Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (18 page)

My own inability to understand the most simple, never mind complex, sentences was brought home to me forcibly in the toilet of a London club last night when someone offered me a line and I didn't know what he was talking about.

Context is important here. I had been to a charity premiere of an undistinguished film about death. I think it was about death. It died, anyway. But only after suffering long periods of fatigue, losing the ability to express itself succinctly, and forgetting what it had said five minutes earlier. Extraordinary this, considering that very young people had made the film. So maybe the Pinochet condition has nothing to do with age after all, but is caused by something in the water. Be that as it may, to a premiere I'd been, wearing the dinner jacket I now reserve for literary dinners (all weddings and bar mitzvahs having dried up in my age group), recognising and being recognised by no one. Don't get me wrong: I don't expect flashlights to pop the minute I slide a leg out of a taxi. It is not the job of a writer to excite the public. But it can be nice to exchange the odd smile of acknowledgement with a Scorsese or a Mamet across a crowded foyer, auteur to auteur. Besides, I spend long enough getting into a tux to hate the thought that it's all been for nothing. Hence my ending up at a club more suitable to people of my generation and profession.

Context. Context is everything. Had I not passed the earlier part of the evening anonymous in a velvet bow and patent dancing shoes, would I have been quite so flattered by the attentions of the person in the cardigan who accosted me in the club toilets? Who can unravel history? Had Napoleon not slept well on the night before Austerlitz . . . (Not that Austerlitz rings any more bells with me than Santiago does with Pinochet.) Idle to ask. However you account for it, flattered I was.

I was looking for paper towels when he appeared. But he was so urgent about shaking my hand that I gave it him wet. He was taller than me, a quality I value in a fan. And I could tell from the way he regarded me that I satisfied his expectation of an author – namely, that I wrote in evening dress. Once he'd paid me a sufficient number of compliments I began to back towards the exit. Experience. Sometimes, if you let them use up all their compliments, they start on the insults. He for his part was backing into a cubicle. Just before either of us could close our respective doors, he said, ‘Would you like a line?'

‘A line?'

Though last night is a long time ago to be remembering, I am convinced my mouth actually fell open. Truly, I was at a loss. From where I stood I raked his cubicle to see if he meant to read me a line someone had written on the walls. Or had I misheard? Had he asked me, as a literary personage he admired, to furnish
him
a line? I cannot tell you how close I came to saying, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day' – unless that's two lines.

It was also possible, though I am always loath to leap to this conclusion, that he was inviting me to join him in his cubicle. A line, if I was not mistaken, was what fishermen employed. Could it, while retaining all its angling associations, have taken on a secondary homoerotic meaning? Was a line something you throw an inexperienced ‘swimmer', in order first to save him from drowning, and then gradually to reel him in?

He saw my confusion, though I doubt, in the time available, he was able to read its anguished constituent parts. ‘I could let you have a line,' he repeated. Very sweetly this time, stressing the ‘let', as though to rule out any idea of gross transaction.

I shook my head. Some faint light, such as intermittently comes on when you open a very old refrigerator, was breaking in the recesses of what Pinochet's doctors would say is no longer my brain. ‘No thank you,' I said. And fled, I fear blushing, into the more public spaces of the club.

Maybe I should have been more careful who I went to with my story. In an establishment of this sort you don't plonk yourself down next to absolutely anybody and ask him to help you in the matter of ‘a line'. Within seconds I was being offered another.

Now that more and more of us are staying alive after eighty, but are too
tsemisht
, to borrow a Yiddish word meaning confused, too bewildered to remember whether it was three, four or five million people we tortured in our younger days, oughtn't we to insist that a spade be called a spade? If someone wants me to sit on his knee in a toilet cubicle, snorting cocaine with him, why doesn't he just
ask
?

The Greatness of Philip Guston

Seen any good art lately? I have. Philip Guston, at the Royal Academy. Piccadilly. London. Opposite Fortnum & Mason. I recommend that you approach it at a leisurely pace, say via the Burlington Arcade where you can have your shoes polished by a flunkey in livery and maybe pick up a cashmere cardigan for the man or woman in your life, then pop across to Fortnum's tea rooms for a Welsh rarebit and English cordial. Make a treat of it. A truly great retrospective of an artist few of us know very well doesn't come along that often. A painter, to boot. A painter who isn't Picasso or Titian, or Andy Warhol or Jackson Pollock. A painter who isn't either abstract or figurative, but neither and both. A painter in whom every important twentieth-century argument about art seems to have been enacted. Reader, go. And if you don't skip through the Royal Academy's fountains on your way in to see Philip Guston, I guarantee you will skip through them on your way out.

I have an axe to grind, I don't deny that. Nothing personal. I never met the man. Nor do I have Guston canvases in my cellar whose value I suddenly see the opportunity to augment. No, if you're looking for a motive look to age. As I grow full with years, so do I grow to love the years in others. Give me an aged genius before a young one any time. And let's keep raising the bar. If I live to be a hundred it will only be hundred-year-old artists I admire. A wonderful provision of nature this, to forestall the cultural equivalent of paedophilia, that is taking an inappropriate interest in the doings of people younger than yourself. I'd enshrine it in law myself, and have the police maintain a register of offenders. Such-and-such a one has been seen hovering around young persons' art. Keep an eye on him.

Not that Guston made it to a grand old age. He was a mere sixty-seven when he died in 1980. And not that he wasn't brilliant when he was a boy. Aged seventeen, he could knock you off a Picasso-cum-de Chirico-cum-Piero della Francesca worthy of a knowledgeable and accomplished artist twice his age, and this while doing a cartoonist's course in his spare time. Six or seven years before, his father hanged himself in frustration and disappointment, a fugitive from Odessa whose life had not turned out as he would have liked it. Not every migrant's story is a happy one. Not even if you're Jewish in America. The young Philip Guston found the body. Such an event can speed up artistic development. Whatever the reason for his precocity, or its impressiveness, it's the evidence in Guston of its opposite – a quality for which words like culmination or ripeness or consummation seem to close more than they open – that is really exhilarating: prolificity in your pensionable years, creative abundance when you are meant to be getting feebler, not so much late as persistent, unabating florescence, and let death go take a jump.

All credit to the Royal Academy for hanging this show so that you follow the painter's evolution, stage by stage, room by room, anticipating development and change all right, but nothing on the scale of what's waiting for you – boom! – when you suddenly enter the grand scala showing Guston in the full bloom of his sixties, one spectacular canvas after another, grotesque creations, now depicting the painter as a potato head, one eye forever open like a camera shutter, unblinking whatever the horrors; now depicting him bound in a terrifying spider's web, bleeding crimson paint, while the giant insects advance on him as though he's good for nothing but their dinner; and now depicting him buried in his bed, grown into his wife, a huddle against the black immensity which engulfs this heartbreaking little everywhere, the painter's insect hands outside the coverlet, still grasping the brushes.

Always the brushes. This is art at its most serious, made by someone for whom it was impossible not to paint or to go on thinking and talking about painting. Talk. One of the best paintings in the show is called simply
Talking
, and shows the painter's hand holding a smoking cigarette – always a cigarette – and maybe a smoking brush – always a brush – nothing more, just the hand painted like a gun, with a hint of rolled-up sleeve, and a one-fingered cartoon wristwatch, but never have you seen such garrulousness evoked, as though the hand is the most voluble organ we have.

It was in Guston's case, most certainly. Though he was a great reader and talker, a devourer of ideas against which he was forever testing himself, unforgivingly most of the time, as though in despair that as an artist he was not more of a match for them, it is nonetheless the paint, applied intimately, three inches from the canvas, which does his talking for him. He'd tried silence. For a while, in the bloodless fifties, he'd been the all-American abstract expressionist, shimmering away in seas of luminous quiet, a hero of pure feeling, until he gave all that away in a fit of noisiness. ‘I got sick and tired of all that purity,' he said. ‘I wanted to tell stories.' Not everyone forgave him that. Some saw it as a betrayal. In fact he'd been the noisiest, most figuratively fraught abstract expressionist there ever was; it was just that the quiet ones hadn't noticed.

What came next, his famous hooded clansmen, candy pink and puffing Groucho Marks cigars, sometimes murderous in their anonymity, sometimes just perplexed and sad, like baffled Jewish migrants from Odessa, and sometimes brandishing Guston's own smoking paintbrushes, are masterpieces of the grotesque. Wonderfully gluttonous works follow, in which seeing, talking, thinking, eating, smoking, suffering, joking do not so much compete for the artist's attention as entirely constitute it. This is what it is to be alive.

Reader, go. Before the forces of quiet finally claim you too.

Darts and the Man

You know you're in a bad way emotionally when you start crying over World Darts on television. Not just sniffles, either; not just a lump in the throat when one of the throwbacks from the old beer-and-instinct era succumbs to one of the game's new gin-and-tonic automatons – no, I'm talking real tears, big wet baby droplets the size of a bull's eye.

I've been lachrymose for weeks. All right, I've been blubbering for weeks. Hasn't everyone? There's been reason enough, God knows. The cruel pinch of winter. An old century dying in the indifferent arms of a new. Jesus on the cross – ‘Erbarm' dich mein', pity me, pity me, my father.
David Copperfield
on the box. And now darts.

It was
David Copperfield
that set me off. Dickens on the cross. Was there ever a more naked book of needs and fears? Cruel supplanting stepdads. Lovely mothers dead. Childhood sweethearts ravished. The impecunious making it in Melbourne. The evil ones all routed. The good all filled with love for one another. The hero forever devoted to a stained-glass window. Who needs Freud? Sometimes art works best without subtlety. Tear the heart out, that's the way to do it. An injunction telly faithfully obeyed, ignoring, for once, the siren calls of reinterpretation and relevance (as though the torn heart can ever need reinterpreting). What, no flash of period buttocks? No Peggotty with her stays undone? Barkis stays willin', notwithstanding. And we must make what we will of the man-rejected, man-rejecting Betsey Trotwood keeping company with a kindly piece of eunuchry going by the name of Mr Dick.

But the real coup of the production, coming when it did, was this: by doing Dickens plain and faithful, the BBC reminded us of what it was like to encounter Dickens the first time, recalling to our minds ourselves when we were young, suggestible and tearful. No small matter, this. To reacquaint yourself with yourself in a familiar book is up there with flying balloons with Mr Dick, as one of the sweets of existence. And tears remembered . . . but you don't need me to tell you that.

Tears remembered must have something to do with my emotionalism around darts. I was a handy player once; even carried my own arrows about my person in a sort of spectacle case made of Bakelite. Nowadays, darts are so slender you can keep a set behind your ear. But they were more like feathered javelins in my day, boohoo. Scrub what I've just said about being handy. I was a master. Sometimes I thought it was possible I had a natural genius for the game. Which made me feel bad on other people's behalf – those who did not have a natural genius for the game – for it seemed to me I was gifted in too many other areas to be gifted at darts as well. I recall an occasion in a pub in Stoke Newington when the weight of my giftedness troubled me as it must sometimes have troubled Albert Schweitzer or Eric Bristow. First of all I couldn't stop making witty remarks which drew every woman at the bar to my side; then I was unable to lose to anyone at pool, even playing with my wrong arm; then I won a chicken in a raffle. When the darts were brought out, I felt a shudder of anticipation run through the women, a frisson of fear through the men. ‘Time to fail,' decency whispered in my ear.

An Australian woman I knew had become famous in our circle for losing her darts bottle after exchanging a lover who was a thrower for a lover who was not. As a matter of unconscious psychic solidarity, or maybe just guilt, she was now unable to get a dart to reach the board. No matter how vigorously she tried to launch it, the dart dropped from her fingers like Desdemona's handkerchief and landed flightless as my chicken at her feet. I would throw limp-wristedly, like her. But here's a wonderful thing: the less you try to hit the dartboard, the more you find the trebles. The long and short of it being that I couldn't miss. Every three darts, however faint-heartedly flung, however precariously they hung –
One hundred and eigh . . . ty!