The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [161]
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It was not clear for some time whether Wolfgang Stern spoke English. Joachim whispered to Charles that Anselm Stern was an important figure in Munich’s artistic life—and a sympathiser with the anarchists and the idealists. “He is not your English Punch-and-Judy—he dines with von Stuck and Lehnbach—his work is discussed in Jugend and Simplicissimus. This I know. I do not know his son.”
Philip was the odd man out amongst the young men. He found himself frequently alone. Wolfgang Stern found him sitting on a bench, drawing, and sat down beside him.
“I may?” he asked. Philip nodded. Wolfgang said “May I see? I speak only little English, I read better.”
“I had a long talk in pictures with a Frenchman,” said Philip, flicking the pages back to his dialogue with Philippe; drawings, the Gien faïence, and the little grotesque figures of the majolica urns and dishes.
“You are artist?”
Philip made his signature gesture of hands inside clay cylinder rotating. Wolfgang laughed. Philip said “And you?”
“I hope to be theatre artiste. Cabaret, new plays, also Puppen as my father. Munich is good for artists, also dangerous.”
“Dangerous.”
“We have bad—bad—laws. People are in prison. You may not say what you think. May I see your work?”
Philip was trying to work out a new all-over pattern of latticed and entwined bodies, part-human, part-beast, part-dragon or ghost. He was making impossible combinations of the Gloucester Candlestick’s warriors and apes, the majolica satyrs and mermen, Lalique’s insect-women, and, more remotely, the naked women who sprawled and smiled and died on all the huge symbolist paintings. The drawing he was working on combined the limp puppet with the limp woman from Les Fantoches; he was paying too much attention to the female breasts, and the proportions were ugly. Wolfgang laughed, and touched a breast with a finger. Philip laughed too. He said
“I saw your father’s puppets in England. Cinderella. And one about an automatic woman. Sandman, or something. They come to life—and don’t come to life. Uncanny.”
“Un-canny?”
“Like ghosts, or spirits, or gnomes. More alive than us, in some ways.”
Wolfgang smiled. He said again “I may?”
and took Philip’s pencil, and began to draw his own trellis of forms—little grinning black imps, and bat-winged females. “Simplicissimus,” he said, which Philip failed to understand.
They went to the Rodin Pavilion in the Place de l’Alma. Here were gathered most of Rodin’s works in bronze, marble and plaster; the walls were hung with large numbers of his drawings. Vast forms of sculpted flesh and muscle loomed. Delicate frozen female faces emerged from rough stone, or retreated into it. Everywhere was appalling energy—writhing, striving, pursuing, fleeing, clasping, howling, staring. Philip’s first instinct was to turn and run. This was too much. It was so strong that it would destroy him—how could he make little trellis-men and modest jars, in the face of this skilled whirlwind of making? And yet the contrary impulse was there, too. This was so good, the only response to it was to want to make something. He thought with his fingers and his eyes together. He needed desperately to run his hands over haunches and lips, toes and strands of carved hair, so as to feel out how they had been done. He edged away from the Wellwoods and the Cains. He needed to be alone with this. Benedict Fludd too had edged away. Philip followed him. Fludd was considering The Crouching Woman, who squatted, clutching an ankle and a breast, her female opening displayed and lovingly sculpted. He spoke to Philip’s thought. “Shouts out to be touched,” said Fludd, and touched her, running his finger in her slit, cupping her breast in his hand. Philip did not follow his example, and looked around apprehensively for guards, or angry artist.
The artist was in fact in the pavilion, which he treated as though it was a studio. He was talking to two men, one of them tall and very shabby, with greasy long locks, muffled in an overcoat despite the warm weather.