The Forgers by Morrow Bradford

Author:Morrow, Bradford [Morrow, Bradford]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Thrillers, Psychological, Literary, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780802191922
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Published: 2014-11-04T08:00:00+00:00

WHEREAS I ADMIRED MY FATHER, I adored my mother. My father’s legacy as a book collector was key to my education about literary first editions, and the debt I owe to him about all things Arthur Conan Doyle, indeed all things rare books, could never be overstated. But it was my mother—several of whose watercolors were hung in our Kenmare cottage, charming landscapes that reminded Meghan a little of those by W. B. Yeats’s brother, Jack—whose influence on me was of paramount importance when it came to calligraphic prowess.

The illustrated nursery rhyme and fairy tale books Meghan and I had begun to collect into a little library for our child were, in my youth, read to me by my mother as I sat on her lap and marveled at the colorful pictures of princes and princesses, runaway bunnies and velveteen rabbits, wild things and talking animals, all manner of other fanciful characters. When, in elementary school, my teachers urged me to write with my right hand, it was my mother who intervened on my behalf, telephoning the principal to demand that they allow me to follow my natural southpaw instincts. My mom, champion of nonconformity and a lefty herself, won the day and henceforth I became the lefthander that genetics demanded, a minor challenge to my later work as a forger though obviously one over which I triumphed. Once I was a precocious six or seven, it was my mom who took me to the Frick, the Morgan, the Met, and showed me not only old master paintings and Roman frescoes but the astonishing paintings William Blake made to surround his poems, the meanings of which she patiently tried to explain to me. It was my wonderful mom who, seeing my youthful interest in calligraphy, made sure that I saw master Japanese scrollwork from this or that dynasty at the Asia Society and a major exhibit of illuminated medieval manuscripts at the New York Public Library. And it was my mom who sat me down with ink and paints, brushes and nibbed pens, and taught me how to approach the glorious tabula rasa of a blank sheet of paper. She who first showed me how to copy written characters and words on tracing paper and later, after setting aside any such nets to catch my figurative falls, how to see the finished line before that line is even drawn on a beautiful piece of handmade foolscap.

My mother saw to it that every impediment to an early mastery of the calligraphic arts was removed from my path. Any true portrait of the artist as a young forger would have to include her as my teacher, my prompter, my consoler, with the obvious proviso that never in a million years would she have wanted me to become what I became. She was a mentor, not a prophetess. As a mother, she gave her boy tools with which to build secular cathedrals, not elegant outhouses, as she would surely have viewed the forger’s enterprise.

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