Athena (3 page)

1.
Pursuit of Daphne
ca. 1680
Johann Livelb (1633-1697)

Oil on canvas, 26½ × 67 in. (67.3 × 170.2 cm.)

A product of this artist’s middle age, the
Pursuit of Daphne
is a skilfully executed, poised yet vigorous, perhaps even somewhat coarse work with uncanny and disturbing undertones. The brooding light which throws the central figures into high relief and bathes the background distances in an unearthly glimmer produces a spectral and almost surreal quality which constitutes what some critics consider the picture’s chief interest. The dimensions of the canvas, a lengthy rectangle, would suggest the painting was commissioned for a specific site, perhaps above a couch or bed; certainly the atmosphere of unrestrained though polished lewdness informing the scene supports the contention (cf. Popov, Popham, Pope-Hennessy) that the work was painted for the boudoir. As always, Livelb adapts his vision to the dictates of available form, and here has used the dimensions of his long, low panel to create a sense of headlong dash appropriate to the theme while yet maintaining a kind of ersatz classical repose, an enervated stillness at the heart of seeming frenzy. The action, proceeding from left to right, strikes the viewer as part of a more extended movement from which the scene has suddenly burst forth, so that the picture seems
not quite complete in itself but to be rather the truncated, final section of a running frieze. The artist reinforces the illusion of speed by having the wind blow – and a strong wind it is – not in the faces of pursuer and pursued, as we might expect, but from behind them, as if Aeolus himself had come to urge Apollo on in the chase. Despite this following wind, Daphne’s hair, bound in a purple ribbon, flows back from her shoulders in long, rippling tresses, a sinuous movement that finds an echo in the path of the river Peneus meandering through the distant landscape of the background like a shining, silver serpent. The figure of Cupid with his bow, hovering at the extreme left of the picture, has the aspect less of a god than of a gloating satyr, and there is in his terrible smile not only the light of revenge but also a prurient avidity: he intends to enjoy the spectacle of the rape that he believes he is about to witness. Apollo, love’s bolt buried to the gilded fletching in his right shoulder-blade, cuts a somewhat sorry figure; this is not the lithe ephebe of classical depiction but, probably like the painter himself at the time, a male in his middle years, slack-limbed, thick-waisted, breathing hard, no longer fit for amorous pursuit (there have been suggestions that this is a self-portrait but no evidence has been adduced to support the theory). If Daphne is suffering a transformation so too is the god. We see in the expression of his eyes – how well the painter has captured it! – the desperation and dawning anguish of one about to experience loss, not only of this ravishing girl who is the object of his desire but along with her an essential quality of selfhood, of what up to this he believed he was and now knows he will not be again. His sinewed hand that reaches out to grasp his quarry will never find its hold. Already Daphne is becoming leaf and branch; when we look closely we see the patches of bark already appearing through her skin, her slender fingers turning to twigs, her green eyes blossoming. How swooningly the laurel tree leans over her,
each fringed leaf (
wie eines Windes Lächeln
, as Rilke so prettily puts it) eager to enfold her in a transfiguring embrace. We could have done without that indecent pun between the cleft boughs of the tree and the limbs of the fleeing girl. Here as in so much of Livelb’s work the loftiness of the classical theme is sacrificed for the sake of showiness and vulgar effects, and in the end the picture lacks that nobility of purpose and simplicity of execution that a greater artist would have brought to it. To quote the critic Erich Auerbach writing in a different context, what we have here is ‘a highly rhetorical style in which the gruesomely sensory has gained a large place; a sombre and highly rhetorical realism which is totally alien to classical antiquity.’

Aunt Corky was not in fact my aunt but a cousin on my mother’s side so far removed that by her time the bloodline must have become thinned to about the thickness of a corpuscle. She claimed to be Dutch, or Flemish when she thought that sounded fancier, and it is true, I believe, that her people originated in the same hunched hamlet in the Pays-Bas from which my mother’s ancestors had emigrated centuries ago (I see it by Hobbema, of course: a huddle of houses with burnt-sienna roofs, a rutted road and a man in a hat walking along, and two lines of slender poplars diminishing into a dream-blue distance), but she had lived in so many places, and had convinced herself that she had lived in so many more, that she had become blurred, like a statue whose features time has abraded, her self-styled foreignness worn down to a vague, veiled patina. All the same, in places the original lines still stood out in what to me seemed unmistakable relief: she had the Lowlander’s broad, bony forehead and high cheekbones (cf. Dürer’s dauntless drawing of his mother, 1514), and her voice even had a faint, catarrhal catch on certain tricky consonants. When I was a child she was to me completely the continental,
a product of steepled towns and different weather and a hotchpotch of impossible languages. Though she was probably younger than my parents, in those days she looked ancient to me, I suppose because she was so ugly, like the witch in a fairy-tale. She was short and squarely built, with a prizefighter’s chest and big square hands with knotted veins; with her squat frame and spindly legs that did not meet at the knees and her always slightly crooked skirts she had the look of an item of furniture, a sideboard, perhaps, or a dining-room table with its flaps down. She carried off her ugliness with a grand hauteur. She was said to have lost a husband in the war; her tragedy was always referred to by this formula, so that I thought of him as not dead but misplaced, a ragged, emaciated figure with desperate eyes wandering amidst cannon-smoke through the great forests and shattered towns of Europe in search of my Aunt Corky (her real name, by the way, was an unpronounceable collision of consonants interspersed with i’s and y’s). She had suffered other things during the war that were referred to only in hushed hints; this was a matter of deep and strangely exciting speculation to me in my fumbling pre-adolescence, and I would picture her bound and splayed in the dank cellar of a barracks in a narrow street beside a canal while a troupe of swastikaed squareheads approached her and … but there, unfed by experience or, as yet, by art, my imagination faltered.

I am still not sure which one of Aunt Corky’s many versions of her gaudy life was true, if any of them was. Her papers, I have discovered, tell another story, but papers can be falsified, as I know well. She lied with such simplicity and sincere conviction that really it was not lying at all but a sort of continuing reinvention of the self. At her enraptured best she had all the passion and rich inventiveness of an
improvvisatrice
and could hold an audience in a trance of mingled wonder and embarrassment for a quarter of an hour
or more without interruption. I remember when I was very small listening to her recount to my mother one day the details of the funeral of the young wife of a German prince she claimed to have witnessed, or perhaps even to have taken part in, and I swear I could see the coffin as it was borne down the Rhine on the imperial barge, accompanied only by
seine königliche Hoheit
in his cream and blue uniform and plumed silver helmet while his grieving subjects in their thousands looked on in silence from the river banks. As so often, however, Aunt Corky went too far, not content until narrative had been spun into yarn: the barge passed under a bridge and when it came out the other side the coffin, bare before, was suddenly seen to be heaped with white roses, hundreds of them, in miraculous profusion. ‘Like that,’ she said, making hooped gestures with her big hands, piling imaginary blossoms higher and higher, her eyes shining with unshed tears, ‘so many, oh, so many!’

How did she come to have all that money when she died? It is a mystery to me. She never had a job, that I know of, and had seemed to live off the charity of a network of relatives here and abroad. There was a prolonged liaison with an Englishman, a lugubrious and decidedly shifty character with a penchant for loud ties and two-tone shoes; he strikes me as an unlikely provider of wealth; rather the opposite, I should say. They married, I think – Aunt Corky’s morals were a subject our family passed over in tight-lipped silence – and she moved with him to England where they travelled about a lot, mainly in the Home Counties, living in genteel boarding houses and playing a great deal of whist. Then something went wrong and Basil – that was his name, it’s just come back to me – Basil was dismissed, never to be spoken of again, and Aunt Corky returned to us with another weight added to her burden of sorrows, and whenever there was talk of England or things English she would flinch and touch a hand to her cheek in a gesture at once tragic and
resigned, as if she were Dido and someone had mentioned the war at Troy. I was not unfond of her. From those early days I remembered her curious, stumping walk and parroty laugh; I could even recall her smell, a powerful brew of cheap scent, mothballs and a dusty reek the source of which I was never able to identify but which was reminiscent of the smell of cretonne curtains. And cigarette smoke, of course; she certainly had the true continental’s dedication to strong tobacco, and wherever she went she trailed an ash-blue cloud behind her, so that when I thought of her from those days I saw a startlingly solid apparition constantly stepping forth from its own aura. She wore sticky, peach-coloured make-up, and rouge, and painted her large mouth, always slightly askew, with purplish lipstick; also she used to dye her hair a brassy shade of yellow and have it curled and set every Saturday morning.

How pleasant it is, quietly turning over these faded album leaves.

I don’t know why I allowed myself to go and to see her after all those years. I shy from the sickroom, as who does not, and so much had happened to me and to my life since those by now archaic days that I was not sure I would still speak a language comprehensible to this fading relic of a lost age. I had assumed that she was already dead; after all, everyone else was, both of my parents, and my … and others, all gone into the ground, so how should she, who seemed ancient when they were young, be surviving still? Perhaps it was merely out of curiosity then that I—

Ah, what a giveaway it is, I’ve noticed it before, the orotund quality that sets in when I begin consciously to dissemble:
and so much had happened to me and to my life since those by now archaic days –
dear, oh dear! Whenever I employ locutions such as that you will know I am inventing. But then, when do I not use such locutions? (And I said that Aunt Corky was a liar!)

She was living, if that is the way to put it, in a nursing home outside the city called The Cypresses, a big pink and white gazebo of a place set in a semi-circle of those eponymous, blue-black, pointy trees on the side of a hill with a sweeping and slightly vertiginous view of the sea right across to the other side of the bay. There was a tall, creosote-smelling wooden gate with one of those automatic locks with a microphone that squawked at me in no language that I recognised, though I was let in anyway. Tarmac drive, shrubs, a sloping lawn, then suddenly, like an arrow flying straight out of the past, the sharp, prickly smell of something I knew but could not name, some tree or other, eucalyptus, perhaps, yes, I shall say eucalyptus: beautiful word, with that goitrous upbeat in the middle of it like a gulp of grief. I almost stumbled, assailed by the sweetness of forgotten sorrows. Then I saw the house and wanted to laugh, so delicate, spindly and gay was it, so incongruous, with its pillared arches and filigree ironwork and glassed-in verandah throwing off a great reflected sheet of afternoon sunlight. Trust Aunt Corky to end up here! As I followed the curve of the drive the sea was below me, far-off, blue, unmoving, like something imagined, a sea of the mind.

The verandah door was open and I stepped inside. A few desiccated old bodies were sunning themselves in deckchairs among the potted palms. Rheumed yellowish eyes swivelled and fixed on me. A door with glass panels gave on to an interior umber dimness. I tapped cautiously and waited, lightly breathing. ‘You’ll have to give that a good belt,’ one of the old-timers behind me said quaveringly, and coughed, making a squelching sound like that of a Wellington boot being pulled out of mud. There was a pervasive mild smell of urine and boiled dinners. I knocked again, more forcefully, making the panes rattle, and immediately, as if she had been waiting to spring out at me, a jolly, fat girl with red hair threw open the door and said, ‘Whoa up there, you’ll wake
the dead!’ and grinned. She was dressed in a nurse’s uniform, with a little white cap and those white, crêpe-soled shoes, and even had a wristwatch pinned upside down to her breast pocket (why do they do that?), but none of it was convincing, somehow. She had a faint air of the hoyden, and reminded me of a farm girl I knew when I was a child who used to give me piggyback rides and once offered to show me what she called her thing if I would first show her mine (nothing came of it, I’m afraid). I asked for Aunt Corky and the girl looked me up and down with an eyebrow arched, still grinning sceptically, as if she in her turn suspected me of being an impostor. A blue plastic tag on her collar said her name was Sharon. ‘Are you the nephew?’ she asked, and I answered stoutly that I was. At that moment there materialised silently at my side a plump, soft, sandy-haired man in a dowdy, pinstriped dark suit who nodded and smiled at me in a wistfully familiar way as if we were old acquaintances with old, shared sorrows. I did not at all like the look of him or the sinister way he had crept up on me. ‘That will be all right, Sharon,’ he murmured in a low and vaguely ecclesiastical-sounding voice, and the girl shrugged and turned and sauntered off whistling, her crêpe soles squeaking on the black-and-white tiled floor. ‘Haddon is the name,’ the pinstriped one confided, and waited a beat and added, ‘Mr Haddon.’ He slipped a hand under my arm and directed me towards a staircase that ascended steeply to a landing overhung by a broad window with gaudily coloured panes that seemed to me somehow menacing. I had begun to feel hindered, as if I were wading through thick water; I also had a sense of a suppressed, general hilarity of which I felt I was somehow the unwitting object. As I was about to mount the stairs I caught a flurry of movement from the corner of my eye and flinched as a delicate small woman with the face of an ancient girl came scurrying up to me and plucked my sleeve and said in a flapper’s breathless voice, ‘Are you the
pelican man?’ I turned to Haddon for help but he merely stood gazing off with lips pursed and pale hands clasped at his flies, biding and patient, as if this were a necessary but tiresome initiatory test to which I must be submitted. ‘The pelican man?’ I heard myself say in a sort of piteous voice. ‘No, no, I’m not.’ The old girl continued to peer at me searchingly. She wore a dress of dove-grey silk with a gauzy silk scarf girdling her hips. Her face really was remarkable, soft and hardly lined at all, and her eyes glistened. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘then you are no good to me,’ and gave me a sweetly lascivious smile and wandered sadly away. Haddon and I went on up the stairs. ‘Miss Leitch,’ he murmured, as if offering an explanation. When we reached the landing he stopped at a door and tapped once and inclined his head and listened for a moment, then nodded to me again and mouthed a silent word of encouragement and softly, creakingly, descended the stairs and was gone. I waited, standing in a lurid puddle of multi-coloured light from the stained-glass window behind me, but nothing happened. I became at once acutely aware of myself, as if another I, mute and breathing, had sprouted up out of the balding carpet to loom over me monstrously. I put my face to the door and whispered Aunt Corky’s name and immediately seemed to feel another heave of muffled laughter all around me. There was no response, and in a sudden bluster of vexation I thrust open the door and was blinded by a glare of light.