By Catherine Cusset
David should have been happy. He had done everything he could to get into this school. The day he was accepted, he had felt as if he had passed through the eye of a needle, had entered paradise, had been rescued from the life of an office employee that was the lot of his brothers, his sister, and his neighbors in Bradford. During the two years he had worked at the hospital, he had dreamt of his future existence and developed a serene patience, knowing that his deliverance would come and awaken him from what felt like a century of sleep. Now he was finally free, but that anticipated, desired happiness that should have been within his grasp escaped him. For the first time, he no longer felt joy in painting. He felt strangely detached from his work, without energy or enthusiasm. Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe he was just an impostor. His American friend listened to the young twenty-two-year-old, completely at a loss, pour out his anxieties. They also talked about other things, politics, literature, friendship, love, the vegetarian diet that David, like his parents, practiced. His daily conversations with Ron at least allowed him to feel less alone.
“This is what you should paint,” Ron said one day. “Things that matter to you. You don’t have to worry about being contemporary. You already are, since you live in your time.”
The idea was interesting. There was no point in struggling to belong to one’s time—one belonged to it by definition. Ron’s figures, indeed, didn’t seem to have been painted in Manet’s or Renoir’s time. In any case, something had to change. If David didn’t rediscover pleasure in painting, he would end up like an old, dried-up lemon left out on a kitchen counter. As a matter of fact, he felt like painting vegetables. No one could accuse him of being antimodern, because their round shapes seemed respectfully abstract. But in his mind, they were vegetables. He then painted the can of Typhoo Tea from which he took a bag every morning when he arrived at school, and which reminded him of his mother. In addition to the words “Typhoo Tea,” he had the idea of adding a letter or a number here and there which would force the viewer to get closer to the painting to decipher them. He was smuggling in a bit of intimacy. The letters and numbers engaged the viewer instead of leaving him at a distance, as abstract painting did.
Ron shared a corner of his studio down the hall with another student, and when David went to see him in the afternoon, he also chatted with his studio mate. Adrian was gay. The first openly gay man David, at the age of twenty-two, had ever met. He had known for a long time that he liked men, but his sexual activity was limited to rare, furtive encounters about which he spoke to no one in places where he went alone. The day when one of his friends told him, “I saw you in that pub with that bloke and I saw what you were doing!” he had blushed, terribly embarrassed by the unfortunate coincidence that had brought a student he knew into an unfamiliar pub where a stranger he had met an hour earlier in the Leicester Square movie theater was fondling him. Afterward, his own reaction had made him angry. Would he have blushed if the student had caught him with a girl? And would the student have even mentioned it? What gave him the right to talk to him with such mocking familiarity? David painted a work that he called Shame, without any other identifiable shape than that of an erect penis in the foreground. While he listened to Adrian unashamedly tell him about his homosexual adventures, he thought, That’s how I want to live. Adrian advised him to read the American poet Walt Whitman, whom David had heard of, and the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, whom he hadn’t.
The summer he turned twenty-three, he read Whitman and Cavafy. (…) “And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy,” wrote Whitman, talking about the love between two men. For the first time in a year, David no longer had any doubt: he had to paint what mattered to him. He had just turned twenty-three. There was nothing more important than desire and love. He had to thwart the forbidden, represent it in images the way Whitman and Cavafy had done through words. No one could authorize him to do so—no professor, no other artist. It had to be his decision, his creation, the exercise of his freedom.
Having returned to the Royal College, he created a series of paintings in which he slipped in words and even lines, some of which came from Walt Whitman, such as “We two boys together clinging,” and others from graffiti he had read on the men’s room door in the Earl’s Court Tube station, such as “Ring me at . . .” or “My brother is only seventeen.” Geometrical shapes like those in children’s drawings, the figures were identifiable thanks to the hair, mouths, teeth, impish ears, and erect penises. To represent himself in these paintings, he borrowed a childlike code from Whitman that consisted of replacing the letters of the alphabet with numbers, drawing on the canvas in tiny script the numbers “4.8” which represented his initials, and the numbers “23.23” for Walt Whitman. These were so small, so light, that one could choose not to see them and to interpret David’s new works in a purely artistic context by seeing the influence of Pollock or Dubuffet in them. His professors were in the dark (so to speak). It was an excellent way to dupe the system.
He no longer felt the gloomy lack of inspiration he had felt the year before, and couldn’t stop painting, completing one work after another.
David aurait dû être heureux. Il avait tout fait pour être accepté dans cette école. Le jour des résultats, il avait eu l’impression de passer par le chas d’une aiguille, d’entrer au paradis, de se sauver de cette vie d’employé qui était celle de ses frères, de sa sœur et de ses voisins de Bradford. Pendant les deux ans où il avait travaillé à l’hôpital, il avait rêvé de sa future existence et construit en lui une attente patiente, sachant que viendrait le moment de la délivrance qui le sortirait d’un siècle de sommeil. Il était enfin libre et ce bonheur entrevu, désiré, maintenant à sa portée, lui échappait. Pour la première fois, il n’avait plus de joie à peindre. Il se sentait étrangement détaché de son travail, sans énergie et sans enthousiasme. Peut- être s’était-il trompé. Peut-être n’était-il qu’un imposteur. L’Américain écoutait son jeune ami de vingt-deux ans déverser ses angoisses, totalement perdu. Ils abordaient aussi d’autres sujets, la politique, la littérature, l’amitié, l’amour, le régime végétarien dont David était un adepte, comme ses parents. Ses conversations quotidiennes avec Ron lui permettaient au moins de se sentir moins seul.
« Ce que tu devrais peindre, lui dit Ron un jour, c’est ce qui compte pour toi. Tu n’as pas besoin de t’inquiéter. Tu es nécessairement contemporain. Tu l’es, puisque tu vis dans ton époque. »
L’idée était intéressante. Inutile de chercher à appartenir à son temps : on y appartenait par nécessité. Les figures de Ron n’avaient en effet pas l’air d’avoir été peintes à l’époque de Manet ou de Renoir. De toute façon, quelque chose devait changer. Si David ne retrouvait pas le plaisir de peindre, il finirait comme un vieux citron desséché abandonné sur un comptoir de cuisine. Justement, il avait envie de représenter des légumes. Personne ne pourrait l’accuser d’être antimoderne, car leurs formes rondes avaient l’air respectueusement abstraites. Mais dans son esprit, c’étaient des légumes. Puis il peignit la boîte de thé Typhoo dans laquelle il prenait un sachet chaque matin quand il arrivait à l’école, cette boîte de thé qui lui rappelait sa mère et qui saluait chaque nouvelle journée. En plus des mots « Typhoo Tea », il eut l’idée d’ajouter une lettre ou un chiffre ici et là qui forçaient à s’approcher du tableau pour les décrypter. C’était un peu d’humanité qu’il passait en contrebande. Les lettres et les chiffres engageaient le spectateur au lieu de le laisser à distance comme une peinture abstraite.
Ron partageait son coin d’atelier dans le couloir avec un autre étudiant, et quand David allait le voir l’après-midi, il bavardait aussi avec son voisin. Adrian était gay. Le premier homme ouvertement gay que David, à vingt-deux ans, ait jamais rencontré. Il savait depuis longtemps qu’il aimait les hommes, mais son activité sexuelle était quasi inexistante, se limitant à de rares rencontres furtives dont il ne parlait à personne dans des endroits où il allait seul. Le jour où un de ses camarades lui avait dit : « Je t’ai vu dans ce pub avec ce type et j’ai vu ce que vous faisiez ! », il avait rougi, terriblement embarrassé par la malheureuse coïncidence qui avait amené un étudiant de sa connaissance dans le bar pourtant éloigné de leur école où le pelotait un inconnu rencontré une heure plus tôt dans un cinéma de Leicester Square. Après coup, sa propre réaction l’avait mis en colère. Aurait-il rougi si l’étudiant l’avait surpris avec une fille ? D’ailleurs, celui-ci aurait-il dit quelque chose ? Qu’est-ce qui lui donnait le droit de s’adresser à lui avec cette familiarité moqueuse ? David avait peint un tableau qu’il avait appelé Honte, sans autre forme identifiable que celle d’un pénis en érection au premier plan. Tandis qu’il écoutait Adrian lui raconter sans retenue ses aventures homosexuelles, il songea : « Voilà comment je veux vivre. » Adrian lui conseilla de lire le poète américain Walt Whitman, que David connaissait, et le poète grec Constantin Cavafy, dont il n’avait jamais entendu parler.
L’été de ses vingt-trois ans, il lut Whitman et Cavafy. (…) « Et cette nuit son bras reposait légèrement sur ma poitrine – et cette nuit j’étais heureux », écrivait Whitman en parlant de l’amour de deux hommes. Pour la première fois depuis un an, David n’avait plus de doute : il fallait peindre ce qui comptait pour lui. Il venait d’avoir vingt-trois ans. Il n’y avait rien de plus important que le désir et l’amour. Il fallait contourner l’interdit, le représenter en images comme Whitman et Cavafy l’avaient fait en mots. Personne ne pouvait l’y autoriser – aucun professeur, aucun autre artiste. Cela devait être sa décision, sa création, l’exercice de sa liberté.
De retour au Collège, il réalisa une série de tableaux où se glissèrent des mots et même des phrases dont certaines venaient de Walt Whitman, comme We two boys together clinging, et d’autres de graffitis qu’il avait lus sur la porte des toilettes pour hommes à la station de métro d’Earls Court, comme « Appelle-moi au… » ou « Mon frère n’a que dix-sept ans ». Géométriques comme des dessins d’enfants, les figures étaient identifiables grâce aux cheveux, aux bouches, aux dents, aux oreilles de diablotin, aux pénis en érection. Pour se mettre lui-même en scène dans ses tableaux, il emprunta à Whitman un code enfantin qui consistait à remplacer par des chiffres les lettres de l’alphabet, traçant sur la toile, en tout petit, les chiffres 4.8 qui désignaient ses initiales, et les nombres 23.23 pour Walt Whitman. Les indices étaient si petits, si légers, qu’on pouvait choisir de ne pas les voir et interpréter les nouvelles œuvres de David dans un contexte purement artistique en y décelant l’influence de Pollock ou de Dubuffet. Ses professeurs n’y voyaient que du feu (si l’on peut dire). C’était une excellente façon de duper le système.
Il n’éprouvait plus le vague à l’âme de l’année précédente et ne cessait de peindre, un tableau après l’autre.
<b>The Importance of Arts, Culture & The Creative Process</b><br> We’d love to hear your thoughts on the importance of the arts and humanities and how this project resonates with you.: The arts and humanities are essential because they are... artistic and human. Or, to quote Proust, only arts allow us to discover the singular vision of the world of another person. Arts give us access to the deepest part of ourselves and also to that other whom we would never know without the arts.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?: My inspiration for my novel Life of David Hockney was David Hockney himself. Not his painting, but his character. By this I mean his relation to life, his view of the world. I love his sense of humour, his passion, his constant renewal of himself in his work.
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation?
I miss a world where we meet in person and not only on zoom (I am happy to see my American friends on Zoom, though). Where we exercise in nature and not in a gym. I am very lucky because part of the year I live in a hamlet on a cliff in the part of Brittany called "Finistère" (which means end of the earth). The hamlet is located in a protected park and every grassy path leads to wild beaches. It is out of the world. Sheer happiness.
