p e n c h a n t

Yesterday my wife and I took a small break from the pressures of work to visit the studio of Gari Melchers, which overlooks the Rappahannock River in Falmouth, Virginia. Melchers (1860-1932) was a world-known American impressionist. His wife, Corinne Mackall, who was 20 years his junior, was also an accomplished artist. They had no children.

The Melcher home is undergoing restoration and their personal collection of paintings, which includes works from Morisot and Rodin, is currently on display in the gallery off the studio. There is a portrait of Corinne and her brother, Leonard, painted by an unidentified artist when the two were young golden-haired children; he might have been four, she, two.

On the way home my wife remembered that years ago she had bought a set of books that had Corinne’s name written in them. I found them behind the glass doors of the secretary.

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I have always liked the books and made sure they’ve been kept safe; I’ve always been on the lookout for a matching volume of Shakespeare’s histories, if there is one. I opened the volumes, and found the same inscription inside each, handwritten in ink.

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Leonard Mackall was a bibliophile, and was known for giving books away to people he believed would appreciate and take care of them, rather than sell them at exorbitant prices. He gave away as many as 200 books a year, yet maintained a 12,000 volume library of his own. He was also known for discovering rare books. Once while in London, he visited the British Museum to ask to see a particular book on American exploration. The librarian refused his request on the reason that the book was too rare for even a specialist to handle. Not put off by the librarian’s aloofness, Mackall went to Oxford in search of another copy, found one in a second-hand shop, paid two shillings for it, and promptly returned to the British Museum. The librarian was speechless.

Corinne, ever sensitive to the needs of the community here in Fredericksburg, may have loaned out this two-volume set (to a student, I’m thinking) and never got them back (something my wife and I have experienced all too often). They ended up in the old junk shop in which my wife found them, years ago. Corinne (1880-1955) willed the Melcher estate to the commonwealth of Virginia. We plan to return the books to their rightful place.

The books were obvious birthday gifts from her brother: Corinne was born on February 27.

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Painting by Gari Melchers

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I wrote this years ago as a creative writing exercise. It’s a little quaint, but I think there’s something here worth saying.

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It wasn’t from anger or frustration, but from passion and pressure and overuse.

Picture a cutaway view of a room, like a medieval painting of a monk’s cubicle, womblike. The light is dreamy. On the tarnished floor sits a black swivel chair—sometimes it is a throne, sometimes a hard stool.

At present  it is a stool, and on it sits a body, bent and laboring. It is a man: he is an artist. Above him hovers a cloud, and in the cloud swirl myriad colors and shapes, images, vagaries and histories, questions and definitions and elusive unknowns. He takes a swipe at the cloud now and then, and like a wide-eyed child after a firefly, brings the brush down to draw it across the empty surface before him. He does this defiantly at times, at times with uncertainty, but always with quiet anticipation.

And there it appears: a thing once invisible, to see. Proof of intellect, of desire, of pain perhaps, of love.

It is the most brilliant spot in the room.

But look! See the spot spread, watch it grow; it washes over the astonished artist, spills across the room; it appears greater than even the cloud.

The cloud grows bright too. Sometimes it swells. But sometimes it rains gloomy and dark; sometimes it shrinks, almost vanishing completely.

Yet the artist works on and on and on.

One day his weary hand breaks—his work-weary, gnarled hand. He bandages it up.

But how the cloud grows, grows to an enormous height, towering over him! So he straps the brush to his bandaged hand, and once again plunges and plunges and plunges into an ocean of turbulent hues, storm-wracked, severe under northern light.

One day the brush breaks. It snaps on a rugged landscape of a face: a commanding, crowded brow filled with concept, and stained-glass mysteries of eyes.

The artist is left with his broken brush, splintered at the heart and hanging by an impossible shred. This brush that conjured magical fog, ran across glorious hills, sharpened life into focus, stirred a vast sea of spirits.

He wraps up the brush—wraps it and wraps it as with a shroud. But underneath the wraps, the brush remains broken.

The light is fading in the cutaway scene; the room becomes lone and silent. The cloud blackens; it rains and rains and rains and rains. It rains until there is no more rain. The cloud is gone.

But the brilliant spot is propped up in eternity for all the world to see.

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I’ll be taking a break from blogging for a few weeks in order to meet some deadlines.