The Man Who Went Down With His Ship Read Free

knowledge, or there should be.
    People say Francis Bacon’s paintings are horrific, but I find them beautiful as paintings. The subject matter is, in a sense, irrelevant. If you consider the power of Renaissance painters who painted crucifixions – the subject may be tragic or whatever you want to call it, but if the paintings are beautiful then in that way you get the whole package. The Grunewald
Crucifixion
in Colmar, for example, is horrific but also beautiful. Whereas paintings by someone like Renoir who just did flowers and rosy-cheeked girls are much uglier to me.
    RTK:
So the artist needs to make an accommodation with the horrific, to look at it squarely?
    HF: Oh, I think everybody should, artists or no. I should say, I don’t think artists are any more corrupt than anyone else – I just think they should stop pretending that they’re
less
.

THE MAN WHO WENT DOWN WITH HIS SHIP

    On the morning of his fifty-fifth birthday, Alfred Albers announced to his mistress that someone was planning to kill him.
    ‘Oh lovey, they’re not,’ Dorothy said, running a comb through her hair, giving her lover a peck on the cheek, and doing up her coat. She smiled at him with what was clearly meant to be a disarming smile. ‘Not today, anyway.’
    For a moment Alfred thought of arguing his case, or even of showing her the anonymous letter he had just received. He knew, however, that if he did the one he would only upset her, and if he did the other he would make her angry, and make her accuse him of having cut up some newspapers, glued the words to a sheet of paper, and sent the thing himself. Besides, she was late for work. So he contented himself with giving her a hurt, owlish look; with trying to make sure no tears came into his eyes, as they always did when he was accused of lying; and with telling her soulfully ‘Well, maybe not of killing me’. Then he raised himself on his toes, kissed her on the lips, and said ‘Don’t be late. Remember we’re going to Louise’s for dinner.’
    Someone really was though, he protested to himself after Dorothy had muttered ‘Louise indeed’, had added, ‘Be good’, and had practically run out of the house. And after he had gone into the kitchen, been almost knocked over by Matilda rushing out of the house after her mother to go riding—‘Oh Alfred Happy Birthday see you later can’t stop Bye’—and had taken the letter out of his pocket, he couldn’t help becoming slightlytearful. He understood Dorothy, of course, and if he had been her he would have reacted in the same way. After all, it wasn’t the first time he had told her that someone was planning to kill him. In fact he did so on average twice a year; whenever he had one of his attacks. Only, he told himself, all those other times his announcement had been part of a recognisable pattern. First, the obsessive reading of newspapers, of magazine articles about terrorism, and books about the Second World War. Then the headaches, the cramps that made him retire to his bed, and lie there curled up like a little child in pain. And finally the uncontrollable tears, the awful sense that at any second the door was going to be flung open and They, whoever they were, were going to come in and get him, and the whimpering, pathetic pleas for Dorothy to put her arms around him and protect him, because having carried him off somewhere—probably bundling him into the boot of a car without a numberplate—and having tortured him, They were going to murder him.
    Whereas today, it had all been quite different. For one thing, he had been in a good mood when he had got up this morning and contemplated the day ahead. For another, it was only a month since he had come out of hospital, and never before had he started to slide back into darkness so soon after re-emerging into the light. And for still another, even if he had, exceptionally, had a sudden relapse, he wouldn’t, surely, have started at the bottom of the slope, so to speak; nor