Life of David Hockney by Catherine Cusset

Author:Catherine Cusset [Cusset, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2019-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

DEATH IS OVERRATED

One evening in November, when he was having dinner with Gregory and Ian, the phone rang. The person on the other end, David Graves, had been David’s assistant in London and his friend since he had met him seven years earlier at the premiere of A Rake’s Progress in Glyndebourne. He was also the partner of Ann, whom Graves had met at some mutual friends’ home. When Graves said, “David?” the softness of his voice conveyed something David recognized right away, something almost metallic that he had heard in his brother’s voice one February morning three and a half years earlier, like an absence of resonance: the voice of tragedy. Byron. Byron, who had just turned sixteen, Byron whom just last summer David had taken to see the Hot Springs, the ghost town of Calico in the Mojave Desert, and the Grand Canyon, and who three months earlier was in this very house next to him, laughing, playing cards and Scrabble, telling jokes, helping him choose seventy-six photos for his photomontage, Byron, who had given him the best advice. His cries of joy and fear at Disneyland when he was fourteen still rang in David’s ears. Dead. Byron had eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms—which weren’t illegal in England—and had gone onto the subway tracks in London, where a train had crushed him.

David flew to England. He didn’t know what to say to Ann. There weren’t any words. If his mother had been the living image of sorrow at his father’s death, Ann was but a silent cry. He took her in his arms, they clung to each other like two drowning people and sobbed. She had lost everything. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what a woman who had carried a child in her womb, who had given birth to him, who had raised him—so well raised!—who loved him with all her heart, all her body, all her soul, and who hadn’t been able to protect him from himself, must be feeling. There was nothing sadder than the burial at the Kensal Green cemetery the afternoon of November 11. All his friends from his time at the Royal College were there, including Byron’s father, Michael. That sadness David expressed in the photomontage he did immediately afterward. It showed his mother in the rain in the ruins of the Bolton Abbey, wearing a long, dark-green raincoat with a hood, all the sorrow of the world on her wrinkled face. He invited Ann and Graves to come to Los Angeles—and to stay there, why not? There would be fewer reminders of Byron than in London; the heat, the sun, and the ocean might help Ann survive.

On the way back to California he stopped in New York to see Joe McDonald, who had gone home after a long stay in the hospital. His condition had scarcely improved and he stayed in bed; his mother was taking care of him. At thirty-seven, he looked eighty. His flesh had melted away, leaving his body emaciated and gaunt, his sunken face skeletal.

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