Songe de la Fantasie

1864

Richard Dadd was transferred to Broadmoor Hospital, a purpose-built criminal asylum in Berkshire, on July 23, 1864.

He had been in Bedlam for almost twenty years.

They had anticipated that there may have been some difficulty in persuading Dadd to move, even from his familiar cell. But he had taken the news calmly, almost without reaction, and spent several days filling the portmanteau that had been given to him, asking for small lengths of cotton in which to roll his paintbrushes, and that he also used to wrap his volumes of poetry.

Brigham had noticed that on the morning of the day of departure, when he went earlier than usual to check his charges, Dadd was sitting on his bed, with a book open on his lap.

The painter looked utterly benign. It was hard to believe that he was a fantasist, a schizophrenic, a murderer. Dadd was forty-seven years old, and yet he looked very much older. He bore little resemblance now to the photograph that had been taken of him only five years previously. After his prolonged weeks of grief he had finally relented to let his image be recorded, and had been shown at his easel, working on his painting Oberon and Titania; an imposing man, broad and bulky, his eye fixed on the photographer and not the lens. His hair had been still dark then, with only a few traces of gray. Now he looked as if shock had overtaken him. His hair was almost completely white.

The physician’s opinion was that Dadd had reached a sudden—if delayed—acquiescence to his circumstances. After his photograph had been taken, Dadd no longer raged, or took to violence, even of argument. He is improved in temper, his notes ran. Though still holding his old convictions.

“What are you reading?” Brigham had asked him that last morning in London.

“Resolution and Independence,” Dadd said, holding out the book.

Brigham read the page out loud. “William Wordsworth. My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought …” He smiled. “Well, sir, there’s an idea for you.”

“My old remembrances went from me wholly, and all the ways of men,” Dadd read.

“Well, that is good. Old remembrances are no use to us, sir.”

“Are they not,” Dadd murmured. He picked up the last piece of cotton sheet, closed the book, wrapped it, and held it to his chest.

They brought the carriage that was to take Dadd and four other inmates at eleven o’clock.

Dadd was silent until he reached the last flight of stairs and could see the patch of yard, and the rims of the wheels, and the horse’s hooves on the brick driveway. He held on to the handrail and stopped.

“We’ll move on now,” Brigham said. “Last few steps now, sir.”

But Dadd would not move. Tears were in his eyes; as he stood rooted to the spot, they began to fall. Slow, heavy tears.

“There’s nothing to be frightened of,” Brigham said. “Come, sir. There’s a fine new building waiting for you at the other end. A fine view of woodland. And there are terraces to walk upon. It is a better place than here, Mr. Dadd.”

“I have had to leave it,” Dadd whispered.

“That’s right, sir,” the man encouraged. “That’s right. You must go.”

Dadd turned to him. The tears were splashing on the fustian jacket. It was the same one that Dadd had worn twenty years before when he had been admitted. “You will have it,” he said.

“Have what, sir?”

“The canvas they will not let me take.”

There were more than forty paintings in the locked storeroom next to the physician’s office.

“You have seen me working on it,” Dadd said.

The attendant nodded. He took out his own handkerchief and wiped Dadd’s face. Suddenly, Dadd started searching in his pockets. He took out a piece of paper. “I wish to write,” he said.

“There’s no time,” Brigham said. “The driver is waiting. You must take the train in forty minutes.”

“Give me a pencil,” Dadd said.

Looking into his face, Brigham felt nothing but pity. What a life wasted, he thought. He had sat and watched him many times working on his drawings. Sometimes Dadd would spend all day producing a little thing, a face, a hand, a branch of leaves. And then, at the end of the day, he would screw the paper and throw it away. The attendant had picked up many of them. He kept them at home, carefully smoothed out and held flat under a traveling trunk that his wife filled with linen. One or two had got damp, and the children had taken some; but he still had a good number. He had got an affection for the peculiar chap; he thought his drawings very fine, even if he threw them away. Sometimes in the morning, if the man had had a poor night, Brigham would sit with him and listen to the horrors that had inhabited the dark.

He took a stub of pencil out of his own jacket and gave it. Dadd scribbled hurriedly for a few seconds. He handed the note to him.

“You take this, Edward,” he said, using the attendant’s Christian name for the first time. “You give that to Mr. Neville and tell him that it is to be seen to.” His hand closed on his wrist. “You take it for me,” he said. “You have been kindness itself to me. You are a fine stirring fellow. You are Polyphemus.”

“Indeed, I am not, sir.”

“From the idylls of Theocritus, the lover of Galatea.”

“I don’t doubt it. But I am not he, sir.”

“It has taken me nine years,” Dadd said. “It is called The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. I have nothing else to give you.”

The attendant smiled. “I cannot take that, sir,” he said, “for you have given it already to Mr. Haydon.”

Dadd stared at him, baffled. “The Master-Stroke?” he repeated.

“Yes, sir.”

Dadd shook his head. He looked down the stairs, to the splashes of sunlight dancing on the road. “I shall paint you another,” he said. “I shall paint you a copy. And you must have some of the others that they have here.”

“It doesn’t matter, sir.”

“Oh, yes,” Dadd murmured, pressing his fingertip into the center of the piece of paper that he had already put into the attendant’s hand. “I shall certainly paint you another, Mr. Brigham.”

The carriage pulled out of the yard. It rattled slowly down the long driveway and out into Lambeth Road, toward the oldest settlements of London, at Lambeth Palace.

At first the blinds were closed, pulled down so that the patients would not be disturbed; but after less than a mile, it was thought that the noise from outside, which could not be drowned or lessened, was more disturbing if no sights accompanied it. And so the blinds were raised, and Richard Dadd saw London for the first time in two decades.

They went down to the river, to Westminster Bridge. It was thought that the horse ferry across at Lambeth would be too slow, and so they passed in a roaring slew of carts, carriages, and foot passengers over the span. Halfway across, Dadd leaned forward, looking to his left-hand side.

“What has happened to Westminster Palace?” he asked.

“It is burned down,” he was told. “They are rebuilding it. There will be a great clock tower on the bridge.”

Dadd stared at the half-raised Pugin and Barry edifice, hidden behind its scaffolding, on which men were antlike dots working between the beams. He saw the empty gaps of windows, the horses drawn up with loads, dozing in the midmorning heat. Dust drifted across the Thames, the surface of which, muddy and churning, was clogged with every kind of river traffic.

The carriage turned right, along Horse Guards; left again along the Mall and Constitution Hill. Dadd showed no interest in the street to the right of them, Pall Mall, where he had first exhibited at the British Institution, a young man of twenty-two, a coming talent, a genius, a person to be courted. Only two years later he would produce Titania Sleeping and Puck, both bought by Henry Farrer, when Henry Farrer was the dealer with the most commercial eye, and forecast great things, a place in the public eye, fame and fortune. But all that past had vanished; Henry Farrer would not recognize Dadd now.

The carriage emerged onto Hyde Park Corner, where the traffic ground to a halt. There was some sort of hold-up along the road; the driver called down that they could not pass. After ten minutes or so, one of the attendants got out and negotiated a pass for them along the Serpentine Road through Hyde Park, people shrinking back to let them through.

Dadd sat forward on the edge of his seat for the first time. He had drawn the Serpentine, that sinuous stretch of water, more than once. He caught sight of the Long Water and, beyond it, the pretty little dogcarts and broughams passing along West Carriage Drive. He blinked rapidly; his sight was not what it had been. He had been looking for too long at paint only six inches from his eye. He simply could not focus on the rolling waterfalls of color. Two children were running alongside the carriage, each with a handful of gravel, which they were throwing at the wheels; he tried to lean out of the window to look at them, at the liveliness in their faces. He was pulled back, into the shade.

They passed out of the Marlborough Gate and into the morass of traffic again; the green was left behind; ahead, new buildings shone white, faced with Isle of Portland stone. Beside himself, Dadd began to breathe heavily; the impact was too much. Yet he had to remember. It was all he would see before he was locked away for the rest of his life. It was all he would have to paint. He must remember the way it looked, so much busier than before, so many more people. He must remember. It would vanish in a matter of minutes. He tried to place the perspective of the sky against the city, the people against the pavements, the jolting motion of the broughams, the fluttering of pale dresses of the women within them, the dancing of horses’ movements, the writhing blocks of humanity in the street; it almost choked him.

And sound more than anything: the wall of voices, the echo of the trees and water, the hollowness of the park, the stagnation of the street, the blackening circles of the chimes of churches …

They were at the railway station. Dadd was given a small cup of water, in which was dissolved drops of laudanum. He was helped down the steps and out into the baying mass of Paddington, into Brunei’s massive terminus for the Great Western Railway, running from London to Bristol: a hugely vaulted iron-girder roof with decorative iron ribs, held up by cast-iron columns.

The noise now was more than mere volume; it was a living monster of sound, another Bedlam. Men dragged luggage on wheeled carts; racks of leather, bands of brown. The iron wheels of the luggage carts assaulted him, smothered him, the awful metallic clanging of them next to him as he was half walked, half dragged, beside the train. Dadd dared not look up at it; already the glittering windows, the brass on the finishing, the open sash glass where here and there a body hung out, calling to him, waving at whatever was behind him, laughing, had frightened him beyond belief.

Dadd tried to look upward instead, disoriented and nauseous: he had never traveled by train. The sight of the engine at the front, on the very point where the track began to curve, out into the light, sent him into a paroxysm of terror.

He was bundled through the smoke and steam; they were late, the train was about to leave. Strangers sidestepped him and grimaced. He could not bear it. The world was a blazing star; he had been swept up in switching parallels of light, of dark. The crowd howled at him; he moaned as he was bodily hauled into the belly of the beast, and sat in the corner of the allotted space, shivering, weeping, his hands over his face.

When he reached Broadmoor, Dadd showed no interest in his new private room; no interest in his belongings that were brought to him. Even a violin had been purchased and was waiting for him on a little writing table.

It was remarked upon that he was quiet and peaceable with his fellow patients; but the diagnosis did not touch him. It was not calm at all. It was retreat. It was indifference to the ordinary world. He was an exile.

In time, he was roused to sit up, and dress himself, and eat. He sat with others, in the day rooms, hands folded in his lap or placed exactly on his knees. He said very little, because he knew that he could not communicate what he knew, or that it would not be accepted. Life did not exist in what his senses told him, in what was received in the lies of sight and hearing.

The real world, a thing of beauty, had to be guarded, he knew; shut up firmly against its parody. The real world existed not outside himself but inside, gifted to him by old gods. The real world vibrated under glass; he could hold a magnifier to the paper, and see it. Just the smallest slender door through to that world, the real world hidden in the invisible grains of cotton and wood, flattened and processed into paper and canvas. The real world hid there, in between the strands of fabric and grass. Somewhere deep in its heart was the truth.

He sat next to the window, with its view of the woodland, but he did not look out at all.

He kept his promise. He painted a copy of The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, for Edward Brigham.

And called it Songe de la Fantasie, his place of safety.