Transit(29)

It was this story, Jane went on after a while, that caused the cataclysm of realisation – what she had called the revolution – to occur. Rather than mirroring the literal facts of her own life, Marsden Hartley was doing something much bigger and more significant: he was dramatising them.

I asked her what it was about this particular story that had brought her to that conclusion.

It seemed so pointless, she said, so futile and sad. It was almost too awful to be true. I was trying to work out what it meant, why it had happened to him, after all that he’d already gone through, rather than to someone else. He’d lost his mother and his father had abandoned him, he’d failed time and again to find and keep a lover – even a friend of his, someone who cared about him, once wrote that it was impossible not to reject him, that the friend himself had rejected him, that something about him just made people do it. Reading these things, she said, I began to understand: when he loved something, he drove it away. I realised, standing there, that if I had to describe my own life – even though, as I say, the examples would be much less dramatic – I would use exactly those same words.

While she had been speaking, a powerful, rancid smell had been filling the sitting room. It was emanating from the basement flat. I apologised and explained that the people downstairs sometimes cooked things that – at least from a distance – smelled pretty unpleasant.

I wondered what that was, Jane said, with an unexpectedly mischievous smile. It must be something they caught in the garden, she added, because I don’t know anything else that smells that bad when you cook it. When she was a child, her mother used to boil animals’ skeletons – squirrels, rats, even once the head of a fox – in order to paint them. The smell was just like that, Jane said.

If she objected, I said, we could easily go out and find a café somewhere in order to finish our conversation.

I’d rather not, Jane said immediately. Like I say, I’m actually pretty used to the smell.

Her mother was quite a successful painter, she went on. It was all she’d ever cared about really – she probably shouldn’t ever have had children, except that it was what you did in those days. She doesn’t think much of what I do, Jane said. Even Jane’s recent commission to photograph the Waitrose Christmas brochure had failed to impress her. She hates food in any case, Jane said. There was never anything to eat when we were growing up. Even the freezer was full of dead animals, and not the sort you’d want to have for dinner. Other kids had fish fingers and choc ices in their freezers: Jane had half-decomposed vermin. Marsden Hartley’s experiences of starvation, she added, were another source of affinity: they had rendered him both obsessed with food and terrified of it. He compensated for the episodes of hunger by overeating when the opportunity arose. It was said that, at the end of his life, he ate himself to death. It was another of those instances of dramatisation: Jane herself had eating problems – what woman didn’t – but in her case it wasn’t a question of will and control, or at least it hadn’t started that way. Her mother’s mental and often physical absences had resulted in her being, as a child, underfed: as an adult she remained haunted by hunger and by the knowledge that if she ever started to eat, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

I take photographs of food, she said, instead of eating it.

After reading about Marsden Hartley eating himself to death, she had tried to find out more about what had actually happened. She ploughed through countless pages on his brushstrokes and his influences, his developmental phases and his turning points, but no one had much to say on the subject of his eating problems. I suppose there wasn’t the language for it then, she said. In all the photographs she’d seen of him, he was a tall, narrow man with a lifted, bird-like face, but then finally, one day, she’d come across a black-and-white photo of him late in life. He was standing in an empty room, a white space – it looked like a gallery, except that there were no pictures on the walls – and he was wearing a big black overcoat buttoned up over his enormous body. His head on its still-narrow neck came out of the top, so that it looked almost dissociated from the mass beneath it; his face, though older, was more or less unchanged. In fact, if anything, it looked more childlike, so naked was its expression of suffering. It was a photograph of a tormented child imprisoned in a great rock of flesh.

What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn’t really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing – no narrative flights, no plot developments, no immersive human dramas – to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time. Just his work, she said, and in the end she had the feeling that he’d done more of that than anyone had any use for. He died in his sixties, yet reading about it you’d think his life had gone on for a thousand years. Even the social life she’d envied had started to pall on her, the shallowness of it, the same competitive faces in the same rooms, the repetitiveness and lack of growth, the lack of tenderness or intimacy.

Loneliness, she said, is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there. Yet when she looked at her mother, who lived alone in such squalor that frankly they’d be better off burning the house to the ground when the time came to sell it, she saw someone happy in her solitude, in her work. It’s like there’s something she doesn’t know, she said, because no one’s ever forced her to know it.