Richard Temple

[nigeltde]

When people ask me who my favourite author is, I usually say Patrick O'Brian, because it's an impossible question, and because it's basically true. I recently read his 1953 pre-Aubrey-Maturin book Richard Temple, which is excellent -- if typically abrupt at the end -- a really contemplative and dissociative portrait of the life of a young painter. It has plenty of those delightful O'Brian surprises where really important stuff happens between words in the most overlookable places (for instance, the surprise gay: He and Gay had always got along well together, but it was only in the last year that they had been such close friends, drawn together, it must be admitted, by the abominable vice of sodomy.).

Towards the end, and after several periods of greater and lesser moral and financial dissolution, Richard has an encounter with some of his older work.

Some of those pictures he had recovered from his early days seemed to him less exciting now then they must have been when they were painted, and some were juvenile nonsense that had unnecessarily survived; but on the whole he found them far better than he remembered. In those days he seemed to have had extraordinary luck, a wonderful capacity for plunging into dangers that he did not recognise and yet coming out unharmed; but with every allowance he was proud of having painted some of them, and even elated. This made the confrontation of now and then all the more anxious, for his indifference; and he turned abruptly to his most recent picture, looking harshly at it, with none of the gentleness that he had had for the others.

It was not a very large picture, and yet it gave the impression of size, partly, no doubt, because of the clarity of its colour -- pure intense colours in which he had succeeded in keeping the cleanliness and even something of the strange light of the tempera. He looked at it in the most strictly 'painterly' manner, and as unkindly as a hanging judge at first, almost willing to condemn it. Its figurative and its literary aspects aside, it consisted in the main of two upright forms connected by a receding curve: on the left a tawny rectangle filled the bottom corner; from it arose a great violet plane, cut by the curve, which in its turn rose in a diagonal flight towards the right-hand edge, being supported on the left by a hard bar, a dark column raised and sustained by the fire of crimson lake. The other form rose on the right-hand side at a slight angle to the edge, converging inwards and coming from an area of mauve, not unlike a platform. This form (which had its origin in one of the piers of the little bridge) was in two parts, a green upright that rose steadily into a still more intense green and the other silver-white with a dashing stroke of cobalt-blue and a vivid, almost invisible vermilion line, just far enough from the green to not move. These rose towards the high end of the leaping curve: it was essential that they should join, for there, in that junction, was the whole point of the matter; yet a junction alone would not suffice. His eye, travelling up the curve, followed it with rising tension to the top; and there, exactly balanced and poised by the opposing movements, was the sun, holding the entire picture together as one natural whole.

Once seen it was the obvious solution, the only answer; it looked so easy now, to crown the complexity of movement in the middle of the picture and to resolve the tensions with the sun, and yet he had blundered through several versions, always knowing that some essential was not there, but unable to name it, supplying busy non-essentials and almost spoiling it forever in the gouaches he had made, some of which had been terribly commonplace and dull laboured things: depressing industry. Two had fallen victim to Mr Hewer. Yet the final oil had been implicit in their earliest drawing, the sketch in which Valerie figured, for their greater unhappiness.

It was good. High, remote and pure; no gesticulation. He put his hand over the sun and the picture fell to pieces. He took his hand away and covered the vermilion line: this was less spectacular; the balance shifted, the picture lost something of its vitality and the sun lost its fire. With the vermilion restored it glowed again. That stroke was the last he had given, and he had hesitated so long that the paint had thickened on his slab; it was a remarkably successful stroke, and it was perhaps the most valuable thing that had come out of his long excursion into the use of clashing colours, for this vermilion, swearing with the carmine sun, gave it a life and a thrust that nothing else could ever have done.

I love O'Brian's writing for its ineffable intimacy, this kind of rhythmic stepping through characters' psyches. His writing seems so clinical -- and indeed the above passage is probably the most clinical of the whole book -- but that objectivity, that commonsensical mundanity, is such a lie. His books are entirely bent around his protagonists (slipping sweetly between them, in the case of Aubrey and Maturin). He is such a generous writer, so evidently delighting in their passions and joys, from which he draws terrific humour and pathos.

There is less joy and humour in Richard Temple, perhaps because Richard is extraordinarily, and unknowingly, lonely, despite the intense attachments he forms with a succession of men and women. He is recounting his life to himself while he is interred in a POW camp, trying to hang on to his identity in the face of torture, but this backward-looking sets up an essential foreignness, a distance, a search that meanders and loses its way. The Richards of school, of France, of London, of Churleigh, even of Germany, are both strangers and particular friends, connected more by a happenstance of space-time, and less by any concrete Richardness. There is something really curiously hollow at the centre of this book and character, a space in which buzzes about the sneaking fear that connection is impossible, that will is empty, that encounters with people and art are never transformative because there is nothing to transform; a terror with which I empathise keenly as I get older, uglier, and boringer. So I love the above passage for how vivid and visual it is and how forgiving about the past, for how Richard is able to pull a kind of shocking, beautiful unity into being, to sit contentedly with himself if only for a moment.

Certainly Richard Temple is not about any such fucking pablum as "how passive resistance can be a form of courage and what it truly means to be a hero", as the blurb suggests.* It's an excellent book though, if not as comforting as our dear old friends Aubrey and Maturin.

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* True heroes, Channel 9 and Telstra have taught me over the last couple of days, are people that can swim really fast, or perhaps do other things fast. Our great nation is currently undergoing the developmental anxiety and trauma of realising that there are other people, who also have heroes, and that our heroes sometimes do not swim as fast as those other heroes. Thus indicating that we have turned five.