The War Artist by Steven Kelly

'A study in the morality of art, a thriller and a love story all at once; this is a marvellous and bewitching novel.' - Metro


First Chapter

The Republic occupies a nineteen-thirties building on Russia Street in the west of London, not far from Notting Hill Gate a little further west or Bayswater Road to the south or Westbourne Grove to the north or Queensway to the east. From the outside the building has the austere functionality of its period, but a certain robust grandeur goes with this, and a quality of permanence and calm. It is a building which has meditated the years, followed the breath of the city itself to find its still point.

The Republic's owners, when they reopened the building after twelve years of closure and neglect, chose to retain the exterior's faded aspect. The brickwork remains encrusted with pigeon droppings and soot. Paint flakes from window sills and eaves. Only the insides of window panes are cleaned; their outsides are drizzled with grey rivulets and visibility changes with the seasons. Roof slates were replaced as a concession to common sense and the guttering and pipework is new. Every morning a cleaner swabs the pavement outside the kitchens and another scrubs the steps which lead to the club's main doorway.

Most of the building's ground floor is taken up by an entrance hall with marble staircases winding up the walls on either side. The entrance hall itself is spartan with neither paintings nor furniture or decoration of any type. The white marble floor is bare. The space smells faintly of lemon and iron. As one ascends either staircase there is a sense of removal: an optical effect. One might feel that one is going down and not up. It is an effect which is reinforced when, at the top of each staircase, one finds the three steps which descend from the landing into the Republic's foyer, a tiny, richly carpeted and dimly lit room, its closeness at odds with the airy asceticism of what has gone before.

In the foyer names and coats are taken and from there one ascends a further staircase and enters either left the restaurant, or right the Exchequer Room. The Exchequer Room is a large, warmly cluttered salon whose ceiling-to-floor windows face out over Russia Street, framed by heavy, faded red drapes which are drawn shut only in the depths of the coldest winter. In summer the windows are thrown open to let the noise of Russia Street echo in off the walls of the mansion blocks opposite.

The room is furnished with an eclectic mix of sofas and armchairs arranged around diverse coffee tables, many of them workshop pieces unsuited to this type of commercial use. The bar which extends along fully half of the room's south wall is cool and modern in design, an expanse of steel and black-stained wood. On the walls hang many paintings by well-known twentieth-century artists: Picasso, Bacon, Warhol, Pollock, Freud, Kokoschka, Hockney, even a Hitler but that was bought and displayed as a joke which has long-since worn thin.

At five o'clock one Thursday afternoon in August a man wearing dark sunglasses and an expensive suit sat in the north-west corner of the Exchequer Room, a corner coveted for its proximity in summer to a window and in winter to the huge fireplace set in the west wall. Charles Monk, curator of the Republic's art collection and godfather to the wealthiest non-identical twins on the planet, had eaten well in the Republic's restaurant: an English lunch of calf's brains in black butter; a mixed grill of liver and kidneys and steak, skuets; an eel pie, roast potatoes and greens and swede mash and gravy, all washed down with stout ale and champagne; then gooseberry tart and a great deal of cream. And now he had drunk port and coffee and smoked a cigar.

He was a large man, not obese but tall and thickly muscled after a lifetime of adventuring. He occupied his armchair with heavily-laden discomfort, twisting in his seat and shifting his weight from side to side. The armchair was new, custom-made by a shop in Surrey and delivered just a few days earlier; it was well-sized and sturdy, its seat deep. It was upholstered in worn brown leather which had been rescued from a woodworm-ridden sofa from another part of the building. After his old armchair had fallen apart Monk had broken half-a-dozen chairs and stools and for a few days he had been reduced to standing at the bar, his feet and ankles swelling under his weight and in the heat to twice their normal size.

It had not been a hot summer but the weather that week had been hot and it was a hot day on this day, too.

The armchair made him think of someone he once knew, William "Buck" Rogers, a veteran of wars and mutinies and storms and shipwrecks, Captain of the Ringhorn and the man who had shown Monk the sea thirty-five years before.

"There are two things a man needs," Rogers had said to him once. "A man needs a belt to hold up his pants, and he needs an armchair he can call his own."

Every man should have an armchair he can call his own; Monk had not understood that at the time, but then he had not been a man at the time: fourteen, just a boy, piss and vinegar in jars, no brains to speak of, a tall, awkward youth with fine hands, a clear eye, a head full of dreams, a nervous need for fear, no knowledge of real suffering or pain.

Monk understood it now: there was truth here: what is a man if he has no armchair he can call his own? less than a man: little more than a beetle: beetles do not have armchairs; this gave him comfort: a rule by which to measure other men.

He shook these thoughts from his head, a nervous habit which he knew made him look like a drunk, but he did not care and anyway the Exchequer Room was almost deserted, just the Republic's sole poet at his usual table at the other end of the room: jug of coffee, blue haze, half a dozen notebooks, a mugful of yellow pencils, yellowing skin and hair; they had not spoken in years, never would again, but they knew each other, exchanged the odd nod; the poet had even written a poem about him once, many years before in Paris, a homoerotic fantasy which a smaller man might have considered libellous at the time, but which Monk treasured still for the loneliness and repression and fear that it betrayed; did the poet have an armchair he could call his own? it seemed difficult to believe that he could, and yet Monk imagined that he must, perhaps a very old armchair with worn, yellowing upholstery and wooden arms dotted with cigarette burns. Not much of an armchair, but an armchair all the same and one the poet would have made his own by force of circumstance or habit; were he to visit the poet's home, the poet would claim his own armchair to sit in: an affirmation of the fact that it was his home, that Monk was the guest, or intruder; perhaps the poet would do as Monk would do: sling a leg over the wooden arm of his armchair, just to reinforce his claim; and down the back of his armchair, between the seat pillow and the backrest, what there? Shreds of tobacco and dust and old coins, of course, what else? Cat hairs - the poet surely had a cat or two - and feathers or crumbles of foam rubber, perhaps a yellow pencil sharpened to a stub, or a book: a slim volume of poems, the poet's own, his sole remaining copy of his first volume, long-thought-lost, its loss long-grieved.

Monk shook these thoughts from his head. He shifted his weight from left to right, rubbed the knuckles of his right hand against the underside of his chin. He was full but still hungry: a familiar dull ache at the back of his throat which made him want to gag. Only food or drink would relieve it, and then only for a few minutes at a time. He shifted his weight from right to left, wondered what he might drink or eat, decided to wait.

The hunger had got worse. There were weekends when he could not sleep, but would go to Soho and make his way from restaurant to bar to pub to restaurant, eating, drinking, drinking, eating. It was affecting his work. Every time he prepared a canvas, mixed some paints, the hunger would attack him, forcing him to eat until he could eat no more. Then he would vomit and eat again.

"Like a fucking Roman at a banquet," he said to the room.

The poet glanced up at him, used to these outbursts but resentful of them Monk was sure. He did not care.

"I have no time for anally-retentive poets," he said.

The poet kept his head down, ears burning. The fumes layered the air.


He was waiting for a blind man.

He had found Pete Dixon the way he had found all the blind men. He had called the RNIB and pretended to be a blind man himself; he had told the woman on the end of the telephone that he had recently lost his sight. Was there a support group in London he could join? He had not felt like explaining who or why or what. The lie was easier.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time. He had turned his back on war. He wanted now to subject his own art and life to a personal, intellectual exploration. It had seemed like a fine idea to search out some blind men. If he could explain to them, if they could explain to him, half the job would be done. They would share with one another their perceptions of art, of colour and light and shade and visual texture, perspective. Monk wished to learn to see as they saw, to understand how a blind man might experience a Dali or a Braque. Or a Monk. By learning to give description in detail, he thought, by condensing pictures into ideas, he would learn new ways to express his own experiences of art and war.

It was a stupid idea, but he had learnt from his mistake: we are all as blind as we want to be. Not much of a lesson, an education in his own lack of vision, no more.

There were ten of them. They became his friends, not all of them and not close friends, not friends he would think to ask anything of beyond occasional companionship, the odd opinion. Casual friends whom he could live without but who enriched his life in small, unexpected ways, the way a tree can enrich your life, or a particular summer evening that you remember well: ice-cold beer, a beautiful woman's smile just for you, the song of birds or the snarling chatter of squirrels, water running from a tap.

Each of them was different, but he could not help but think of them as the Blind Men, his Blind Men, an ironic-collective Enlightening of Blind Men. Pete Dixon was one of the best: a good listener when it was needed, a jovial conversationalist always, an unusual mix: Monk's kind of guy: the kind of guy Monk might have liked to have been but he was not good at listening, would lose track of conversations, miss names, places, birthdays, the existence of wives and children: a poor friend to have, though a friend who would cover your back, he could say that much for himself: a friend who would take a bullet for you if that was what it came to, or an arrow.

Reaching inside his shirt, fingering the scar tissue on his shoulder, knobbly and profound: a wound that took eight months to heal: excrement on the arrowhead: the constant seepage of pus, the fevers. They said it might never heal: wound-management: keep it clean but get used to it. In the end an old Masai herdsman, no teeth, bloodstained lips, cut the wound and applied a poultice to it: cow dung and herbs, congealed blood and milk, other things: one week later the wound was closed.

Monk had painted that Masai herdsman, painted him without his knowing it, stolen his image and sold it. Years later he sent the money he received for the painting to the man's family. It was not enough: he tracked down the painting, a six-month search, bought it for five times its real value, bought it and burnt it, a private ceremony: let the man's soul rest, let his own mind have peace in this matter at least, a token of gratitude and respect for the man who healed this wound, of forgiveness for the man or woman who had caused it: a cleansing.

But there was that need for contempt: small, fleeting contempts, the deeper contempt: having washed your soul the need to become unclean again so you may wash again: nothing like another man's blood and shit and death in his eyes and his entrails in your hands for that. A young journalist, late twenties, mild-mannered, intellectual, polite, only two years ago now, a young journalist in a whole war full of earnest young journalists, guts pooling around her feet, impaled on the branch of a tree, thrown there by the force of the explosion. Monk had watched her die, could not move her, had no weapon with which to dispatch her. He had held her hand and kissed her on the lips: a chaste kiss but he had felt aroused, he could not deny that: was tempted to reach into the mess of her stomach and feel its warmth even as her life ebbed away: the exact moment when enough became more than enough.

Even then he had stayed for one more year, a war-junkie, unable to tear himself from it, transfixed and blinded, rabbit-like, by the cold inferno of suffering around him.

Enough was more than enough: no more war.


Monk closed his eyes and rested back in his armchair. He breathed deeply and tried not to swallow. His saliva was unlit napalm on the back of his tongue. He ground his teeth. Sparks flew from them.

He heard the poet shift in his seat. He poked his tongue into his cheek: he would need to keep a straight face. He said loudly: "Chaque fois que j'ai lu Shakspeare, il m'a semblé que je déchéquette la cervelle d'un jaguar."

Monk opened his eyes to watch as the poet paled, stood and ran from the room, almost fell as he caught his jacket pocket on the doorknob on the way out. There was the sound of old, dry tweed seams tearing. The shredded remains of a jaguar's brains spilled on to the floor and disappeared into the woodworm trails etched in the old oak boards.

Monk laughed. He closed his eyes again and more quietly, almost to himself, he said: "La poésie doit être faite par tous. Non par un."

The night before he had got drunk with another Blind Man, Simon Morton. Monk had sent a car to pick him up from his Islington home and bring him to one of the new bars that had opened in Soho over the summer, a cool bar with loud music and loud kids drinking bottled beer and smoking joints without a care in the world. Monk's kind of place, Simon Morton's too.

"Like the trenches, just less blood," he had said to Simon Morton. Simon Morton had laughed: another idiot who wished he had been born half a century earlier and fought in the big one, writing poetry while he was at it, no idea of what it would really have been like to die in Flanders, or worse, perhaps, survive.

Monk had ordered splits of Krug which they drank from the bottle but no one got the joke, or if they did they did not laugh: the young: so fucking serious he could die. They moved onto vodka, first with tonic then frozen and neat: tipped back in one. By midnight Monk was raging, out of control, but no one wanted to fight him: too big. Boys moved out of reach, allowed girlfriends to flirt with him, defuse, placate: protective role-reversal as old as war itself. He calmed down, apologised, bought drinks all round, introduced them to the first blind man most of them had met, told stories, flashed his cash bigtime. The party lasted till dawn.

It was always the same: the creative genie escaping its bottle to run amok; there was no controlling it, not after a drink or two, not when he was storming. And Monk felt no need to control it: he nurtured it, indulged it. He could almost personify it: a different self, part of his whole but whole of itself, one that demanded absolute freedom, knew no authority, no arbitrary moral codes, whose only truth was its own unbridled pleasure and whose greatest pleasure was to test the limits. It would get him killed in the end, nearly had done a thousand times before.

"Sometimes," he said to the room, "I just need something to remind me that I'm still alive."



Steven Kelly is the author of the short story collection Invisible Architecture and the novels The Moon Rising and The War Artist. By day, he maintains web sites for a living - including his own on-line literary magazine The Richmond Review. By night, he writes. He can be emailed at [email protected]