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Book by Patrick McGrath
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Extrait :
Chapter One
When he first came back to New York, and that would be twenty years ago now, my brother Jack was in a kind of stupor, for it was shortly after the death of his daughter Peg. What can you say about the death of a child? She was sixteen when it happened, and the impact on all of us, Jack of course in particular, was devastating. When I glimpsed the extent of his grief, after the first shock wore off, and he awoke to the grim slog of flat, empty days that yawned before him—all meaning, hope and pleasure drained from life—I called out to him from across what seemed a chasm, and got back only the faintest of answers, which might have been no more than an echo; I mean I did not know what to say to him to bring him back into living contact with the world, and more immediately with myself, his sister. I don’t suppose there’s very much you can say.
I never feared for his sanity, however. I never feared that he would attempt to do harm to himself, and for this reason: he had his work. And with the first, weary, reluctant attempt to pull himself together came a return to the studio, a loft I had rented for him in an old warehouse building on Crosby Street. I remember watching him silently building stretchers, the very mindlessness of this familiar activity giving palpable relief to a soul in pain. I sat in that loft drinking tea and trying to make conversation as he nodded and grunted and nailed his stretchers, and the next day he cut canvas, and began to staple it to the stretchers, and again I was the one who sat there with him, talking or silent, whichever he seemed to prefer, simply a familiar body in the same bleak space during those slow wretched days. I was also there when he mixed paint in a bucket, Indian-red and black pigment, and thinned it with turpentine to the consistency of soup, and I remember how he turned the brushes over in his fingers, running the fibers across his palm. He had discovered second-hand paintbrushes in a hardware store a couple of blocks east, in Chinatown, big floppy decorators’ brushes softened by long use by working men.
And as I watched him I saw what the years in Port Mungo had done to his hands. Jack’s hands were once like mine, our best feature, I used to think: thin, and long, with slender tapering fingers, elegant white bones intricately assembled for fine work with the violin, perhaps, or the fountain pen. Mine were as white as ever, Jack’s by contrast had become purely functional entities, and like any tools put to daily work they showed the marks of use: scarred and chipped, horny-nailed, the skin burnt brown, old paint baked into the beds of the nails, and the backs matted with bristles pale as straw. And as he nodded and grunted I began to see that the cast and temper of the man were similarly coarsened and scarred, and it struck me that he had spent too many years working in the harsh sunlight of that shabby town.
Then one day quite without warning he told me he didn’t want me to come to the loft any more. He said I was suffocating him—me suffocating him! I was wounded by the abruptness of this rejection, also by his lack of gratitude, though not entirely surprised. For it confirmed that the years in Port Mungo had done nothing to civilize him, in fact I had the distinct impression that he’d deliberately destroyed in himself all remaining traces of a social decorum learned as a child in a country he no longer called home. It wasn’t until six weeks later, and with no word from him in the meantime, that he called me up and suggested we have a drink.
We met in a bar on Lafayette Street, and I have to say I was dismayed at the state of him. In six weeks the man had turned into a husk, no flesh on his bones at all. I subdued the gust of irritation his appearance provoked in me, and aroused the familiar dull wave of rising concern. We sat at an obscure table at the back of the bar, he took off his glasses and I saw in his eyes what I can only call an extinction of the spirit; and I strongly suspected it had to do with something other than grief. I waited for him to speak. He played with his cigarette. There was a trembling in the yellowed fingers as he lifted his drink to his lips. He tipped back the vodka in one movement.
—What’s the problem, Jack?
He said something about not being able to eat, or sleep, or work, or think properly any more.
—Why not?
He flung a look at me, then turned his head away. I knew the gesture well. He’d mastered it years ago, it was meant to suggest depths of torment no average mortal could be expected to comprehend, such sentiment being reserved for a certain few select noble souls. It had intimidated me once.
—You’re not using needles, are you?
For a moment it looked as though he’d rise from his chair in a towering rage and sweep out into the night to do more damage to himself because nobody understood him. He was nearly forty years old! But he hadn’t the juice in him to make such an exit. A bit of a sigh, sardonic and private, and he rubbed his face. I wondered if he wanted money, if that’s what this was all about. I paid his rent and gave him an allowance—this we had organized immediately on his return to the city—but perhaps he had a habit and his habit had outrun it.
—No, Gin, I’m grieving.
Then it all came out, how lonely he was without his girls, for not only had he lost Peg, but his younger daughter, Anna, had been taken away from him and was now living in England with our brother, Gerald. He said he felt utterly friendless and bereft in New York, it was too much for him, he couldn’t stand to be by himself in the loft any more—could he come live with me for a while? I had thought this might be what he was after. I wanted to say yes but something prevented me, and I think it was connected to this intuition, or intimation, rather, that he had drifted far from civilization’s ambit down in Port Mungo, and had much to conceal from me. But it broke my heart, him coming to me in need, and me prepared to give much, but not everything, no, I had to keep some distance from him, and I said this. I’d sort him out if he wanted me to, but I couldn’t have him in the house.
—You can’t have me in the house.
The way he said it, I might have been speaking to a dog.
—No.
He nodded, he accepted it without argument. I think he heard it in my tone, and understood that I was not the compliant adoring uncomplaining sister I had been once, and he said yes, that was just what he needed, a good sorting out, and he grinned at me, which created such creasing and cleaving in the taut flesh of his bony head that I realized he hadn’t grinned at anyone in quite some time. It warmed me to see it, and I grinned back, and there we were, Jack and Gin, just like old times.
We got drunk and talked about Peg, also about Vera—Vera Savage, the painter, the mother of his girls. He wept a little, and I did my best to comfort him. The depth of his emotion impressed me, but he had squandered much of his strength and had few resources left with which to cope with his grief. We parted warmly, and with various resolutions made. I told him to go straight home, no drifting about in the night. He said he would. I didn’t altogether trust him. Jack’s will, once roused, was fierce, but he was weak, and he was drunk, and drink undoes the will like nothing else. But when I got to Crosby Street the next morning he was clear-eyed and alert, having slept, so he told me, better than he had in months. I was gratified to know I had some influence over him still. Nobody else could have turned him from the trajectory he was on, even if I did apparently suffocate him. So we got the loft organized, we put his work table in some sort of order, and talked about what he wanted to do. All rather dark and bleak, his ideas, but this was not the point. Work itself was what he needed, and if his brief season in what he regarded as hell was the engine of fresh creativity, then so be it. I left guardedly confident that he was once more on course. I visited him again the next day, and for several days after that, and I saw him steadily resuming his old habits, the long hours of daily work, I mean, the deepening immersion. A corner had been turned, and having begun to work he never again sank quite so low as he had in those first weeks. Of course he never properly recovered. To the end of his life there was a chord in Jack’s character, softened with the years to a kind of melancholy drone, but once a howl of misery: Peg’s death created it, and Peg’s death sustained it. But Peg’s death did not stop him working, and working, for Jack, generated a kind of stamina which dissipated the worst of the grief.
As to what he was painting, it was disturbing because so strongly pervaded by what I understood to be the emotional residue of loss. Tones and values were heavy, laid thick on splintered armatures of black brushstrokes, and the dominant impression was of heat, sickness, darkness, decay—he referred to them as his “malarial” paintings, and certainly they aroused in the viewer ideas of dank swamps steaming with disease and such. To me they lacked the force of the paintings done in Port Mungo, being sombre where the others were vivid, but of course I did not say this.
When he stopped work, and came away from the canvas, and flung himself onto the couch, he would talk about Port Mungo, and his thoughts emerged so disjointed and fractured I would have thought him psychotic had I not understood the state that the act of painting put him in. I remember him talking about the night when Vera in her rage seized a kitchen knife and attacked not Jack but their bed, tearing and slashing at the mosquito netting, stabbing the mattress and ripping the sheets to shreds, this insanity not exhausting her fury but inflaming it, rather, and then she went for his canvases, and ...
Revue de presse :
When he first came back to New York, and that would be twenty years ago now, my brother Jack was in a kind of stupor, for it was shortly after the death of his daughter Peg. What can you say about the death of a child? She was sixteen when it happened, and the impact on all of us, Jack of course in particular, was devastating. When I glimpsed the extent of his grief, after the first shock wore off, and he awoke to the grim slog of flat, empty days that yawned before him—all meaning, hope and pleasure drained from life—I called out to him from across what seemed a chasm, and got back only the faintest of answers, which might have been no more than an echo; I mean I did not know what to say to him to bring him back into living contact with the world, and more immediately with myself, his sister. I don’t suppose there’s very much you can say.
I never feared for his sanity, however. I never feared that he would attempt to do harm to himself, and for this reason: he had his work. And with the first, weary, reluctant attempt to pull himself together came a return to the studio, a loft I had rented for him in an old warehouse building on Crosby Street. I remember watching him silently building stretchers, the very mindlessness of this familiar activity giving palpable relief to a soul in pain. I sat in that loft drinking tea and trying to make conversation as he nodded and grunted and nailed his stretchers, and the next day he cut canvas, and began to staple it to the stretchers, and again I was the one who sat there with him, talking or silent, whichever he seemed to prefer, simply a familiar body in the same bleak space during those slow wretched days. I was also there when he mixed paint in a bucket, Indian-red and black pigment, and thinned it with turpentine to the consistency of soup, and I remember how he turned the brushes over in his fingers, running the fibers across his palm. He had discovered second-hand paintbrushes in a hardware store a couple of blocks east, in Chinatown, big floppy decorators’ brushes softened by long use by working men.
And as I watched him I saw what the years in Port Mungo had done to his hands. Jack’s hands were once like mine, our best feature, I used to think: thin, and long, with slender tapering fingers, elegant white bones intricately assembled for fine work with the violin, perhaps, or the fountain pen. Mine were as white as ever, Jack’s by contrast had become purely functional entities, and like any tools put to daily work they showed the marks of use: scarred and chipped, horny-nailed, the skin burnt brown, old paint baked into the beds of the nails, and the backs matted with bristles pale as straw. And as he nodded and grunted I began to see that the cast and temper of the man were similarly coarsened and scarred, and it struck me that he had spent too many years working in the harsh sunlight of that shabby town.
Then one day quite without warning he told me he didn’t want me to come to the loft any more. He said I was suffocating him—me suffocating him! I was wounded by the abruptness of this rejection, also by his lack of gratitude, though not entirely surprised. For it confirmed that the years in Port Mungo had done nothing to civilize him, in fact I had the distinct impression that he’d deliberately destroyed in himself all remaining traces of a social decorum learned as a child in a country he no longer called home. It wasn’t until six weeks later, and with no word from him in the meantime, that he called me up and suggested we have a drink.
We met in a bar on Lafayette Street, and I have to say I was dismayed at the state of him. In six weeks the man had turned into a husk, no flesh on his bones at all. I subdued the gust of irritation his appearance provoked in me, and aroused the familiar dull wave of rising concern. We sat at an obscure table at the back of the bar, he took off his glasses and I saw in his eyes what I can only call an extinction of the spirit; and I strongly suspected it had to do with something other than grief. I waited for him to speak. He played with his cigarette. There was a trembling in the yellowed fingers as he lifted his drink to his lips. He tipped back the vodka in one movement.
—What’s the problem, Jack?
He said something about not being able to eat, or sleep, or work, or think properly any more.
—Why not?
He flung a look at me, then turned his head away. I knew the gesture well. He’d mastered it years ago, it was meant to suggest depths of torment no average mortal could be expected to comprehend, such sentiment being reserved for a certain few select noble souls. It had intimidated me once.
—You’re not using needles, are you?
For a moment it looked as though he’d rise from his chair in a towering rage and sweep out into the night to do more damage to himself because nobody understood him. He was nearly forty years old! But he hadn’t the juice in him to make such an exit. A bit of a sigh, sardonic and private, and he rubbed his face. I wondered if he wanted money, if that’s what this was all about. I paid his rent and gave him an allowance—this we had organized immediately on his return to the city—but perhaps he had a habit and his habit had outrun it.
—No, Gin, I’m grieving.
Then it all came out, how lonely he was without his girls, for not only had he lost Peg, but his younger daughter, Anna, had been taken away from him and was now living in England with our brother, Gerald. He said he felt utterly friendless and bereft in New York, it was too much for him, he couldn’t stand to be by himself in the loft any more—could he come live with me for a while? I had thought this might be what he was after. I wanted to say yes but something prevented me, and I think it was connected to this intuition, or intimation, rather, that he had drifted far from civilization’s ambit down in Port Mungo, and had much to conceal from me. But it broke my heart, him coming to me in need, and me prepared to give much, but not everything, no, I had to keep some distance from him, and I said this. I’d sort him out if he wanted me to, but I couldn’t have him in the house.
—You can’t have me in the house.
The way he said it, I might have been speaking to a dog.
—No.
He nodded, he accepted it without argument. I think he heard it in my tone, and understood that I was not the compliant adoring uncomplaining sister I had been once, and he said yes, that was just what he needed, a good sorting out, and he grinned at me, which created such creasing and cleaving in the taut flesh of his bony head that I realized he hadn’t grinned at anyone in quite some time. It warmed me to see it, and I grinned back, and there we were, Jack and Gin, just like old times.
We got drunk and talked about Peg, also about Vera—Vera Savage, the painter, the mother of his girls. He wept a little, and I did my best to comfort him. The depth of his emotion impressed me, but he had squandered much of his strength and had few resources left with which to cope with his grief. We parted warmly, and with various resolutions made. I told him to go straight home, no drifting about in the night. He said he would. I didn’t altogether trust him. Jack’s will, once roused, was fierce, but he was weak, and he was drunk, and drink undoes the will like nothing else. But when I got to Crosby Street the next morning he was clear-eyed and alert, having slept, so he told me, better than he had in months. I was gratified to know I had some influence over him still. Nobody else could have turned him from the trajectory he was on, even if I did apparently suffocate him. So we got the loft organized, we put his work table in some sort of order, and talked about what he wanted to do. All rather dark and bleak, his ideas, but this was not the point. Work itself was what he needed, and if his brief season in what he regarded as hell was the engine of fresh creativity, then so be it. I left guardedly confident that he was once more on course. I visited him again the next day, and for several days after that, and I saw him steadily resuming his old habits, the long hours of daily work, I mean, the deepening immersion. A corner had been turned, and having begun to work he never again sank quite so low as he had in those first weeks. Of course he never properly recovered. To the end of his life there was a chord in Jack’s character, softened with the years to a kind of melancholy drone, but once a howl of misery: Peg’s death created it, and Peg’s death sustained it. But Peg’s death did not stop him working, and working, for Jack, generated a kind of stamina which dissipated the worst of the grief.
As to what he was painting, it was disturbing because so strongly pervaded by what I understood to be the emotional residue of loss. Tones and values were heavy, laid thick on splintered armatures of black brushstrokes, and the dominant impression was of heat, sickness, darkness, decay—he referred to them as his “malarial” paintings, and certainly they aroused in the viewer ideas of dank swamps steaming with disease and such. To me they lacked the force of the paintings done in Port Mungo, being sombre where the others were vivid, but of course I did not say this.
When he stopped work, and came away from the canvas, and flung himself onto the couch, he would talk about Port Mungo, and his thoughts emerged so disjointed and fractured I would have thought him psychotic had I not understood the state that the act of painting put him in. I remember him talking about the night when Vera in her rage seized a kitchen knife and attacked not Jack but their bed, tearing and slashing at the mosquito netting, stabbing the mattress and ripping the sheets to shreds, this insanity not exhausting her fury but inflaming it, rather, and then she went for his canvases, and ...
“A work of utter brilliance.”
—Independent (UK)
“[An] immensely clever and tautly composed novel . . .”
—The New York Times Review of Books
“Patrick McGrath can write a love story like no other man alive — dark, a little twisted, very passionate, and so loaded with exact
and unexpected sensuous detail that, although you may never wish to actually live in this sleazy little city of Port Mungo, you could
happily spend a whole vacation within its pages.”
—Peter Carey, twice winner of the Booker Prize, for Oscar and Lucinda and for The True History of the Kelly Gang
“No one has penetrated the psychological darkness at the heart of [a] nightmare as successfully as McGrath. . . . As a master of modern Gothic, [he] is unparalleled.”
—The Guardian (UK)
Praise for Patrick McGrath:
“The sensuous world that McGrath creates is intense in its beauty . . . mesmerizing.”
—The New York Times Book Review
—Independent (UK)
“[An] immensely clever and tautly composed novel . . .”
—The New York Times Review of Books
“Patrick McGrath can write a love story like no other man alive — dark, a little twisted, very passionate, and so loaded with exact
and unexpected sensuous detail that, although you may never wish to actually live in this sleazy little city of Port Mungo, you could
happily spend a whole vacation within its pages.”
—Peter Carey, twice winner of the Booker Prize, for Oscar and Lucinda and for The True History of the Kelly Gang
“No one has penetrated the psychological darkness at the heart of [a] nightmare as successfully as McGrath. . . . As a master of modern Gothic, [he] is unparalleled.”
—The Guardian (UK)
Praise for Patrick McGrath:
“The sensuous world that McGrath creates is intense in its beauty . . . mesmerizing.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
- ÉditeurAlfred a Knopf Inc
- Date d'édition2004
- ISBN 10 1400041651
- ISBN 13 9781400041657
- ReliureRelié
- Nombre de pages241
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