Myself and Marco Polo

Chatto & Windus, London, 1989     ISBN: 0701135719
Random House, New York, 1990     ISBN: 0394582969
Picador, London, 1990     ISBN: 0330316710
Faber, London, 2008     ISBN: 0

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, 1990 (best first novel, Eurasian section)


German translation as Ich und Marco Polo, Kindler, Berlin, 1991     ISBN: 346340141X


     Bendeniz ve Marco Polo

Turkish translation by Güzin Özkan

Ayr2nt2 Edebiyat, Istanbul, 1998     ISBN: 9789755391793

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chapter xxvi

‘You must begin,’ said the master painter, ‘with imitation.’

‘Do you mean,’ she said quickly, unable to check herself from using more breath than was necessary, gasping from the embarrassment even she might have felt at this early stage of her apprenticeship, in a studio where otherwise they were boys and men who sat at high desks by high windows, ‘the imitation of nature? For I think I showed you, before you were gracious enough to accept me as your pupil—‘, and at the rise of an eyebrow she stumbled, then went on: ‘I mean, before I was admitted here, when you were examining my work, I think I showed you, or at least you saw, some studies I had made for my former teacher, studies of flowers, waterfalls, I think there were some of trees, and a theatre, I distinctly remember a theatre, with so many figures in the stockade, and an old man conversing with a youth—‘

’You will know,’ he began severely, before relaxing to a lower and warmer tone, ‘that the imitation of nature is reserved for great and wise talents. Theirs is the second level of perfection. Those at the first level, the greatest and wisest, imitate nothing, but instead accomplish the creation of what has not been known in the world until their realization of it. But we must begin at the third level, which is that of the imitation of art. I think you are ready for this challenge: your studies whispered as much to me, whatever their other noises, which we must try to render into silence.’

They had been standing close to the door: an adieu had perhaps been prepared before the master’s first words, and indeed the pupil was carrying her brushes in a long-strapped linen bag dangling almost to the ground from her left hand, and she was waiting as if to go, showing her back, with the master facing her and also facing the row of other students to the right, each face turned a little from its white paper-screened window to observe the dialogue. But then she herself turned a little, into the studio again, her eyes presumably following the master as he strode to a tall teak cupboard on his dais and removed a box, a box covered with paper that had an exuberant tracery of vegetal design in vivid green on a white ground. She raised her right hand to receive it.

‘Here. Let this be your model. Call me to your studio when your work is completed.’

So she took the box to her studio, and drew off the lid, which came stiffly, with a stuttering scrape of cardboard on cardboard, and found inside a scroll, which she carefully withdrew as if it might fall apart at a rough gesture, and unrolled on the plain pine table before her. The scroll had perhaps not been surveyed in many years: it wanted, like a disturbed caterpillar, like a caterpillar which has been asked a terrifying question, to return to the safety of coiling. But she held the silk-backed paper with a slightly spread hand at each side, and stopped its bashful impulse at a stage where rolled cornets formed at the four corners of a sheet that was perhaps four feet wide and eighteen inches deep. Then she looked, or rather continued to look, for astonishment and intense inspection had begun with her first glimpse of the picture.

It was a fête champêtre of the Tang dynasty, a scene of the utmost civility and liveliness. To the left, almost brished by her thumb, for the margins were narrow, was a teahouse, seen in oblique perspective so that the front of the building rose and receded as the viewing eye traveled rightward. This teahouse was a wooden building of simple design, with steps on the left (that is, facing out from the picture) up to a veranda that went the length of the façade, and with enclosed quarters behind (that is, to the left). Ladies in gowns of superb color—peacock blue, tangerine, ultramarine—were stationed on the steps, seeming to wait there, though very possibly some were passing as they went on errands into and out from the interior; indeed, a few were carrying trays, or pots, or baskets. Other figures, in jackets of sapphire and vermilion, were lolling out through windows, cups poised in their hands. Then in front of the building, or to the right of the picture, was a low fence of a single wooden rail reaching from one squat square post to another, and one might imagine that the fence completely encircled, or rather enrectangled, the teahouse, except for a single break in the middle of its front length to admit entrances and exits. And some figures were indeed moving, or placed as if they were moving, toward or away from this aperture, in both directions, while others sat on the unpainted white within the enclosure, which extended almost to the center point of the scene.

The other half was similarly thronged. There was a small circle of women sitting with their legs pushed out in front of them, or reclining on one elbow, their gowns, in prescribed folds, outlined in black against the whiteness, so that they might have seemed to be floating on a cloud were it not that their postures intimated gravity. A man with a topknot was seated looking away from them, his back arched forward in the substantial, purposeful curve of a musical instrument, his hands clasped around his tightly folded knees. Some children, their heads excessively large and spherical, were running in an uneven line at the front, toward the teahouse. A man with parallel lines of beard and an oyster cloak was leaning rightward on a black stick, while the tall black fin of his headdress reared in the opposite direction toward the widening curl of its finial. And facing him, perhaps listening to some story, looking upward perhaps only because he had been drawn smaller as being of lesser importance, was a much younger man, hatless. Servants, as one would suppose them to be, stood bearing lanterns on long canes, or perhaps slowly walked, emerging from the copse of drooping willows at the right edge, toward the back. And from those clumped bells of tremulous striations there came also a horizontal line that marked the river bank, taking the eye back along to the knobbed roof of the teahouse, past the round-topped triangles, striped like geodes in section, that stood for mountains, past the sky clamant with characters and flying with the impressions of seals in black and cinnabar.

She raised her head from the view and sighed deeply, no doubt in wonderment at the liveliness and civility of the scene, but no doubt too in mingled fear and excitement at the magnitude of the task that the picture dumbly commanded. One might wonder if the master had chosen this particular scroll as best fitted to bring out the pupil’s skills, or to challenge her acquiring of new ones, or whether his choice had been made at random, whether perhaps he might even have been ignorant of what was contined within the box he thrust into his pupil’s waiting hand.

However, she set to work at once, and wiped the dust from four lead weights of various sizes, which she placed on the corners of the outstretched scroll. Then she fetched from a shelf some papers of similar quality, and compared them closely with the painting, eyes flashing from the finished work to the virginal candidate under inspection, until she found a piece that matched in color, weave and weight what the original artist had used. Then with a rule and a point of silver she measured the painting and cut her paper accordingly; and then again with the rule and the point of silver she noted the dimensions of the larger features, and plotted on her paper where the teahouse, fence, figures, trees, bank and mountains were to go. Satisfied with her work so far, and leaving on the table the pinioned picture and her own paper stippled with dots as with a fine shower of pepper, she went to her bed, for the paper was now beginning to turn gray more uniformly in the dimming light of that first day.

But many times the sun was to rise and set while the copy grew toward the original. Meanwhile she did not return to the master, but sought advice from her earlier teachers about so many things that troubled her. How had painters of the Tang obtained their vibrant scarlet, which covered the paper with thick color, obscuring the fibers, yet had the opulent mattness of the petal of a pelargonium? Were the black outlines of the teahouse’s timbering to be set in place before or after the wash of brown? Was the malachite of Tachu available at this period? Would the tendrilous branches of the trees have been done with a pen or with a fine brush? Fortunately the artistic traditions of the Tang were well recorded and remembered, so that an ink-stained finger would be able to touch a reference in some treatise, or else tap at the table while thinking proceeded and then rise in the air with the realization that an answer was known.

And so the pupil gathered her information; though much more came from the painting directly. She might need help from outside in matters of technique, but the welter of data was in front of her, awaiting only her observation: the picture was not only her model but also the system of instructions which told her how she might make her reproduction. She did not rush at obeying. Instead she mesured and looked and compared with the most intimate attention while engaged on a roof cornice, or a pleat of drapery, or a branch, or a face. She was careful to imitate every stroke of pen or brush, to equal with precision every color, to follow the original even in its errors, as where a dab of kingfisher blue had been only roughly placed to coincide with the outline of the shirt of a boy fishing at the riverbank, or where the line between two planks extended beyond the edge of the teahouse roof. Such intensive work required the fullest concentration she could summon, and she was able to work for only an hour in the morning and a further hour in the afternoon, spending the rest of each day in reading, or in the composition of poems, or in lazing with her lover, or in indolent conversation, but never in painting or even sketching, for she was unable to proceed with any work of that kind while so much was being demanded by the Tang scene.

In future years she would feel, though with so much regret, that this had been the most difficult, the most absorbing and the mot complete artistic work she had ever undertaken. And it seemed to her even while she was engaged on the work that her burden was so much heavier than that of the original artist, for he had been able to paint and draw with infinitely greater freedom. No doubt the picture was itself the reproduction of some view in his head, compounded perhaps of elements taken from life and of course from other paintings: his own, those of fellow artists of his period, and those of revered colleagues from the past. But in matters of detail he had been free. What did it matter if there were twenty-seven or twenty-eight branches limply cascading from the bole of a tree? What did it matter if the green of a robe of a lady at the teahouse steps were just a certain degree yellower than that of a boy’s waving belt? What did it matter precisely where the topknot man was seated? Indeed, might he not be replaced, without damage to the composition, by a tub of chrysanthemums, or by a girl ceremoniously raising one leg, as in a dance? And it occurred to her that her knowledge of the painting was incommensurably greater than that of the original artist, because she was obliged to measure and consider and prepare every action she made at the paper, doing so with reference to what he had done unfetterdly. And sometime from this she would conclude—especially toward the end of her work, when pride in her achievement was becoming intolerably hard to strangle—that her copy meant immeasurably more than the original, because purpose was drawn into the paper in every detail, because nothing was done at the end of a long process of deliberation. But then she considered that all her effort of will was directed toward its own extinction, since the measure of her success was the exactness with which her copy resembled something that had been created so much more freely, and by another.

Finally one morning the painting was finished, and she stood back to look at her table with the same wonderment as weeks before, but now with mingled relief and melancholy that the work had been completed. Of course, the copy was not quite identical with the original, despite all her pains. If she looked from one to the other with the most scrupulous inspection, then she could see where a line of hers might be thinner at some point than a line of his, because her brush had carried less ink, or been finer, or moved more swiftly. Or the texture of a washed area might be different because of some dissimilarity in the congregation of paper fibers. Or a portion of black might have less luster because it had dried more quickly.

These differences, however, she reasonably judged to be insignificant: the picture was ready for the later stages of its preparation as a simulacrum, and she called in first an engraver of seals to examine the prints which the artist and subsequent owners of the painting had placed like kites on his work, bearing monograms or in some cases more considerable inscriptions. Copies of the seals were duly prepared without error, sealmakers being used to fine work in a mirror world; and inks of matching black and cinnabar were compounded. Then, with judicious care and due measurement, and with all possible allowances for the variations in ink density that had in the original case been so arbitrarily permitted across each seal, the impressions were made.

And it seemed to the pupil that this was a point of crucial coincidence between original and copy, for the imprinting of a seal is a mechanical action done always in the same way, the square or circular block of stone being pressed between thumb and forefinger and rocked on the paper, so that here her hand was in the same flow as his had been so long before, whereas who can say with what movements he had darted and peered with his brushes and pens? Also there was the collusion of speed. While painting she had been moving so much more slowly than he, whereas now she felt herself to be reproducing not only his work but also his physical activity as he created that work, her nerves and muscles operating to the same purpose and with the same accord. Further, there was the agreement in risk. A misplaced seal (though that was unlikely given the precision of the anticipatory measurement), or an excess or underfill of ink (though all efforts had been made), or a smudge (though accident had been as far as possible excluded), would cause for either of them far graver damage than the occasional slip of pen or brush: an inappropriate or unlovely impression might have to be scraped off, and the worrying of the paper would be difficult to repair, disfiguring perfection whether of original or copy.

But against this rapture of closeness there was the poignancy of deliberae imperfections. Several of the seal prints on the original, it was obvious, could have been better performed: a red rectangle with two characters excised in white was poorly inked at the bottom left corner, and a large black square conveying perhaps a whole poem had been slightly swiveled clockwise in the pressing. The pupil was tempted to right these mistakes, for though she felt that apparent misjudgements or carelessnesses in the actual painting might have artistic value, there seemed no reason to find a purpose or a point in some failing of a mechanical process. And yet she refused to effect any improvement, but placed the impressions as exactly as possible in the way they had been placed before. And her tact was rewarded. No scraping away of fault was necessary, and she stood back to look at the seal marks. Of course, the copy was not quite identical with the original, despite all her pains. If she looked from one to the other with the most scrupulous inspection, then she could detect slight differences in the inking of seals, or in the uptake of ink by the paper fibers, or in the patterns of tiny round white shadows left by bubbles.

These differences, however, she reasonably judged to be insignificant: the picture was ready for the last stages of its preparation as a simulacrum, and she went to a merchant for silk on which to mount it, finding a piece that might have been cut from the same cloth that had served the Tang artist: it needed only to be rubbed with dust and to have two ovoid stains applied (chicken fat seemed an appropriate material, carefully dripped and encouraged into the right configurations). It was perhaps at this point that she wondered whether the master had intended her to go so far in copying the painting; but she knew she must. She had a woodcarver reproduce the twin poles of ebony to which the original painting was bound, and then she gummed the copy to the silk and fastened the silk to the poles, adding a tie of brown silk ribbon identical with the original’s once it had been zealously thumbed a while.

But she left to the end what might have been the most difficult part of her task: imitating the characters. For the essence of calligraphy is in its speed, and the lettering of the Tang artist bore witness to hsi quick virtuosity, telling not only of the painting in the flourishes of its poetry but also of the artist’s agile touch and swoop. The pupil knew that if she were to rival his speed, then her penmanship would easily reveal her handiwork, not because her characters would necessarily be inferior, but because they would have her style. On the other hand, to copy the original placing and shape of each stroke would require slow labor, and it would be exceedingly hard to catch the dash of the artist’s script at so much lesser a pace. Perhaps it was because of these quandaries that she had kept the calligraphy till last, but eventually she decided that she would have to make her imitation in slow motion, yet make it so carefully that she reproduced the full substance of energy and life that was present in the original. So she proceeded, and after two weeks of the most painstaking work, more painstaking even than the effort of copying the painting had been, the superscription was complete. Of course, the copy was not quite identical with the original, despite all her pains. If she looked from one to the other with the most scrupulous inspection, then she could spot how the ink spread differently in the filaments of the paper at one point, or how the contour of the arch at the top of one stroke was not quite in agreement, or how the ink of a horizontal bar was grainier.

These differences, however, she reasonably judged to be insignificant. All that remained was to complete the aging of the copy with a splash of tea, some scuffing at the lower edge, a wafting of ash to tone down in places the brilliance, and the odd tuck, crease or fold. Then she rolled her scroll tightly, until it imitated even the caterpillar shyness of the original. Finally she hung the two paintings side by side on the wall of her studio. They were identical. But no: one of the original’s ebony poles had an incision that neither she nor the woodcarver had noticed before; it was carefully reproduced on the fellow. Now they were indeed identical, except in such insignificant discrepancies as she had noted, and though she had expected to feel elated at this point, still the elation was mingled with sadness and even foreboding. But she sent for the master.

The next morning he arrived, and without saying a word walked through her house and out into the garden, where she had her studio. He stood for many minutes looking at the two paintings, examining now one and then the other, or flipping his eyes from one to the other, or standing back to look at both together, or craning near to stare at some detail. And then he turned and smiled broadly at his pupil, who had been lingering close to the doorway.

‘Many congratulations! Your success has been so complete that I am afraid you will have to tell me which is the original and which your copy. For even though this is a great and famous work, one which I have studied through many years, still you have reproduced it in every detail.’

And then she realized: she had forgotten which was which. She looked at the two paintings. She thought hers must be the one on the right, but then she thought no, it must be the one on the left. But she would look stupid or worse if she hesitated, and so she said: ‘The one on the left is the work of the Tang painter, that on the right my copy.’

‘Then,’ he said, ‘I will take the original back with me. Again, many congratulations.’

She must stop him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Could I keep it for one more day after so long? I have spent so much time in examining its proportions, materials and techniques, but I have yet to make acquaintance with its essence.’

The master looked at the two paintings. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘The great work has an indefinable aura that no imitation, even one as excellent as your own, can quite recapture.’ He smiled and was gone.

Immediately after a farewell at the street the pupil rushed back to the two paintings. She looked at places where she knew there was a difference: in the texture of a wash, or the inking of a seal print, or the shape of the top of a calligraphic stroke. But in no case could she remember with certainty which author was indicated by the difference. Sometimes, and with blissful gratitude, she would feel confident that she had found some feature which unmistakeably was hers. But then, and with renewed agitation, she would find on the same painting something she knew was the great artist’s. What should she do? If by mistake she returned the copy to the master, then an important painting would henceforth be known only in an imitation made centuries later, while the original lay unregarded as a journeyman’s travail. Perhaps the best course, she considered, would be to destroy one of the paintings, but then there was an even chance that a great work of the Tang would be lost forever. Or perhaps she should go to the master and admit what had happened but this idea she did not long entertain, for it would not only make her look foolish but also place the master in an awkward situation: he had asserted that th difference was evident; he would either have to admit that this was not so, or else himself make a judgment that would certainly be matter of chance, for she was convinced that if she could not tell the two paintings apart, after so many weeks of working with them, then decidedly he could not, for all his years of study. She looked again at the two paintings. One of them ought to resound with centuries and greatness; the other should be loud with the noise of her own strains and efforts. Both were silent. She retired to her bedchamber, and the next morning tossed a coin, which as it spun in the air, catching gold on its revolving rim in the rising sun, decided whether the original or the facsimile was returned to the master.