Authentic Captain Marvel Ring and Other Stories by Alan Cheuse

Author:Alan Cheuse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
Published: 2014-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

A Little Death

Originally published in The Southern Review

…when they draw near forty men seem to undergo a sort of spiritual change of life, with really painful depression and loss of energy. Even men whose physical health is quite good. So don’t fret.…Often an entire change of scene helps a lot. But it’s a condition which often drags over several years. Then in the end you come out with a new sort of rhythm, a new psychic rhythm, a sort of re-birth. Meanwhile it is what the mystics call a little death and you have to put up with it….

—D. H. Lawrence to Mark Gertler, December 23, 1929

June 23, 1939—I heard the voice of the Brute on the wireless last night pouring poison into the hearts of his countrymen. It was awful, like wild beasts.…I much prefer the. As though it were yesterday. In front of the house on Gun Street, Spitalfields, a pavement artist turns his wrist and wields the chalk to make a rooster so real to me I can almost hear it crow….

Cock-a-doodle-doo! Cock-a-doodle-doo!

Only forty-five some years ago. And now.

Bleeding—once last night—five times yesterday. And all the air in all the sanatoriums.

I breathed. Coughing up clots the size of hummingbirds I saw once in France. In summer. In.

Stripping the bed and breathing in the familiar odours of oils and the haunting residue of Maria’s last visit. Poor gifted dear. Running from the beasts.

Going to the desk. Glad that I saved. Reading David’s letter again…thinking, I tried change of scene. The photograph? Marjorie and me at the beach just after we married….The waves lapping. Please do put on your bathing costume, please do come in with me. Reading while she splashes about. Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.…I loved gazing at the sea. An intense blue with hot green trees silhouetted against it. The crude greens of the earth, the ultramarine of the sea, and the sunlit whites of the cliff, clear cut and solid, like coloured sculpture…

Ah, a mattress, like a life, as if it has absorbed all the nights entrusted to it, so heavy to haul this into the middle of the room, to begin…I’ve hauled canvas, hauled stretchers, wood for frames. But this…The body is the hulk that follows the paintings around.

Oh, for the life of a labourer!

A chalk artist, working his wrist…

Coughing lightly. Fearing more to come. Coughing stops.

Stop coughing, Mama saying. Asking, What kind of work is that, painting, for a Jewish boy?

Faintest recollection, old Spitalfields rabbi—forgot his name—saying, What kind of a Jew makes painting? Painting is idol worship.

Painting rooms…would he have said that?

But instead, at an early age, the Slade.

Changed everything. Boy genius, a charity case, discovering the masters. Cézanne…When later that critic called me “the Yiddish Cézanne,” it stung me, made me angry, yet somehow half-pleased.… Angry again now. Anti-Semitic bastard! Thinking of it now, stomach heaves. Clots forming in my lungs…

Picture the Slade instead, the hallways redolent of oil and paint, seeing…for the first time…

Her head…

Carrington! Carrington!

How beautiful, the first…

Wasted years on her, but painting, painting.

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