My Time in Space (4 page)

Miss Heaps, a sweet-tempered bun-shaped Ilkley lady, was my first art teacher. Side by side at the easel in her cramped little front room we worked on pastel copies of Van Dyck’s ‘King Charles the First’, paying special attention to reflections in the armour, and of portrait photographs of cats and dogs, in which she would make one gleaming, lifelike eye, and I would make the other. Soon thereafter I became a modernist, and have remained one since. I attribute this to the art master of the local grammar school, Tommy Walker, who differed from the drab gaolers in charge of other cells of the curriculum in that he would smuggle in
evidences
of an outer world of creativity, not ongoing in Ilkley,
perhaps
, but not impossibly far removed. I remember his delight in
Under
Milk
Wood
,
which he spent an entire afternoon reading to the class when it was first published. But what was modernism? Answers were as hard to come by and difficult of interpretation as information about sex. Somewhere I read an article which laid it
down that Sickert’s ‘Ennui’ was a truly modern painting, and I spent a lot of time poring over a small and blurred reproduction of it, trying to make out this quality of modernity. Herbert Read’s book
Art
Now
was subjected to deep looking too, and I took his various exemplars so deeply to heart that even nowadays when I come across one of the peculiar works he plucked from
nonentity
, such as Edgard Tytgat’s ‘Springtime’ in the art museum in Brussels, I hail it as an icon of culture on a flight with the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

From such reading I gathered that the eternal enemy of art was ‘The Academy’, and that in each young generation the only artists worthy of respect were those disapproved of by the
preceding
generation. Art could not be taught; the ecstasies of
creativity
were the reward for selfless endurance of neglect and rejection. Art schools, I deduced, would be staffed by today’s equivalents of those dullard painters and sculptors who figure in art history only in the blazing light of the pupils who rebelled against them. Science was different; discovery there was a matter of standing ‘on the shoulders of giants’ rather than striding across the fallen bodies of pygmies. Since I wanted both sorts of glory, I would study maths at university, and paint untutored.

My paintings of adolescent years varied from a depressive realism to a tortured expressionism, but always with a stiffening of the ‘formal relations’ I read about in R.H. Wilensky’s
The
Modern
Movement
in
Art.
By my first year at Cambridge I had a style of my own, or rather two styles impacted and superimposed one on the other, in which flame-or leaf-like shapes were constrained by and played against a Mondrianesque rectilinear grid. Perhaps in a few examples these fraught contradictions achieved a tolerable
outcome
; at any rate one of them, exhibited in Heffer’s Gallery,
caught the eye of an art-loving mathematics lecturer, who wrote me a note about it. Some time later – it must have been after the exams at the end of my second year – I had the idea of starting a picture-lending scheme in my college (which I had decided was a philistine hole dominated by self-satisfied lawyers), and I called on this lecturer for advice, knowing that he had done something
similar
in his own college. He greeted me with ‘Congratulations! You got a Second.’ It had not occurred to me that he would be involved in marking papers. ‘What sort of a Second?’ I asked. ‘The last one,’ he said, and showed me a list of names in which mine actually stood two places below the cut-off line for
second-class
degrees, but was bracketed and furnished with an arrow that looped around and reinserted it just above the line. I was not bold enough to ask the reason for this miraculous assumption, which I suspect was a tribute to my artistic rather than my mathematical talents. A stern letter from my college followed me home that summer, warning that greater application would be necessary if I was to avoid sinking to a third-class degree in my final exams. Indeed, given the amount of time lost in my Cambridge years to drawing whimsical cartoons for the newspaper
Varsity,
designing incompetent layouts for undergraduate journals such as
Granta
and
Gemini,
scene-painting for the Amateur Dramatic Company, and other artistic activities I soon came to look back on with
embarrassment
, I was lucky to achieve a Second in the end. Fortunately I was blessed with a groatsworth of geometrical wit at the crucial moment in my finals, and perhaps that result was achieved despite, rather than because of, my aesthetic endeavours.

It was still to be some years before I would define myself as a painter; travel was my priority, and for that I needed a job. I was keen to revisit the East, of which my National Service had given
me a taste; the names of Sumatra and other Conrad-attested
fragments
of Orient rang in my head. I had an interview with Shell during my last term, in the course of which I happened to
mention
that oil installations had spoiled the vista of the Straits of Malacca from Singapore Hill, whereupon the interviewer
suddenly
remembered that Shell didn’t need any more
mathematicians
. My tutor tried to elucidate my ambitions and set me off on a career. By elimination, teaching had become my vocation, and since I was frightened by the thought of facing a class of
youngsters
, I wondered if my speciality was to be Adult Education. Gently he gave it as his opinion that I ‘would find Adult
Education
in Borneo to be something of a Chimaera or Will-o’-the Wisp’. Next, I responded to an advertisement from an American institution, Robert College, on the Bosphorus. The golden grime of Istanbul had enraptured me on a vacation trip the previous summer; Turkey would be Orient enough. And as the Americans were desperately in need of a maths teacher for the Academy that prepared Turkish boys for college entry, and would start paying straight away, all was soon arranged, and we (I had paired with M by then) set off on a leisurely progress to Istanbul via Athens, with diversions to Mykonos and Delos. It was the beginning of three Aegean-centred years.

Squally weather, especially the first of those years, what with my inexperience in class and the coups and curfews attending the fall of the Menderes regime, and artistically a mere groping in dark and dazzle towards my final commitment to being a painter. In the paintings I produced, mostly after Saturday midnights, the conflictual schema of my Cambridge works reappeared in the guise of ancient masonry prised apart and held together by sinewy vegetation – a trace of my ocular feastings in Mycenae, Olympia,
Delphi, Naxos, and in the sumptuous decay of Istanbul itself. After an initial immersion in the hard-partying campus life of Robert College, we tended to withdraw from it and found our friends among the artists of the city, in a little Bohemia whose
aesthetic
loyalty was to Paris rather than to the wolf-grey Turkey of Atatürk or to the faded tatters of Ottoman splendour some of them had inherited.

Mehmet was the most flamboyant of these latter. His
apartment
, up five cavernous flights of stairs in old Pera, was a museum in meltdown; on one visit we found him bundling up the
uniforms
of two of his ancestors, a Vizier and a Grand Vizier, and had our photographs taken in them before they were carried off to the pawnshop. Mehmet was tall, handsome in a raffish way, dressed with a nautical air, and almost as thin as the knife-blade figures he used to paint on seven-foot-long planks. His wife, Sevim, was the most beautiful girl I’ve seen or imagined; her beauty was a
physical
shock, and once when I introduced her to a colleague from the college at a party I saw him turn white, then green, then red, as perhaps I had myself on first meeting her. But Mehmet was a drinker and a philanderer, recurrently in disgrace over one escapade or another, and on returning from an absence we were annoyed to find that he had been using our flat for one of his affairs. Like many Istanbul intellectuals, he eked out a living by translating French or English works into Turkish; he borrowed a copy of Malraux’s
The
Voices
of
Silence
that I’d treasured since my teens, and when we went to say goodbye to him and repossess the book before leaving Turkey for the last time we found that he had underlined passages throughout and let his infant son scrawl on its endpapers. In revenge we omitted to return a collection of records of modern music we had borrowed from him.

Two artists who became our friends were Omer Uluç, a
tachiste
whose canvases now seem to us to have prefigured the opaline cloudscapes of our Connemara windows, and Yüksel Arslan, a surrealist who lived below one of the great cemeteries that surround the old city like an exoskeleton. He used to collect the bones washed downhill to him by rainstorms and grind them up with honey and pigments to paint obscurely lurid little scenes in which one could make out half-formed grotesques goading each other with monstrous sexual prongs. Once when he and Omer were going off down the road after a merry dinner with us, I leaned out of our first-floor window and tossed Yüksel a small gift – an egg, as he discovered when he caught it. As a good
surrealist
he had to swallow his annoyance at being splattered by this
acte
gratuite.
The thrown egg was something of an art-form for me at that period.

We formed a deeper attachment to the painter and printmaker Aliye Berger-Boronai. She was at first acquaintance a fright, with her yellow hair and strident make-up, feather boa and antique corset, but we came to love her delicately-boned face and hands and her deep, tragicomic eyes. Her seedily luxurious apartment, darkened by heavy curtains and crowded with canopied sofas, was dominated by a portrait which leaned out from the wall: a
romantic
violinist, all white brow and shirt-front, poetic locks, sweeping gesture with the bow – her dead husband, a Hungarian she had eloped with, and who had betrayed her; we often heard how she had hidden in a tree with the intention of shooting him and his mistress. Her family, with its palace connections, had been
scandalized
by her marriage. Once we visited their deserted house on Büyükada, an island in the Sea of Marmara favoured by Viziers as being out of reach of sudden summonses to the Palace, and where
the Sultans used to pen their over-ambitious brothers. It was a huge, plain, dilapidated wooden building almost hidden in ivy, in a forlorn garden with a bare pergola and dried-up grotto. The main door led into a great vacant reception room with another grotto at the far end, a dusty tumble of dried-out rock-pools and waterfalls. Upstairs, room after empty room, long undisturbed except when Mehmet borrowed the house for his occasional drunken parties, and a boxroom stuffed with rotting documents in Arabic script. Aliye could remember the tedium of afternoons in this house, listening to her elders discussing politics over tea with a smartly dressed young officer, Mustafa Kemal, whose
revolution
would later ruin them and open the windows of Aliye’s generation to the West.

In that new Turkey Aliye had won an art competition judged by Herbert Read, and she was an accomplished colourist; we have a large action-painting of hers, all spills and streaks of coloured inks, which have faded but still plumb galactic depths. I realized the acuity of her eye once when she stood on our balcony, which overlooked several miles of the Bosphorus edged by tiled village roofs and old sea-palaces of fretted wood, as busy as a street with ships and boats, and pointed out dozens of little patches of hues we hadn’t distinguished, answering to each other across the water. Aliye gave me lessons in etching, and entertained us to glasses of tea brought up on a gimballed brass tray from a tea-shop in the courtyard below by a deaf old Armenian whom she paid with the flowers left by some previous visitor. Through her we were
sometimes
invited to ‘kokteyls’, openings of art shows, where we would find ourselves elbow-to-elbow with fabulous beings of another age – Balkis, reputed to have been Atatürk’s last mistress, as rigidly curvaceous as a sea-horse, or Aliye’s brother ‘The
Fisherman
of Halicarnassus’, stunning a chattering roomful into
attention
with the boom of the greeting he’d made fashionable, ‘
Merhaba!
’, and then mesmerizing us with a dithyramb about some girl in a white dress he’d seen: ‘If I were so virginal, I would dispense virginities in hundreds, in millions!’ The friendship with Aliye was one of the few we kept up after we left Istanbul for Vienna, where I arranged an exhibition for her; she arrived on the Orient Express, which was several hours late because the customs officers had been unable to penetrate the compartment entirely packed with framed canvases she had defended like a hawk on its nest. But for some reason I was impatient with her idiosyncrasies on that visit – ‘How you have changed!’ she said; ‘You used to be so quiet, and now you’re like fire!’ – and thereafter we heard from her only occasionally and indirectly.

Perhaps I had changed; perhaps that is why I adopted my mother’s maiden name Drever, instead of the prosaic Robinson, for artistic purposes at this time. Certainly after three years of teaching I knew what I wanted to do, which was to paint, and because of the disproportion between our American salaries and the Turkish cost of living, we had saved enough to fund the experiment for a while. Casting ourselves loose had its costs, though. After a summer’s wandering in Dalmatia and northern Italy we arrived in Vienna in some psychic disarray, and rented a room in a dark, rambling apartment near the Opera. We found ourselves sharing a kitchen with two strange people. Nelly (short for Melpomene), a tall, angular Greek girl, belonged to a clique of free-floating young people, some of wealthy backgrounds, who seemed to have adopted evil and even suicide as a fashion
accessory
. She soon drifted out of our lives, but we became lastingly fond of Karl, the owner of the apartment, bizarre though his
lifestyle was. A malnourished-looking, intense, dark-eyed youth from a poor farming background in Styria, he had two ambitions. One, for which he was already a few years too old, was to become a dancer with the Vienna State Opera. The other was to be kept by a rich elderly masochist. In despair over the first project, he would exclaim, ‘For what I live in this last time?’, and in
explanation
of the second, ‘To have something a little lovely in my life!’ (two formulae that have found a permanent home in our own speech patterns). The opera house, recently restored from bombed-out ruins to its original nineteenth-century pomp,
dominated
the quarter, in the perspective we learned from Karl. We would run down Bösendorferstrasse at the last moment to get standing-room tickets, and in the intervals mingle with the elegant on the cheap; sometimes we even gobbled a slice of Sachertörte and a glass of champagne in the crush and chryselephantine
splendour
of the bar, where we knew nobody and Evelyn Lear once gave me a magnificent look for staring at her admiringly.