A Perverse Romance: a Tourist Dance to Art and Satirical Provocation

By Pru La Motte

A Perverse Romance is a satirical tale of artist Hephzibah Brown, who is persuaded by Cedric, the Imp of Perversity, to follow him to the recently independent Ghana, following with the temptation that they will compose a tourist book for him to write and for her to illustrate. She does follow, but knowing his unreliability, she changes it to a book about tourists—one a pragmatist and the other an idealist. And more than this, her tourists will be women. The novel becomes an examination of real life being a form of transience.

How I use satire: Satire is the uncomfortable life of being disturbed but draws to our notice the human capacity of doubling our subjective thinking. This is a philosophical impact, which philosopher Thomas Nagel brought to my attention in mind and cosmos (materialism): “Subtracts from the physical world as its major object is everything mental—consciousness—meaning intention or purpose.” It is the absence known but ignored too hard. Subjectivity becomes fictive but remains to challenge through satire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jun 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781984504937

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Pru La Motte.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018915269

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-9845-0495-1

                Softcover        978-1-9845-0494-4

                eBook            978-1-9845-0493-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 12/28/2018

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Episodes

1959–60: London, Paris, Colmar, Ghana, London

1.   The Grocer’s Daughter and the Imp of Perversity

2.   Loitering

3.   Love, Lust, Laughter, L’Empathy, L’Impossible

4.   Swinging, Part 1

5.   AE’s Dance, Part 1

6.   Swinging, Part 2

7.   Drawing Is Another Way of Writing

Present-Day Adelaide

8.   From a Retrospection to a Cul de Sac

This book is

dedicate to Poet and beloved friend VIV CAIN

I would also like to acknowledge the Central School of Art Master classes in drawing by CHRIS ORCHARD and Rob Guttridge, which took me to one of my major themes: Drawing is Another way of Writing.

Pru

1.

The Grocer’s Daughter and the Imp of Perversity¹

One evening in the late winter of 1959, a woman is striding assertively along a London street. She wears men’s trousers and boots and has a very long, hand-knitted scarf that ruffles behind her neck like the irrelevant wings of a flightless bird. She is walking fast because that is her way of moving around the world, this time towards a pub where artists congregate, talk, flirt, and get drunk. However, she also appears to have a continuing interest in some of the men she passes. She glances at their faces and seems to assess them, which would be only noticed by a few, because there is only a moment to note where her eyes have taken her.

Her unpolished boots and workmanlike trousers were perhaps bought in a clothing shop in King’s Road but are more likely second-hand, because they don’t shine and flare in the current fashion. Instead, they tell that her working life is not in an office. The scarf her mother knitted to keep her warm in the cold country is striking in the width of its horizontal stripes, knitted in a plain, backward swinging stitch. It is rough looking but probably soft to touch and may signify something about its wearer, or perhaps not. And this comedic ruffling of her scarf must not distract us from considering her face, and in particular her hair. Her skin is pale from living through an English winter, and her red, curly hair is unkempt and almost too big for her face; one can confidently say that it is not surprising that people notice as she walks by.

She has just completed a degree at a London art school, and her first name is Hephzibah, which is rare in the Antipodean city of her birth; we can guess that her mother may have declared, A good name for someone who has the ambition to be an artist, especially when your last name is Brown. Yes, Hephzibah was too strange and Brown was too undistinguished, and gradually she came to believe that Hephzibah Brown sounded good; the fancy linked to the indubitably plain, like a strong stem holds up an exotic bloom. Holding on to her mother’s comment and the idea of being an exotic bloom gave her the confidence to ignore the schoolyard bullies of her youth. Bullies, or in that case only mini-teasers, didn’t like being towered over, ignored, or being told they are not listening in their endless attempts to show contempt. In time, they stopped, because even they guessed it wasn’t serving any purpose. And she grew to love the buzzing z in her name because it shouted, Take notice! in a busy sort of way. This made it possible to ignore those who were too timid to cope with the strange. She thanked her mother for giving her an assertive name that, in her opinion, was just right for an artist.

This evening on a London street, she takes for granted the traffic noise and others who share the same pavement, except for some who capture her special attention. As an artist, or artisan as she sometimes insists, her training has been to observe and note the movement of bodies and consider the facial features of those she finds most remarkable. Tonight, her focus is on the men with sliding eyes, those who stare from a distance when it might not be noticed, but whose eyes slip past the object of their attention as they draw nearer: the men with sliding eyes. She rudely glares back when they pass to confound their initial stare, but also to get a closer look as she shifts from irritated attachment to an objective calculation of a bigger eye or a crooked mouth, with a mere moment to make a judgement as she passes in the night. She is still a little awestruck by these be-hatted men who stare and slide away from her and notes this is a particularly British habit, maybe in their well-mannered code, in contrast to other parts of the world where they might stare, if they are interested enough to notice at all.

At some point in this failed game of teasing those who stare and then pretend they’re not, Hephzibah loses interest, because walking firmly ahead of her is a man who attracts her attention more, but not his face, because she only sees him from behind. From a posterior view, he is tall and not hunched from the cold but shielded from it in a warm overcoat and scarf, topped by a head-cosseting felt hat. More important for her interest in his guise, his elbows are pushed backwards so his hands can reach into his trouser pockets, and this leads to his coat being loosened and to flow behind. It is a coat for warmth that absurdly increases the flow of cool air. The pair—she following him with her crenulating scarf, and he with his billowing coat might signal to an observer that in some ways they are a pair of the same, as he grips the pavement with every stride and projects an air of supreme self-confidence, while she projects a buoyancy of spirit. However, a flowing and striped scarf and ballooning coat don’t make this so.

Hephzibah Brown has learned to love a life model who is self-confident and able to show the artist drawing him how his limbs are in the process of leading from one stationary position to another, who can take her imagination to a story, or just a meaning beyond the craft of mere representation. She sees herself as what she has been trained to be—an artisan, while others would certainly describe her work as self-revelatory in her determination.

Her pace quickens, lest she lose the strong male figure that has excited her. Perhaps he reminds her of another that she once walked behind on wintry days and who also paced majestically with hands in his coat pockets. The gait of the striding man has provoked this youthful memory of walking silently to church every Sunday behind her parents: behind, because there was not enough room for all three to walk side by side on a footpath narrowed first by oak trees and, nearer their destination, flowering gums. She always walked behind her father rather than her mother—for what reason, she does not know, her father always imperious in a felt hat, long coat, and scarf, his hands in his pockets, which seemed to express a firm self-belief.

She is a little bothered by this memory. Her father has recently died. She is bothered also by a particular memory of her increasing impatience with this ritual before she firmly rejected it. One Sunday, walking as usual behind her father, she wondered if her parents knew she was there, so she stopped and paced backwards to test this supposition. There was quite a distance between them before her mother looked round and discovered her absence. They made a joke of it, but Hephzibah was serious. This was the beginning of her new assertiveness. They guessed she was too old to continue with such a childish formation, but there was no discussion.

Her foot touches an object on the footpath, and, looking down, she sees an apple sidling away. It has a red and green skin that glows despite the failing light, and she is momentarily diverted from her prey—if that is the right word—before she is ready to surrender him to the night. She stops and stretches to pick the apple up and, fondling its shiny skin, considers whether she could eat an apple found on the pavement. Probably not, but she can add it to her collection of found objects, because even if the apple will shrink, dull, dry, and end up as a wrinkled blob, like a very old man after years in the sun, she might need it to remind her how a decomposing apple, or even a man, dries out. Glancing up, she’s sorry to see the tall man has disappeared. She turns a corner to reach her destination and joins her drinking companions.

A beer in her hand, she is introduced to a friend of a friend, and they ask questions of each other, only to be interrupted by the man in the hat from an anterior view; he smiles as he radiates warmth and amiability. She notices that one of his lids droops, making one eye seem bigger than the other. She takes pleasure in asymmetry. He has light-brown eyes that seek the gaze of those he talks with, and she notes that the drooping lid saves his expression from the greedy look of a predator. There are no signs of lines that sometimes become furrows in the faces of men who have thicker skin. He’s very handsome, conventionally so, but beyond reminding her of her father as he strode ahead of her, this is where the resemblance ends. Her father had a much more rugged face and red hair. Hephzibah inherited the colour of her father’s hair; her curls and thin skin are from her mother.

The handsome young man announces that he too comes from Australia—Adelaide, he says—and she hears in his voice the suburb where he probably grew up.

She responds, Not hard to tell.

And he asks, Are you the grocer’s daughter?

She’s surprised by this question. She guesses he has recognised her last name when she was introduced to the newcomer, but there are many Browns in the telephone book. Yes, her father is a grocer.

After a pause, she asks, Should I answer by asking who your father is, what he does, and where you went to school?

He laughs, pretending she is only mocking their hometown, but he notices the bite in her reply that might be directed against his presumption of her more lowly status.

She continues, I walked behind you coming here and was very impressed by your stride.

Unfazed by this new direction and wondering if she’s about to make a pass on the grounds of the way he walked, he asks, Why? and she tells him about walking behind her parents to church every Sunday and how her father too wore a felt hat and walked imperiously.

I don’t walk imperiously, I just walk comfortably, he says, taking her remark as a challenge.

Confidently, she corrects. You walked with your hands in your pockets as he did, but I knew him as having an imperious manner, and she then shifts the conversation to her art making: It has become a habit of mine to take an interest in the physiognomy and stance of people about me. In my work, I draw more than a replica of my sitter, was taught to look and find character that is projected through movement. About to continue, she stops herself and asks, What are you doing in London?

Waiting to hear about a job in Africa as a geologist—prospecting for gold, he quickly adds, smiling as he does because he knows it’s a good line and adds, I’m running out of money waiting.

Oh, I’ve never met a gold prospector before, she says. Have you dug much up? to which he doesn’t reply, but continuing their conversation of reticence and revelation, he says, "I write poems, and when I was at university I wrote a satirical sketch for The Footlight’s Club. Then he adds, Can I be an artist too?"

If you don’t dig up enough gold? she queries, without expecting an answer, adding quickly, I’m looking for a model, but you’d have to take your clothes off.

Unfazed, he asks, How much do you pay?

Peanuts, she replies, and so their banter continues, because each feels a strong attraction for the other, and both are experiencing the unease of being underestimated, which results in a constant testing of the other’s staying power, one beer after another, joined by other drinkers, who stay for a while and then move on, as they hold on to their meeting and stay together till the party begins to break up. She slips away without saying goodbye.

Walking back to her studio, which doubles as a place to sleep, she can feel the apple in her pocket nudging her thigh, as she thinks about the striding man and his charm, but then gets stuck on his opening gambit: Are you the grocer’s daughter?

Why did he ask if I was the grocer’s daughter? she mutters, continuing this irritation in her head, silently fashioning each word in the sentence as though she is addressing a confidante who is interested in gossip. Why should he instantly connect me with the name of my parents’ grocery stores?

She shrugs and supposes that Brown is a household name, because everyone buys flour, sugar, and butter, but then follows this with an Adelaide analysis that she usually avoids. She is not a member of an old family with a revered name that would bring forward instant recognition of respectability. She only had her parents, so her family only began when she was born; nobody had ever referred to her this way before.

She is attracted to him, she might even lust for him in bed, alone, when she can push her work out of her mind to think only of her bodily urges, hardly ever satisfied because she can envision them getting in the way of her ambitions. She doesn’t need a permanent lover (or any lover) at the moment and certainly not one, who comes from her town, who she reckons would discard her as easily as he charmed her, with his confidence and good looks.

She leaves that thought and returns to thinking about her father, and this takes her to something that she has really wanted to know since his recent death. Her family life has been happy but strange. Her family: There were just the three of them, no siblings, no cousins, aunts, uncles, or grandparents, and nobody she knew had been so deprived.

She did ask her mother, and her answer, That’s the way it turned out, explained nothing. Whenever she repeated the question, the answer always started with a sigh and then Rachel would say, Darling, I’ve already answered that question, and there is nothing more I can add.

However, apart from an unsatisfactory answer to her nagging queries, she still remembers with affection how her parents looked at her with loving eyes, encouraged her interest in art making, even her study overseas. They were never poor; there was always money to back up her education, first in Adelaide and then London. She was very distressed to hear of her father’s recent death. She considered him beloved. He left her a house that she didn’t know he owned.

Now that her London degree is behind her, she is itching to be free of her student life, free to determine what and how, especially with a stronger focus on personal ideas, which any art school will try and foster but also retard. She no longer wants to be a student in any conventional way. She’s convinced that it’s time to leave her clever teachers, who have come to empty her of herself. She feels the urgent need for contact with artists outside the institutions that pay them enough to stave off poverty, contact maybe even with the invading barbarians. She has heard a rumour that Aussie artists are leaving the Antipodes for London, but she doesn’t think that more of London is the right solution for her, no more exciting than walking to church with her parents over gum nuts and acorns. She’d like a people in danger, in a hot and untidy country. Mexico, she exclaims and adds, "I need to live in a hot and untidy country and learn a new language."

Her studio is on the upper floor of an old warehouse/clothing factory, with two large rather elegant windows and a high ceiling that needs a large iron stove to heat. She shares a bathroom and toilet with Helen, another committed artist who paints in another partitioned-off studio. They see more of each other in the pub than in their studios, but they have sometimes been supportive of each other’s work. Well, Hephzibah looks and comments. Helen looks with intense concentration, but in silence; she is the quietest person Hephzibah has ever known. Even in the pub, she only speaks when spoken to but seems to listen to everything that is said. As neighbours, they do not welcome intrusion into their space and time.

Helen is currently working on a series of imaginative landscapes that are created out of figures and faces that take on a green landscape hue with the addition of skin colours and lipstick pinks. Her neighbour’s painting interests Hephzibah, and Helen seems to return the compliment, gauging from the time she spends just looking. More, Hephzibah notices a print of Blake’s Nebuchadnezzar pinned to the wall, and as an admirer of William Blake’s engravings, she has spent hours looking at them in the National Gallery. She assumes that they have an interest in common, but they never quite get to talk about Blake, because conversation is so limited.

They also occasionally cook food at the same time in what is nearly a kitchen, because it has a stove, but the dishes have to be washed at a nearby tap. Hephzibah will tell Helen the gossip of the day, as Helen changes her face to reflect her agreement and pointedly listens when a bigger reaction is required, always catching the eye of the speaker. Very rarely, Hephzibah persist in her demands for more than a look or the nod of her head, and Helen will come out with a well-thought paragraph and then return to silence. Helen is the perfect neighbour for an obsessive like Hephzibah: interest but no intrusion.

In her studio, Hephzibah takes the apple out of her pocket and puts it with other found objects on one of her tables. Usually an orderly woman with her tools of trade, lately she has begun to mess that order with an ever-enlarging collection of road pickings, such as a pair of glasses driven over by a car that reduced them to a spider tangle, an oversized playing card marked by a car tread, bus and theatre tickets, and such oddities from her own body: hair that she cut off as a souvenir and nail clippings and a foot callus, the latter kept because they captured her attention, with no particular purpose in mind. They might be just right for something one day. This is where she will keep the apple, to observe the rotting process, convinced that she’ll find a use for it; a rotten apple is a symbol; she just has to find for what or whom.

She gets a glass of water and places it on the floor alongside her mattress, which is raised on a low platform. She sits on this make-do bed and undresses, but before getting under the blankets, she picks up the glass and drink half of it, puts it down, and only then slips under the blankets to settle into their warmth, with the disturbing thought of the man who strode ahead of her now lying alongside her. He is warm and naked.

The New Model

He finds her again in the same pub, and slightly inebriated, he accepts her invitation to pose; but not that night; she wants a sober model, not a drunk one. When sober, he has doubts; a portrait would have been all right, but she wants him naked, as a life model. She needs him enthroned before her, employed to take orders and to give his concentration to what she needs of him for a small payment. He knows that is what a professional model does, but he has never wanted to be one. He only takes off his clothes to wash his body or share a bed with a woman who, if he’s lucky, takes off her clothes as well. When they finally agree on a time, this first session goes well; she says what a good model he is, how much she enjoys drawing him as he makes his body as challenging as he can through short poses, with the threat of movement, and longer ones that also suggest an interim between one intention and another. She also draws his face in detail, as pose follows pose. Lately, she has been experimenting with a new technique: a replication by overimaging that suggests movement and also a third dimension. In the process, areas occur that can be solidified to a curtain affect and sometimes a solid colour by using pastels over the fixed charcoal of the original drawing. She has seen Francis Bacon’s figure paintings and guesses that his movement of features might have come about this way, might be the inspiration solidified in his mind by seeing blurred photographs that have led to his contorted