Anatomy of Restlessness Read Free

Voss , by Melville’s Omoo and Typee , then Richard Henry Dana and Jack London. Perhaps from these writers I got a taste for Yankee plain style? I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.
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    One summer when I was thirteen I went alone to Sweden to talk English to a boy of my age whose family lived in a lovely eighteenth-century house by a lake. The boy and I had nothing in common. But his Uncle Percival was a delightful old gentleman, always dressed in a white smock and sun hat, with whom I would walk through the birch forest gathering mushrooms or row to an island to see the nesting ospreys. He lived in a log cabin lit by crystal chandeliers. He had travelled in Czarist Russia. He made me read Chekhov in Constance Garnett’s translation, also Duff Cooper’s biography of Talleyrand.
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    The great English novelists were left unread, but were heard, very much heard – Oliver Twist, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice— on gramophone records, in plummy English voices, as I lay in the Birmingham eye hospital with partial paralysis of the optic nerve-a psychosomatic condition probably brought on by Marlborough College, where I was considered to be a dimwit and dreamer. I tried to learn Latin and Greek and was bottom of every class. There was, however, an excellent school library, and I seem in retrospect to have come away quite well read. I loved everything French—painting, furniture, poetry, history, food—and, of course, I was haunted by the career of Paul Gauguin. For my seventeenth birthday the owner of the town bookshop gave me a copy of Edith Sitwell’s anthology, Planet and Glow-worm, a collection of texts for insomniacs, to which I can trace a number of literary fixtures – Baudelaire, Nerval and Rimbaud, Li Po and other Chinese ‘wanderers’, Blake and Mad Kit Smart, the encapsulated biographies of John Aubrey and the seventeenth-century prose music of Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne.
    For a time I went along with the suggestion that I follow the family tradition and train as an architect; but, because I was innumerate, my chances of passing the exams were remote. My parents gently squashed my ambition to go on the stage. Finally, in December 1958, since my talents were so obviously ‘visual’, I started work as a porter at Messrs Sotheby and Co., Fine Art Auctioneers, of Bond Street, at wages of £6 a week.
    I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculpture. I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered Before long, I was an instant expert, flying here and there to pronounce, with unbelieveable arrogance, on the value or authenticity of works of art. I particularly enjoyed telling people that their paintings were fake. We sold the collection of Somerset Maugham, who, at dinner at the Dorchester Hotel, told a story about a temple boy, himself and a baby elephant. On Park Avenue, a woman slammed the door in my face, shouting, ‘I’m not showing my Renoir to a sixteen-year-old kid.’
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    The high points of my fine arts career were:
    1. A conversation with André Breton about the fruit machines in Reno.
    2. The discovery of wonderful Tahiti Gauguin in a crumbling Scottish castle.
    3. An afternoon with Georges Braque, who, in a white leather jacket, a white tweed cap and a lilac chiffon scarf, allowed me to sit in his studio while he painted a flying bird.
    In the summer holidays I travelled east, as far as Afghanistan, and wondered if I was capable of writing an article on Islamic architecture. But something was wrong. I began to feel that things, however beautiful, can also be malign. The atmosphere of the Art World reminded me of the morgue. ‘All those lovely things passing through your hands,’ they’d say—and I’d look at my hands and think of Lady Macbeth. Or people would compliment me on my ‘eye,’ and my eyes, in