Alan Isler The Living proof (pdf)

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Academician.
You have chosen to show only the 4th day of Destruction,
one painting out of eight, each necessary to the meaning
of the others, the eighth being the obvious culmination and
obvious meaning of the work. For shame! Your choice of
one painting, in defiance of my wishes, and your intention
to show it in isolation, against my expressed purpose &
earnest desire that you should not do so, leaves me with no
alternative but to withdraw it. I will take great care that you
never have another picture of mine as long as I am alive.
If my misery was your intention, I congratulate you on
your success. I want my pictures back, ad of them, including
Day 4. It gives me a horrible feeling to think of you
showing it.
Do you understand? I am resigning my membership in
the Royal Academy.
Yours truly,
Cyrd Entwisde, former RA
Please excuse pencd.
119
Entwistle possesses an innate egotism linked to a sense of him-
self as the hero of his own epic. These combine to foster in him
a reliance on his own emotions as a source of painterly raw
material. In this view, I suppose, the painting of 'Destruction'
was inevitable, less a matter of compassion than of self-expression.
But after Belsen, compassion there was, compassion for the victim,
for the underdog. And since in 1945 it was apparent that
Germany's victims were, overwhelmingly, Jews, of whom the sur-
vivors stid lived for the most part in camps, now dubbed refugee
camps, unwanted even by the victorious, 'civdised' nations,
Entwistle became phdo-Semitic. There was, of course, a measure
of paternalism in his phdo-Semitism, a whiff of noblesse oblige, of
I and they.
Such compassion cannot last; it depends upon the status quo.
In the case of the Jews it could not survive the 1967 war. They
were clearly no longer victims, no longer worthy of compas-
sion; they had become arrogant or, more accurately, 'uppity'. As
Entwistle himself put it, grinning, 'I rather liked the buggers
once, even felt sorry for 'em, but now I've turned the other
cheek.' (Lucidly for the Tabakman Museum, 'The Eighth Day:
Destruction' had already graced the wads of its dedicated gaflery
for three years by the time of Israel's stunning victory.)
But even if Entwistle's phdo-Semitism had survived 1967, it
could not have survived Franny's betrayal of him. She was, I
believe, his 'one true love', to use the maudlin, vapid romantic
expression, which is nevertheless appropriate, as I think, in this
case; the only person before whom he consciously let down his
guard unlike before poor Mumsy, who had to discover his vul-
nerabdity for herself and whose sacrificial exertions of comfort
received scant thanks.
Why he should have felt this way about Franny has always
been a mystery to me. But about such matters the outsider is
often at a loss. Certainly he was devastated by her departure,
120
weeping into his beer day in and day out at the Rat and Carrot,
unable to paint for the better part of a year, a bit of an embar-
rassment to the regulars. She, obviously, had felt rather differ-
endy about him. She liked a libidinous tumble as much as any
healthy young female of the first Joy of Sex generation, and, like
many a groupie, she especially enjoyed a tumble with any of 'the
greatest Wlioevers of the twentieth century', relative differences
in age being no object. Entwistle thought he'd found a partner
for life. 'Poor lamb,' said Mumsy when she heard.
I also used to wonder why he designated Franny a Jew;
Franny, whose every indection, every gesture, marked her clearly
as C of E by birth and upbringing, if not by inclination. But
I think I now understand, or have at least a glimmering. Probably,
he started using Jew as a term of endearment, or relish, one of
his frequent Shakespearian adusions, this time to Costard's ' My
sweet ounce of man's flesh [this he would have changed to
"woman's desh"], my incony Jew!' But subconsciously, I sus-
pect, he was attempting to mould their relationship, to shape it
somewhat closer to his heart's desire. Franny was an utterly inde-
pendent young woman, blessed by the generation, the class and
the culture into which she was born. If she enjoyed basking in
redected glory, she did so only in the way her fedows happdy
tanned themselves beneath a Mediterranean sun. Like them, she
was content to forsake the sun at St Tropez for the sun at
Acapulco, if that was where the action had moved. For Entwistle,
meanwhde, Jew had meant victim, one in need of succour, of
loving care, a grateful recipient of protection, a bird with a
broken wing requiring healing, a damsel saved by her knight
from the flaming breath and the ripping claws of the dragon.
To cad Franny a Jew was to place her in happy subservience to
the liberator of Bergen-Belsen. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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