Deceits

Lies

Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960 by William Boyd and ‘My Purple Scented Novel’ by Ian McEwan

Doomed young artist floats around for a bit, destroys many of his own works, and then throws himself off a boat into the sea. Where’s the story? For William Boyd, who made it up, the story is only partly found in the deception — the hallmarks of biography, those little traces which indicate origins as a plush coffee table-type book, a catalogue whose contents are a little sparse. We have a miserly number of endnotes; we have purportedly real photographs with straight explanatory captions; we have some of the hedging language non-fiction authors unable to secure information sometimes find themselves reduced to. All these things usually obscure a good story, or testify to the lack of one.

But the story itself, here, is worth thinking a little about. Imagine the life of the artist. We know well enough because it is famous of the silent generation painters — exchange rates making their American import friends scrape by quite far on a pittance. Meanwhile the artists, the poor artists, aside from filling their days with flirtations and drinking, had quite a miserable lot to endure to produce their very great work.

It is the history of histrionic suffering attributed to artists that Boyd channels. Hart Crane, the great tragic poet who is still so worth reading, is an acknowledged influence; he too died after leaping from a vessel into the sea.

Tate’s life was one of missed chances, failed connections. Never knew his father, who might have been a sailor, and was said by Tate’s mother to have drowned. The mother herself, killed not long after, when Tate was a boy — the mother run down by a car. Tate then adopted by the rich family for whom his mother was working. The new family containing great wealth — wealth that patronised Tate’s art. But the boy himself never fitting in, drinking more and more, making friends with the latterly famous and worrying them all with his alcoholic dependency.

All of this told through useful quotes from letters, diaries, poems – all of them fabricated – and a diligently academic paratext from Boyd himself, in his own voice.

Tate decided late in the day — he was thirty-one — to collect up all the work of his own that he could get. I’m going to rework it, he said, like Turner might have. And some of his friends, and even his exhibitor, they let him do it.

What he then did is not hard to guess. In the gardens of the great, wealth-filled home of his adopted father (by far the most significant owner of Tate’s pictures), Tate instructed the groundsman to build a great bonfire, which was done with pleasure. Into the fire, like Savonarola, Tate threw his pictures. And the rest was history when he flew off the ferry into the sea as if he had an appointment.

The three pictures that survived the holocaust, of course, later ended up in Boyd’s hands, and in the hands, purportedly, of Davie Bowie – Boyd’s friend and the book’s original publisher.

I’ve read this book a few times. I’ve reviewed it, alluded to it, too, here and there. Why? I like the idea.

My weakness is for format. A good format excuses a novel paucity of ideas, lack of technique — quite a lot of things. In this case, format — the fake art biography — more than makes up for the book being so short, so luxuriously padded.

I like it because of what it is capable of being.

Another work I read often is Ian McEwan’s short story ‘My Purple Scented Novel,’ which was published as a little pamphlet by Vintage after appearing some time earlier in the New Yorker. It is, as I have said elsewhere, the story of a literary crime, a confession.

Why do I like this story quite so much? I enjoy the voice of the protagonist — so self-serving and yet so straight and, at his own estimation, honest. I like a few of the situations: mostly the early lives of these two young men. I like the cynicism about how news is made; how the press features; I like the idea that, in stealing, one can convince oneself in time that doing so is truly creative.

Deceits, lies. They’re more creative as the truth. So it is written. And so it must be.