually becomes a writer, someone who observes his world, even as he participates in it.

Also: Jonathan goes on to tell his wife that he sees work with students as a "waste of time-my time and theirs" (I 16). That does not ring true. A man like Jonathan would not see teaching that way. If he felt like that, he would not have accumulated the kind of wisdom which he has.

I do not believe that Jonathan grew up to be a disappointed and sour academic, on the edge of despair and futility.

In the last pages of the book, the distances between the narrator and Jonathan-and perhaps the author-narrow. Jonathan becomes writer there, even if he never did earlier in his life. Does that make the book Künstlerroman? No. This is not book about the development of the writer as a young man. And yet maybe. For me. I still read this as the portrait of an artist. Maybe in spite of itself. Perhaps because in the last pages, close to the end of his life, Jonathan's voice does become the narrative voice, does take over its own story, does become writer. Perhaps because this novel edges close to memoir.

 Make peace with the universe.
  Take joy in it.

 It will turn to gold. Resurrection
 will be now. Every moment,
 a new beauty.

 And never any boredom!
 Instead this abundant, pouring
 noise of many springs in your ears.
 -Rumi (239)

Horwood's book does record the life of a man who works at doing what Rumi teaches. And Jonathan has some measure of success at it. He does take joy in the universe.And especially in the piece of it called Newfoundiand. This is a brave book, because it does affirm.

There are shadows in this man's life and in the Newfoundland community which he celebrates, but the whole is imbued with a clear light of compassion and insight, of continuity. There is a strong sense of generations unscrolling: before Jonathan and after him. He does not become a sailor, but his grandson does, following in a family tradition generations old. (The modernists rejected tradition, the postmodernists are finding their way back into it.) Each chapter of this novel is like a stanza in a poem, standing alone and building a totality. I guess, in the end, I think this a book about love:

 "Agape, philia, karitas, eros,"
 Jonathan murmured.  "Most of the saints
 knew two or three of them but missed the
 fourth.  It is only whenyou experience
 the rare combination ofallfourthatyou
 know life in its most beautiful aspect.
 -Harold Horwood (144)

This novel/almost memoir/almost poem offers the experience of all four. And it makes me want to read the Tao-teh-King, which Jonathan mentions often. He did a good job of loving: children, his community, his wife, his daughter, his grandson, his grandfather, the land. Form and pattern in Horwood's book are gentle, with many open spaces: thresholds of oneirism, of daydreaming, in the company of warm people and lovely places.

Even if Jonathan, inveterate Newfoundlander, does think that Ontario is "dim, dull boring Ontario, where nobody lives by choice, but only for pay" (Horwood, 102). A landscape I am trying to learn to read. The sunshine across the winter fields the other day was not dim, dull or boring, but exquisite in a subtle way which gave mejoy. And the quietpeople at the table behind talked about how Uncle Charlie would eat cabbage in any form, but he didn't much like corn, no matter how it was cooked. Their lives, like their bodies, seem to me sturdy and determined.

 BASIC CORN BREAD

 butter or margarine, for the pan
 1 cup cornmeal
 1 cup flour
 2 tsp. baking powder
 1/2 tsp. baking soda
 1/2 tsp. salt
 1 cup buttermilk or yogurt
 1 egg
 3 Tbs. sugar or honey
 3 Tbs. melted butter or margarine

1) Preheat oven to 350F. Grease an 8-inch
 square pan (or a 9or 10-inch cast-iron
 skillet) with butter or margarine.
2) Combine the dry ingredients in a
 medium-sized bowl Combine the wet
 ingredients (including sugar orhoney)
 separately. Stir the wet mixture into
 the dry, mixingjust enough to thoroughly
 combine.  Spread into the prepared pan.
3)	Bakefor 20 minutes, or until the
 center isfirm to the touch. Serve hot,
 warm, or at room temperature.
-Molly Katzen (114)

Maybe Uncle Charlie would like corn cooked this way--with maple syrup. In a Quebec winter childhood, it was a great treat. I'm still not quite sure how to read this Ontario adult place. Urquhart is showing me, through the eyes of a man who is also a stranger to this place, and through the lives of thoroughly Ontarian, thoroughly admirable people. She is showing me, among other things, their ghosts. She is also showing me what it means to be emptied, to be outwith (a word I learned in Edinburgh) place or people, as the Underpainter finds himself, wherever he is.

 The patriarch,the prophet Robert
 Henri stood over us all. Theorizing,
 expo ulating us. More than we knew.
 Or more than we vt that we knew.
 -Jane Urquhart (134)

I have been puzzling over this man, this artist, this Underpainter, this American, whom I do not like, and whom I keep reading about, my eyes intent on the pages. I do not look up often from this book. I follow the words on the page carefully. This is not, I now think, a book about the struggling artist and about the isolation of the artist-as I thought it was and as the reviews have led me to believe that it is.

This novel is something else altogether.

It does, of course, trace the life of this artist whose name I still do not know. His story is told mostly in hindsight, moving in and out of his present life, as he remembers it. He is the first person narrator. An old man looking back over his life. How reliable is he? He is, at least, in some ways, aware of his limitations.

I thought that Robert Henri had made a brief appearance and would not reappear-or be important to the novel. I now believe that he is essential to the book. He is the theorist, teaching his students and this man among them, that art is the only thing that matters. Life is useful only insofar as it can be turned into art. And a careful distance must always be kept from emotion, from the subject, whatever it is, so that it does not interfere with or distort the art. (Like Virginia Woolf's "incandescent light.")

This artist does his best to follow his teacher's instructions. As a result, he is isolated and driven-not by art but by theory. Kent Rockwell is set up as a kind of foil to him. He lives wildly and paints wildly. He has it all. He lives and does art with great passion. Our artist does not allow himself thepassion-any kind of passion.

"The Underpainter" is usually unimportant in the studio--the apprentice or lesser artist who paints in the backdrop on which the master then works. But this man is more underpainter than painter. He puts what passion he has into the underpainting of the canvas. He then goes to great lengths to paint out that floodof insight oremotion ordisorder. He worries about pentimenti showing up as the surface paint thins or becomes transparent over the years. He develops an elaborate system to make sure that none of these "ghosts" can ever show through. They would give away the fact that he has, occasionally, been moved to art. That he has, in his own way rebelled against the theorist, broken through to some other space-in something the same way he did when the master left the studio and he engaged in tomfoolery with the other artists. While the women artists kept on quietly working and smiled indulgently.

Seeing this has engaged my imagination. I thought Urquhart wasjust being brave, writing about an unattractive character. But this book is much more than that. It is an investigation of whathappens when art is driven by theory. This man is highly successful. His paintings sell for a great deal of money in the New York Galleries. He is fashionable.

 This is what I have so effortlessly
 inherited; this cold this dark this
 emptiness. It is odd how vacancy
 becomes a kind ofpresence, how it
 becomes tangible, real.
 It is what I live with now, this vacancy.
 I am full of emptiness.
 -Jane Urquhart (164)

Life roils around this man, filling in around the edges of his story. The "underpainting" around the main figures of his life. So what are the "pentimenti" of this novel? What is the obscured story-and who inhabits it? Jane Urquhart, for one. Robert Henri, for another: the patriarch, the master, the theorist-who manipulates and controls his students. I wonder who those teachers were in Urquhart's life-does she clown around when they leave, or is she like one of the dutiful women painters in Henri's studio? This is a novel about different ways of being an arti st. Where does Urquhart fall? This novel reminds me more and more of her short story, "The Death of Robert Browning," where Browning bemoans his careful life, idolizing Shelley-who lived a vast, romantic life-and even died romantically.

 It was a critic who came up with the
 term "erasure" when Ifirst exhibited
 the series. There is nothing, you
 understand, like an obscured subject
 to give the critics something to talk
 about. Even those who had been either
 indifferent or hostile to my work in
 the past wrote long, reflective essays
 about the hidden subject matter that,
 under the circumstances, they were
 forced mostly to imagine. This led to
 some interesting fantasies. Some of
 the others ignored titles such as The
 Sawhorse or The Last Jane Eyreor
 Night in the China Hall and refused
 to speculate about what was underneath
 the various layers. They wrote,
 instead, about the "act" of erasure;
 about absence, vacancy, abandonment.
 One or two ofthe men wrote about
 annihilation, about my decision to
 eliminate the object in my paintings,
 how this, in their opinion, would
 eventually lead to discarding the
 "art object" altogether and how my
 intentions had been "active " rather
 than "passive.  " Not one ofthem,
 however, not one had a word to say
 about the casting off of despair,
 about catharsis, anesthetic.
 I was as amazed by this as I was by
 the fact that anyone had paid
 attention at all, though, after all
 these years in the art world,
 absolutely nothing should surprise me.
 But I was surprised by this, then
 doubly amazed when collectors opened
 their cheque-books. Couldn't they see?
  Didn't they know they were carrying
 home a rectangle of sorrow?  Couldn't
 they understand that grief it self
 would now be proudly displayed,
 hanging on their otherwise smooth
 living-room walls?
 -Jane Urquhart (184)

Perhaps in some odd way of knowing, they did know that they were carryinggriefhome-tohangitontheirlivingroomwalls.Perhapstheydid understand despair, catharsis, and anesthetic. Perhaps a rectangle of it was comforting. Maybe it was good to see it contained within the space and shape of the rectangle. Maybe the obscured subject allowed them to put their own subjects under all that underpainting become over-painting. Maybe they waited to see what pentimenti would emerge, what ghosts of his or of their own would make their way through the layers of obscurity. Would insiston attention after long years of waiting-like the little grey girl who appeared in Augusta's snow house.

"Night in the China Hall" is also the title of a section within this novel, the section where grief relived becomes unbearable.

It seems to me not the world of art which collides with human emotion in this book, but the world of theory-in-art. It is, indeed, leafed rectangles of grief. The question is: Whose?

 "There were two worlds of art," he
 declared.  "One up there, " he pointed
 to the ceiling, "and one down here,"
 he gestured toward the ground.
 -Jane Urquhart (188)

George. He was one of the people surrounding the Underpainter, one who was a good friend, even though the latter held him in contempt, because he spent his life in a small China shop, painting china and collecting delicate figurines. George went to war, World War 1, and while he was wading through shattered bodies and mud, the "artist" was at home in New York, clowning around in the studio of Robert Henri. It never occurred to himthen or later-that George was important, George was living a full and honorable-if tormented-life. He knew almost nothing about George. He was too preoccupied with himself, with developing a "temperament" through which to see the world.

 "There is only one world of art now,"
 he said. "The war.' finished the other
 one off. " He was walking me to the door.
 "Only one world of art," he repeated. 
 "Yours."
 ... Ididn't think much about what George
 had said to mejust Hefore I left the
 China Hall.  It would be ' years before
 I would interpret his last statement as
 anything other tha a compliment. 
 -ane Urquhart (193)

Two worlds of art. According to George. Reduced after the war to one. But in the novel there are other worlds of art. Kent Rockwell lives in one of them. He lives high, wide, and handsome, deeply in love with his world and everything in it. He travels, has adventures, gets married, has children, lives intensely, in touch with everyone around him. He reminds me of Horwood's Jonathan-who was not, ostensibly, an artist. Rockwell especially loves the north-which both the Underpainter and his capitalist father have exploited-although he remains puzzled about why he was kicked out of Brigus, Newfoundland, for singing German lieder, after war with Germany was declared. (Brigus is the town Jonathan grew up in and left-albeit of his own free will-and then returned to.)

More and more, this novel seems to me not the portrait of the artist but the portraitof atheory. Aboutwhathappens when art-and life-aredetermined by theory rather than by love or even by suffering. Life surges around the Underpainter (Austin-I finally acquired his name), who holds himself carefully, thoroughly, aloof from it. When Rockwell tells him that his paintings, done over and over, of Sara's nude body, are as "cold as ice," he is furious, and seeing that his work is flawed, he looks for someone to blame. His choice falls on Sara, the "object" he has drawn over and over again:

 "I'm sorry," I finally said, though I
 wasn't at all at the time. "I'm sorry,
 but this is an aesthetic not an
 emotional decision." Sara stood at the
 south window, blocking the view of the
 sundrenched lake.
 "I'm sorry," I said again, with all of
 the coldness I had in me then.
 "I've painted you enough.
 -Jane Urquhart (323)

Kent Rockwell told Austin about women-when they were young men: "You must let their fluidity form one-third of your character." Jonathan, who delighted in having shared so much of his life-time with his Sarah, would have understood exactly. "Faites attention. They are far superior to us and beautiful besides" (Urquhart, 143). Austin thought he was following Rockwell'-s instructions when he began to paint Sara. Sadly, it was over those paintings that they quarrelled and never saw one another again. (Is this book about theory influencing art--or about theory being used as an excuse for "ice cold" art?)

 I've said before that every crafstman
 searchesfor what's not there
 to practise his craft.

 A builder looksfor the rotten hole
 where the roof caved in. A water carrier
 picks the empty pot. A carpenter
 stops at the house with no door.

 Workers rush toward some hint
 of emptiness, which thev then
 start to fill.  Their hope, though,
 is for emptiness, so don't think
 you must avoid it.  It contains
 what you need!
    Dear soul, if you were not friends
 with the vast nothing inside,
 why would you always be casting your net
 into it, and waiting so patiently?
 -Rumi (24)

What is the hint of emptiness that Urquhart rushes to fill? Something to do with fashion, with success, with emptiness. With a world of theorists who are replacing@r at least heavily influencing-artists? Clearly, Jane Urquhart knows about that vast nothing inside-and about dipping a net into it. As the Underpainter dips into it, he finds a moving story, and he takes himself to a point where "I no longer wanted sentences leading to narrati ve" (Urquhart, 322). There is much of the poem about this novel too.

(At the library, dutifully stamping out wave upon wave of sea stories, and the battered blossoms of Mills and Boon, I realized what I had known dimly; that plot was meaningless to me. This was a difficult admission for one whose body was tattooed with Bible stories, but I had to accept that my love-affair was with language, and only incidentally with narrative (Jeanette Winterson, 155).)

Dense language and imagery connect everything to everything else in this story which is, apparently, the rambling memories of an old man, trying to remember, to understand his life. Maybe even to make amends for his life. Image clusters form around the lake and the wind, the little grey girl, light and shadow, colour and white, flowers and ice, the north, the war. The desperate pain of other characters-and their courage-are the underpainting against which the figure of the Underpainter stands out.

(For an artist to be interesting to us he must have been interesting to himself. He must have been capable of intense feeling, and capable of profound contemplation (Robert Henri, 17).)

(Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it, shows there are still more pages possible.The world would stagnate without him, and the world would be beautiful with him; for he is interesting to himself and he is interesting to others. He does not have to be a painter or sculptor to be an artist. He can work in any medium. He simply has to find the gain in the work itself, not outside it (Robert Henri, 15).)

So it does not matter that Jonathan in Evening Light was not an artist. He was a man who lived well ...

Is this the same Robert Henri who-presumably-causes the Underpainter to be what he is? Perhaps Muhammed was right. Maybe it is better not to theorize about essences, best to let them be what they are. Art up there? Art down here? No matter.

Two worlds of art? The Essential Rumi, Evening Light, The Underpainter, The Moosewood Cookbook ...

A woman in the Bingo parlour, reading several texts-all at once-showed me how to read. No. She reminded me of how to read. Of how I read. Sometimes. Maybe that is what teaching is: reminding. I have read these books and they have read me: "Read" from the Old Saxon, raedan: to advise. It is therefore perhaps more true that the books have read me than that I have read the books. Whatever. No matter. They have been part of my January, and early February, which would have been bleaker without them. In this place. This north. Which opens out into "still more pages possible." Into ambiguities of form. And content.

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated from the French by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Henri, Robert. The Art Spirit. Notes, Articles, Fragments of Letters and Talks to Students, Bearing on the Concept and Technique of picture Making, the Study of art Generally, and on Appreciation. Compiled by Margery Ryerson. Introduction by Forbes Watson. Reprint. New York: Harper& Row, 1984. Originally published: Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1923.

Horwood, Harold. Evening Light. Lawrencetown Beach, N.S.: Pottersfield Press, 1997.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response. Translation of Der Akt des Lesens. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Katzen, Mollie. Moosewood Cookbook. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1992.

Rumi. The Essential Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks, with John Moyne. A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson. New York: Harper Collins, 1995.

Urquhart, Jane. The Underpainter. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.

Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects. Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery Toronto: Knopf, 1995.

Back