The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [7]
When pompously asked if he had anything to say for himself before sentencing, my father, putting on a good show, reminded the court that he hadn’t drawn it, only signed it. “That hardly speaks in your favor,” lectured the judge, whom I, at thirteen, instinctively disliked, a puckered school-principal type, later to appear in various guises in my novels. “At least drawing it would mean you’d made something of value.”
“No,” my father rebuked the judge. “Your Honor, I have to object to that. The drawing was, and now again is, without much value. While it supported belief, thanks to me, its value swelled a thousand-fold, and people loved it a thousand times more. Punish me for doing it badly: all right. For getting caught: fine. For failing the world: guilty. But don’t say I didn’t make something!” I applauded, expecting others would join me. If it had been a movie, the courtroom would have shaken with cheers that swallowed the limp gavel’s tapping, and some new evidence or technicality would have bubbled up to the attention of counsel.
“Without parole,” concluded the judge. That was 1977.
Truly criminal people, in my father’s view, were men like the Rembrandt Research Project, a squad of Dutch art experts who swept through the world’s museums a few years ago, like avenging angels of facts or Santa Clausicidal maniacs, downgrading this or that old master (even signed paintings) to the status of “School of …” or “In the style of …” or the smirky “Attributed to …” My father ranted about these guys when I visited him in the late 1990s, as if it were the only thing on his mind. “Who wants to be that?” he stormed from across some other Formica. “What kid dreams of growing up to be the tight-ass joykill who travels the globe waving his facts around and denying people pleasure? As if his facts prove anything.”
“What difference does it make?” I asked.
“All the difference in the world.”
“Why? It’s the same painting. It just means you can’t be pretentious about it. But if you liked the picture before, you still like it now. It doesn’t matter who painted it.”
“Aesthetic empiricism,” he replied blandly. “I know, but that’s rare, Artie. Fact is, most people like the brand name, and the brand name helps them enjoy the product and opens them to trust other products. So being the big Dutch queen who prances around snatching off the brands—even if he’s right, which there’s no saying he is, although I do know the truth in one case, and he is right—that stops a lot of people from learning what they like. They don’t want to say they like it, because they’re afraid the Dutch guy’s going to call them a fool for liking the wrong thing.”
A few years ago I was reading a book of essays I’d been asked to review for Harper’s called The Curtain, by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera. In it he writes, “Let us imagine a contemporary composer writing a sonata that in its form, its harmonies, its melodies resembles Beethoven’s. Let’s even imagine that this sonata is so masterfully made that, if it had actually been by Beethoven, it would count among his greatest works. And yet no matter how magnificent, signed by a contemporary composer it would be laughable. At best its author would be applauded as a virtuoso of pastiche.” I was at home in Prague, lying in bed next to my wife, who was humming in her sleep. I hadn’t been to the United States in a few years, hadn’t seen my father in years, and I had lately noticed with some relief how rarely I thought of him with anger or pain, finally, and then, at Kundera’s provocation, I began to cry. I still don’t agree with the sentiment—that a name