Picture this. It is early morning. He is sitting in a lime green moulded plastic armchair on a little terrace, looking across a river. The light has not yet hardened and the water is still as glass.
He is in his seventy-seventh year, naked but for a striped blue wrap. He is tall, tanned and showing evidence of a fondness for olives aux anchois and saucisson sec. A full head of white hair is still awry from sleep and he wears a two-week growth of beard, some pepper, mostly salt.
He is mainly reading, occasionally glancing into an untrammelled sky of deepening blue. The terrace, white-tiled with functional metal railings, is in shadow. But the opposite bank is in full sunlight.
Tall trees, ash and alder, elm and poplar, crowd densely up the bank, a riot of green. Fringing the river at their feet lies a carpet of water primrose, rafts of floating foliage constellated with brilliant yellow flowers.
Mid-stream, on a partially submerged tree, a large seagull has sole dominion until – a sudden iridescent flash – a kingfisher darts onto the next-door branch.
He sees this out of the corner of his eye as he lays down the book and gazes into the middle distance. Despite a faint, familiar morning buzz of anxiety, he is content with where he finds himself, in geography and in life. Most of all, though, he is in a state of wonder at what he has been reading.
Lent to him by an artist friend, Immortal Thoughts: late style in a time of plague is one of the most extraordinary books he has ever come across. In attempting to write about it he finds he cannot avoid adopting its style. It seems almost to demand this as an act of homage.
Nineteen short essays, portraits, sketches – he’s not really quite sure what they are – speak of the late work of nineteen great European artists: Rembrandt, Titian, Michelangelo, Goya, Bonnard, Cézanne, Constable, El Greco, Velásquez and so on.
The portraits – if that’s what they are – are so intimate, so vivid, that each man (and it is all men except for one) and his work seem both to fuse as entities and yet to stand entirely separate from one another: the man or woman a flesh-and-blood character, often racked with illness or debt or doubt; the canvas or paper or board or whatever it is, a tabula rasa where the miracle of late style occurs.
These painters are old, although many of them no older than he is. Almost all have led difficult lives for one reason or another. All, throughout their lives, have been focused to the point of obsession on their work; to paint, their sole raison d’être.
And as they come to approach the end, they are all reaching for something, some expression of the ineffable which represents at once the sum of, and the setting aside of, everything they know about painting and life.
‘This storm of temperament is true painting,’ says the author, referring to the artist Soutine but drawing a parallel with most of the other artists in his book, ‘an inexplicable combination of seeing, feeling, memory, response, imagination and profound oddness.’
He particularly likes the ‘profound oddness’. But what strikes him most is that all of this – this storm of temperament – is precisely what the author himself has mustered in his book.
Christopher Neve, an octogenarian painter and art historian, will die within a couple of years of writing it. This is his own expression of late style. Time and death are ever present in the book. In some inexplicable way they seem both to weigh heavily, yet lie lightly, on the author.
In emphasis of their presence, Neve punctuates the artists’ portraits with a description of his experience of the pandemic, when he takes himself off alone to the old country house of his childhood.
There, in the company of these painters he loves, he charts the progress of the plague while counterpointing its horrors with exquisite descriptions of the abundant blooming that is taking place around him.
In the garden of the old house and the fields beyond, nature runs riot during the remarkable period of fine weather that arrived, like a state of grace, during the early summer of that first terrible year.
There is something transcendent in Neve’s writing, he finds, that touches him in a way he has only once before experienced. Many years ago, in the midst of reading Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections he had what felt in the moment like an out-of-body experience, while walking alone early one morning on a beach in Brittany.
Now, as he finally lays down Immortal Thoughts he has a similar sensation. It feels that he has read something of profound significance, both personal and universal – which he doesn’t fully understand yet.
It is to do not only with creativity and his own late style (if he has such a thing), but with the miraculously simple yet impossibly mysterious business of being alive.
Immortal Thoughts: Late Style In A Time of Plague, by Christopher Neve, is published by Thames & Hudson.
A Few Kind Words 