Ghost Town by Patrick McGrath Page B

pleased or embarrassed and was forever having trouble with his clothing, buttons coming undone, shirt-tails escaping their confinement within his trousers, studs and pins going astray and with them the cuffs and cravatsand such which they were intended to secure. His eyesight was poor, and he wore spectacles.
    It was Charlotte who saw in him something more than an unkempt buffoon. She watched closely as he amused himself in the sisters’ parlor, running off pencil sketches of the girls and their friends and then springing to the piano, where he would invent a tune with a lyric to accompany what he had sketched. Charlotte saw these spontaneous effusions as the froth or spume atop a rising wave of artistic genius, and was determined that her brother not waste it. She was convinced he had the makings of an artist, and it was certainly undeniable that with his wild hair and disheveled aspect he presented the appearance of an artistic
type
, and to artistic
types
the sisters were particularly sensitive.
    Without telling anybody what she was doing Charlotte began to look for a teacher for Julius. She visited a dozen studios in New York, most of which housed painters with established reputations. She conducted interviews with each of them. None to her seemed right. She felt that these men were too much like her father in the importance they placed on technique and discipline and industry and the like. Julius woulddo as he was told, she knew, but there seemed no passion—no “sweet inward burning,” as the saying is—until, that is, she met Jerome Brook Franklin. Now here was a man, she felt, for whom art was about more than technique. Here was a man for whom art was life itself.
    At that time Jerome Brook Franklin was an impoverished painter of twenty-six whose true calling was the landscape. He had once attended a lecture of Thomas Cole’s and come away with the fiery conviction that his life’s work lay with the movement to establish a unique American art, an art that did not ape the art of Europe, but assimilated it, rather.
Transcended
it. A new nation, Cole had said—and it was this idea which seared the heart of the young Brook Franklin—required an artistic tradition which reflected its own true spirit, and the true spirit of America lay in the vast sublimities of her boundless unspoiled wilderness. He quoted Emerson: “There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving my eyes), which nature cannot repair …”
    I know very little about art but I have it on good authority that until Thomas Cole arrived, American painters had largely been busy with
ships
, and that it was the merchants who drove the market. At one time Noah van Horn had hanging on his walls a painting of every ship he owned, and this was apparently what art meant to men like him: the precise, impersonal, ostentatious display of one’s material property. Handsome enough I suppose if what you like is
rigging
, or the exact color of a
hull
, but hardly the stuff of an emergent civilization. As for Thomas Cole, I remember as a child reading this exchange in a novel. Two men are talking about the wilderness.
    —What do you see when you get there? says one.
    —Creation! cries the other.
    It was to paint pictures of Creation that Jerome Brook Franklin made expeditions into the American wilderness. His canvases displayed sweeping vistas of such scenes of natural beauty as the lakes of northwestern New York in the fall. By that time there was a healthy demand for such paintings, but he had not yet established himself among the more popular artists, and so had to give instruction to young men in order to subsidize his expeditions.
    On the day of her appointment Charlotte mounted a narrow flight of stairs to the topfloor of a building on West Tenth Street. There was a landing with a banister on one side which overlooked the stairwell all the way down to the lobby. A door stood open and she peered in. What she found was a