Daily Telegraph Magazine (London), Saturday, June 14, 2008
THE CONSTANT GARDENER:
AN AFTERNOON WITH FRANCIS TULLY
“Not as many women as Picasso, not as much wine as Durrell, not as angry as Beckett: I could have been so much worse . . .” Francis Tully upends the bottle of local rosé and pushes a chipped, smeared glass towards me, never pausing for breath.
In the garden that the iconoclastic writer and surrealist has created in the South of France, fragments of stone statues and pediments are placed to amuse: a severed hand here, a skein of petrified ivy linking a group of pine trees, a rococo pineapple in a bed of agapanthus lilies.
Joining us at the stone table under a vine canopy is the headless torso of an archer. He aims his arrow at Tully’s head, an ancient version of a gun to the head, although whether this would be to keep him talking or to make him stop is not clear. In any case, stopping him in full flow is not an option.
“Photography and the naïve art are pure ferocity of emotion, as near to the truth as the truth is in people’s reactions to it, and in provoking that reaction . . . austerity is the only truth . . . the context must be supplied by the mind. . . . Surrealism is to do with a kind of hoax, a piece of theatre, carrying through a fantasy in a very European way . . .”
And on he goes, a ferment of ideas and associations.
In a green arbour to the side of the house, the ground is scattered with smashed statuary, stone limbs missing bodies like a macabre graveyard. “A work in progress,” he says dismissively. He is still working, still serious about his art.
Yet when the eagerly anticipated retrospective of his life’s work opens at Tate Modern next week, Francis Tully will not be there. He has no intention of returning to London—ever. His antipathy to his native country remains as strong as it was when he left almost forty years ago.
What I want to ask him about is his arrival here at this house, on this land in the lee of the rocky Alpilles hills, in the spring of 1974, when he put down his stake and claimed his sensuous kingdom; the train journey as he described it in The Rotten Heart: the southern country running past the window where his reflection was a shadow, passing over the fields and the dark trees, the outline of a face without details, waiting to become the man he wanted to be.
The painterly descriptions of stumbling into this wonderful enclosed world “south of the jagged roof of the Dentelles de Montmirail, rock lace natted by the mistral” have enchanted generations and never gone out of print. From the higher windows of his great stone bastide are views over vineyards, “from whence will pour the rich blue-red wines imbibed by the Avignon Popes with their flaccid purple lips, wines that for centuries have fortified the men at their ploughs, uniting all in plum-deep fraternity.”
From a distance these villages seem abandoned. Only the geraniums in pots outside windows and doors attest to inhabitation. Far removed from the Mediterranean world, it is enclosed upon itself, desolate and stony to the casual glance, perhaps, but full of richness for a man like Francis Tully.
As he confessed in The Rotten Heart: “In France, I had all the freedom and ambiguity of the expatriate, the voluntary exile. No borders, checks, or controls. This is what the artist needs: to invent his own country, in which to remake himself.”
And the new world in which he remade himself brought friendship and a cornucopia of characters he would immortalise in print: an ex-juggler from the Circus of Dreams; a toothless shepherd; a six-foot-tall Dutch woman whose husband was a banker in Zurich; the brocanteur who collected and recycled junk from the farmhouses and churches and châteaux to the increasing tide of foreigners; the herbalist who grew all his own ingredients, pounding and distilling them into potent cures; and a great cast of fellow drinkers—farmers, beekeepers, winemakers, builders, bakers, engineers, and fellow artists—in the Bar des Alpilles.
I want to ask him how many of these people were still here, still arguing at the tables under the trees while sipping pastis. Was it even a real world, or just one that suited him to portray? But he waves away my questions about the book. “Unimportant!”
Just like appearances, it seems. He wears a blue jumper full of holes that is visibly unravelling as he stretches out his arm to make a point, as he does often. His shoes are scuffed and the left one is secured to the flapping sole by gaffer tape.
When I persist, he fetches another bottle, pulls the cork and says in measured tones: “Some people prefer lies to the truth. The ambiguities and evasions they live by are what they use to protect themselves. An attempt to know these people is like peeling the layers of an onion. An apt analogy, too, because tears will fall, if you try to love them.”
Erudite and distant, his tone now, with its cut-glass English accent. How much was he talking about himself? I asked.
He evades the question. “But then you can’t tie everything into knots and conspiracies. Surely what matters is the great Now, the cadences of the protean, ringing blue of this sky, this moment! This stone! This wine! This annoying wasp! This sudden waft of cistus scent!”
Does he still see the country in the same way? I wondered. Or has it changed and mellowed with his own long years living here?
“It’s stranger. The more you know, the more you see. Because you are seeing with the addition of another dimension that cannot be seen: time and experience, and all the stories heard and read that are now superimposed. That’s part of the land. It is what makes it.
“Have you been to Cassis? Look at the paintings done there by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Read Woolf. See the place where they lived, then look again. Without roots like that, a book, a painting, an installation . . . it’s all fraudulent.”
He had just returned from a painting trip of his own there, he said. “With a lovely young model. I call her Magie—and she is magic. The best I’ve had for years. Fearless, you know? I’d like to do more with her. But you should go to Cassis. You’d like it. In fact, come with me!”
When it is time for me to go, we exit through the garden where he wants to show me a metal gazebo he has made for trailing roses. He exhorts me again to go to Cassis and presents me with a granite pineapple and a severed hand.