Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
Daily Telegraph Magazine
(London), Saturday, June 14, 2008
T
HE
C
ONSTANT
G
ARDENER
:
A
N
A
FTERNOON
WITH
F
RANCIS
T
ULLY
By Rachel Summers
“Not as many women as Picasso, not as much wine as Durrell, not as angry as Beckett: I could have been so much worse . . .” Francis Tully upends the bottle of local rosé and pushes a chipped, smeared glass towards me, never pausing for breath.
In the garden that the iconoclastic writer and surrealist has created in the South of France, fragments of stone statues and pediments are placed to amuse: a severed hand here, a skein of petrified ivy linking a group of pine trees, a rococo pineapple in a bed of agapanthus lilies.
Joining us at the stone table under a vine canopy is the headless torso of an archer. He aims his arrow at Tully’s head, an ancient version of a gun to the head, although whether this would be to keep him talking or to make him stop is not clear. In any case, stopping him in full flow is not an option.
“Photography and the naïve art are pure ferocity of emotion, as near to the truth as the truth is in people’s reactions to it, and in provoking that reaction . . . austerity is the only truth . . . the context must be supplied by the mind. . . . Surrealism is to do with a kind of hoax, a piece of theatre, carrying through a fantasy in a very European way . . .”
And on he goes, a ferment of ideas and associations.
In a green arbour to the side of the house, the ground is scattered with smashed statuary, stone limbs missing bodies like a macabre graveyard. “A work in progress,” he says dismissively. He is still working, still serious about his art.
Yet when the eagerly anticipated retrospective of his life’s work opens at Tate Modern next week, Francis Tully will not be there. He has no intention of returning to London—ever. His antipathy to his native country remains as strong as it was when he left almost forty years ago.
What I want to ask him about is his arrival here at this house, on this land in the lee of the rocky Alpilles hills, in the spring of 1974, when he put down his stake and claimed his sensuous kingdom; the train journey as he described it in
The Rotten Heart
: the southern country running past the window where his reflection was a shadow, passing over the fields and the dark trees, the outline of a face without details, waiting to become the man he wanted to be.
The painterly descriptions of stumbling into this wonderful enclosed world “south of the jagged roof of the Dentelles de Montmirail, rock lace natted by the mistral” have enchanted generations and never gone out of print. From the higher windows of his great stone bastide are views over vineyards, “from whence will pour the rich blue-red wines imbibed by the Avignon Popes with their flaccid purple lips, wines that for centuries have fortified the men at their ploughs, uniting all in plum-deep fraternity.”
From a distance these villages seem abandoned. Only the geraniums in pots outside windows and doors attest to inhabitation. Far removed from the Mediterranean world, it is enclosed upon itself, desolate and stony to the casual glance, perhaps, but full of richness for a man like Francis Tully.
As he confessed in
The Rotten Heart
: “In France, I had all the freedom and ambiguity of the expatriate, the voluntary exile. No borders, checks, or controls. This is what the artist needs: to invent his own country, in which to remake himself.”
And the new world in which he remade himself brought friendship and a cornucopia of characters he would immortalise in print: an ex-juggler from the Circus of Dreams; a toothless shepherd; a six-foot-tall Dutch woman whose husband was a banker in Zurich; the brocanteur who collected and recycled junk from the farmhouses and churches and châteaux to the increasing tide of foreigners; the herbalist who grew all his own ingredients, pounding and distilling them into potent cures; and a great cast of fellow drinkers—farmers, beekeepers, winemakers, builders, bakers, engineers, and fellow artists—in the Bar des Alpilles.
I want to ask him how many of these people were still here, still arguing at the tables under the trees while sipping pastis. Was it even a real world, or just one that suited him to portray? But he waves away my questions about the book. “Unimportant!”
Just like appearances, it seems. He wears a blue jumper full of holes that is visibly unravelling as he stretches out his arm to make a point, as he does often. His shoes are scuffed and the left one is secured to the flapping sole by gaffer tape.
When I persist, he fetches another bottle, pulls the cork and says in measured tones: “Some people prefer lies to the truth. The ambiguities and evasions they live by are what they use to protect themselves. An attempt to know these people is like peeling the layers of an onion. An apt analogy, too, because tears will fall, if you try to love them.”
Erudite and distant, his tone now, with its cut-glass English accent. How much was he talking about himself? I asked.
He evades the question. “But then you can’t tie everything into knots and conspiracies. Surely what matters is the great Now, the cadences of the protean, ringing blue of this sky, this moment! This stone! This wine! This annoying wasp! This sudden waft of cistus scent!”
Does he still see the country in the same way? I wondered. Or has it changed and mellowed with his own long years living here?
“It’s stranger. The more you know, the more you see. Because you are seeing with the addition of another dimension that cannot be seen: time and experience, and all the stories heard and read that are now superimposed. That’s part of the land. It is what makes it.
“Have you been to Cassis? Look at the paintings done there by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Read Woolf. See the place where they lived, then look again. Without roots like that, a book, a painting, an installation . . . it’s all fraudulent.”
He had just returned from a painting trip of his own there, he said. “With a lovely young model. I call her Magie—and she is magic. The best I’ve had for years. Fearless, you know? I’d like to do more with her. But you should go to Cassis. You’d like it. In fact, come with me!”
When it is time for me to go, we exit through the garden where he wants to show me a metal gazebo he has made for trailing roses. He exhorts me again to go to Cassis and presents me with a granite pineapple and a severed hand.
A
cold wind whipped my hair across my face as I stood by the wall in the garden.
A granite pineapple and a severed hand.
I had assumed Dom had bought them at the reclamation yard. Rachel’s words played and replayed in my head. Could they possibly be different ones, bought by Dom, not by coincidence (that would be impossible) but after remembering the ones given to Rachel?
I dismissed that idea in seconds. Surely it would require a great deal of luck to find such specific and odd ephemera.
And yet—what did it matter if she had left them with her ex-husband? Perhaps she had given them to him, knowing how much he would like them. There was nothing sinister in that.
“W
hy don’t you come and sit here?” asked Dom when I went inside. “You keep scurrying away like a little mouse, always disappearing off to new corners where I can’t find you.”
He had lit a fire, only semi-effectively, in the sitting room off the kitchen and had pulled a couple of chairs and a low table closer to the hearth. Normally, this room was so bare and chilly we tended to keep to the natural warmth of the kitchen.
I shook off my coat and said I’d bring us some coffee.
“It’s made. What have you been up to?” he asked.
“Oh, just . . . nothing much. Looking around the garden.”
“Well, come and warm up here.”
So we sat together, sipping coffee in near silence. The fire popped and emitted small belches of smoke. After a while I fetched my book. Dom went off to bring in more logs.
Despite the spitting flames, the room was still cold. Flakes of plaster floated down from between the narrow lath beams of the ceiling. More fell on the pages I was reading. After a while, it seemed like snow coming through the roof. I shifted my chair and suddenly wondered why Dom was taking so long.
A long, creaking sound made me jump. A sound like a door forced from the position it had been stuck in for years. Was it Dom somewhere else in the house? I craned my head and listened. Nothing, only the fire. Then another, louder creak. I thought of sailing ships in tempests, and shivered. Another larger lump of plaster came down.
I was almost on my feet when the room erupted. A roaring sound, followed by a huge crash as I was suddenly pulled with some force into the kitchen doorway. The noise of falling masonry and wood shattering on the stone floor was earsplitting. Then a scream, which had come from me. At the moment it happened, I had no idea what had jerked me out of danger.
Then my face was against Dom’s chest, and he was swearing and shaking as hard as I was. Only feet away, the ceiling had collapsed onto the chair where I had been sitting. A cloud of gray dust hung over the heap of rubble. Above was an ominous black space. We were both choking.
“Oh my God,” Dom said, over and over again. “Did you not realize?”
“I heard some creaking noises, but I didn’t think—”
“If I hadn’t got back when I did—”
“Don’t . . .”
We clung to each other, hearts pounding. I concentrated on breathing, willing the panic to recede. If anything, Dom was trembling more violently than I was.
U
pstairs, in an unused room, I stashed the printout of the Francis Tully interview in a box containing files and papers of my own. Even as I did it, I felt guilty. Though that did not stop me thinking obsessively about what I’d read.
Rachel had written herself prominently into the interview. She was there on the page as a character alongside the subject in a way that—ordinarily, at least—only seasoned journalists were. Did that say anything about her, or was that simply the required form of this particular piece?
It was pretty clear that the interview with Tully had been a tricky one, and yet it seemed that they had ended by warming to each other. She came across as patient and resourceful, confident in the manner in which she bearded the lion in his den. He had enjoyed her company enough to give her the stone hand and the pineapple.
Francis Tully must still be living at his house in the Alpilles. Who knew, perhaps—just perhaps—I would go up to his village and hope to find him in the café. I could tell him I remembered reading a newspaper feature, and ask about the woman journalist who had written it. What if they really had got on well after the sticky start, and they had kept in touch?
Then I stopped myself. This was pure fantasy, clutching at straws. Don’t tie everything into knots and conspiracies, he had said to her, and I, too, would do well to heed the warning. There didn’t have to be a common thread; for all that I was doing my best to spin one out of nothing.
As it transpired, I never had the chance to test my nerve, because when I did go back down to the Internet café in Apt, waiting until the friendly man at the counter had no other customers before being admitted to make a rapid search for references to Francis Tully, I found myself reading obituaries. The old man had fallen down dead in his beloved garden some six months earlier.
I
t was around then, at the time the ceiling collapsed and I found out more about Rachel, that Dom started retreating more into himself during the days, leaving me to my own devices.
He began taking long, solitary walks whatever the weather. He would set off in the car, while I stayed behind, reading and cooking and thinking. When he returned, he was full of stories and small observations, though, and wanted to share them. I rationalized that this was all for the good, that it never seemed we were living together too closely, that it was a way of ensuring boredom would not set in.
If ever I did start to worry, I persuaded myself that this was normal in such a relationship, given that we spent so many hours in close proximity. There were plenty of times when he was attentive and concerned that I was happy; it was my oversensitivity and lack of confidence that made me misread the situation. I was so in love with him that the thought of our life together slipping through my fingers was unbearable.
And we always came together at night. He would put winter’s wild offerings from the garden in a vase by my side of the bed: sprigs of evergreen rosemary and pine, translucent dried circles of honesty. He always asked me if I needed anything, and bought me an electric heater for the bare, cell-like room on the ground floor where I liked to sit reading.
One book in particular I kept returning to at that time:
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier. It has none of the intellectual cachet of
Madame Bovary
, or
Anna Karenina
, or
Crime and Punishment
, but for me, its modesty is the point. The story has an emotional pull and a truth all its own. Dom’s wife was called Rachel, another of Daphne’s heroines; was it that coincidence that drew me to
Rebecca
rather than any other novel about a woman haunted?