The whole canvas has been primed; one section of the painting has been executed with such meticulous regard for detail that the pattern of the individual brush-strokes can only be distinguished under a microscope. The general plan of the work, however, is far from clear. Pieter de Hooch is toiling over ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’. It is – or rather was – an essay in light; that is, in the controlled modulation of pigment. Light enters from a window high over the woman’s left shoulder. Yellow on the glass of the closely leaded casement, it is accurately transcribed by the painter as bluish white where the leaded pattern of light is reflected on the rear wall. The light catches the high domed forehead of the woman, the glittering silver of the sharp knife in her hand, the faint gleam of the golden bowl at her feet. Where the sun catches the highlights of the gilded stucco round the mantelpiece, its super-saturation is expressed in flecks of white pigment. The further from the window the more sombre the colours roused by its fading light, but glowing coals under the bubbling pot provide a secondary source of illumination and spread their gleam over the polished floor tiles. Behind the neatly stacked coals, in the recessed gloom of the fireplace, the existence of a poker is expressed only in silvery threaded streaks.
An exercise in control certainly, in the poised moment. It is late afternoon. Mother and child have the house to themselves for this moment. Soon the men will return, but for this moment the woman is enthroned in control of her environment. In this eerie picture space, this speculative mystery, De Hooch has caught the mystery of housecraft and its transmission from generation to generation. The mother’s hand above and the child’s below are linked by a shred of refuse; the apple peel falls from the knife into the daughter’s eagerly outstretched hand. How many brush-strokes will it take him to create a sliver of apple peel? Each dab of the brush stands for a unit of perception and, prompted perhaps by his work on the apple peel, it seems to De Hooch that he pulls his perceptions out of himself in an endless chain, like a sick man drawing an apparently endless tape-worm out of his mouth.
To have recreated ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’ as it once was would be a simple exercise in nostalgia. De Hooch is not interested in that. His single-haired brush has already registered the rhizomatic spread of craquelure that has afflicted the canvas in its centuries’ ageing – and the dust flecks that certainly were not in the original Dutch interior, but which were caught on the canvas when it was photographed. Beyond that, as an additional gloss to the original Delft light of late afternoon, De Hooch’s new painting wickedly mimics the bogus shiningness of art in the state of mechanical reproduction. Now he is at work on the mirror over the Woman’s head. Half the mirror lies in the direct light of the sun. Hitherto both halves, light and dark, have only reflected bare walls, but presently the grinning painter with his one-haired brush is inserting a tiny, tiny figure in the shadowed half of the mirror, so tiny it is like one of those animalcules he has seen under Cornelis Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope. Indeed De Hooch has to work with a lens to execute the figure. The lens-box duly appears beside the figure and with equally meticulous accuracy the canvas, easel and maul stick. It is a Lilliputian De Hooch that he is painting into the shadows of the mirror.
The next bit is trickier yet. He estimates that the Woman who peels the apples is no larger than his actual hand. She is as seen from a high vantage-point disposed as an irregular solid on the steep perspective of the receding tiles. Now how large should Marcia be? Marcia stands looking at the painting in her living room mid-way between it and its painter. Two Marcias will have to be executed. The first, in the living room, shall be considerably larger than the Woman with her apples. He will catch the colonies of dust that already form on her shoulder-blades and buttocks. (She is of course still naked and slightly wet.) But her face must be seen, and this he will trap in miniature in the mirror. It will be tiny, but still considerably larger than his own.
Marcia is rabbiting on to herself about how what you never see in these old Dutch paintings is wastepaper baskets or dustbins and how on earth do they manage? Quite charming, but De Hooch would like a more interesting expression on her face.
He calls out to her, ‘Ho, woman! You got dust on your bum!’
That is better. It falls out as he had hoped. She does not turn round. Instead her panicky eyes find him reflected in the mirror. Her hand reaches behind her.
‘Oh, you are so dirty!’ He roars with laughter. ‘Your arse is so dirty!’
Her mouth opens, perhaps to scream.
‘No. Do not talk. The woman’s talk I do not need when I am at my painting. It is better so. This you I love, I think. I shall have you wet and filthy on my canvas.’
While De Hooch talks, his brush flicks as quickly as his tongue to reproduce the straining of Marcia’s tendons as she stands on tiptoe to look at the mirror.
‘Dirty, dirty slut! Look there! That good woman has not your modern tricks and devices, but her house is cleaner than yours I think. Look here! I am having to learn new tricks, I, a very old painter. It is a cobweb in the corner of your living room. Never before have I had to paint a cobweb. Look there! You see no cobwebs. Nothing is dirty. The good mevrouw, she has rubbed that poker with emery, she has bought Spanish white for the window-panes, the knife is cleaned with Venetian red, she has polished the tiles and she has a pointy stick with which to scrape between the tiles. So it is good. Dutch culture is not germ culture. But you I can hardly see for dirty germs.’
And it is almost true. Tiny translucent creatures, wild yeasts, seem to swim languidly in the film that coats the aged painter’s eyes, and smaller spore moulds flicker round the yeasts like erratic tug-boats, and there are still smaller bacteria in that film. De Hooch is, momentarily, a prisoner of his eye for detail. With difficulty he enlarges his vision to encompass Marcia. De Hooch, looking at Marcia, decides to call his painting ‘Woman Looking at De Hooch’. Time to get the feel of the woman. Make her flustered; get her moving.
‘That cobweb please, I do not like it in my painting. Have you a duster? No need for a chair. I want you to stretch. And there please, crumbs on the floor that your friends have left. Show the dustpan and brush – and your haunches. I want to see those haunches. Now smile at the mirror. No, do not get up. Good so. Now with the duster at the painting. Stretch again. Keep that sulk. I like the sulk. Perfect.’
Marcia’s angry body is blushing red all over. De Hooch is now sure that she is a worthwhile subject and continues, ‘The worms you despise make a cleaner job of picking a cockroach’s corpse than you do of cleaning this room. When your Philip comes home in the evening and finds his living room like this, what does he say! Oh, it is shameful! If you are not here all day to clean, then for what? Pardon me for asking. But your house is not clean and that is not so funny I think. And how long have you to make the whole house clean? From the light in the window it is mid-afternoon. Two hours then maybe. Maybe not so much time. But you must be preening before a great Dutch painter.’
She is almost running now, as she moves around the room, duster and brush in hand. Quite charming. But it is time to catch her in a pose. Have her looking at her master.
‘Now stop. Look up at the mirror. Don’t try to look back at me. Look at the mirror. Hold that. And what will Philip say when he comes home and finds you like so? No. No talking please. Good girl. Is this how she does her housework, he will be thinking, or has she got some fellow hidden here, some artist type perhaps? Ho ho! What has she been doing all day? It is not cleaning, that is for sure. Wholly not so. Now see how you look. Look into the mirror, and you can see me there too, showing you how you look.’
And De Hooch accompanies these words with curves crudely drawn in the air by his brush and maul stick.
I have looked as he directed and I am doubtful, no longer quite so sure that there is the miniaturized image of an artist in the darkened half of the mirror in the reproduction of ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’ on my wall. Perhaps there is only a trick of the light. I dab hesitantly at it with my finger and find that there is in fact a bit of gunge adhering to the surface of the glass. Well, it has been a beguiling fantasy while it lasted … In that it got me through a lot of cleaning in this room. The crumbs from the coffee morning are all gone now, and I should have noticed that half-shred of cobweb before. It takes the eye of an artist to notice such things. De Hooch’s voice is stilled. It was never more than noisy thinking, the sort that echoes unbidden in the head when one is very tired. But a touch of nastiness in it that must have come from Mucor. A pity. I was counting on De Hooch to see me through getting the wash done and then giving the kitchen a final tidy before Philip comes home. A failure of the imagination.
As Blake says, ‘He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.’
I say, ‘I have had enough of painters for one day.’
‘The grubbing Hollanders show only the outer lineaments. That was only Analytics & no true Painting,’ Blake replies, and gesturing disparagingly at the bowl and the poker in ‘A Woman Peeling Apples’, he declaims:
‘Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod,
Or Love in a golden bowl?’
‘Well, I don’t want to be painted in the nude anyway and besides it’s getting cold’, and I cast around for something to cover my nakedness. His hand on my shoulder stops me.
‘No need, Angel, for you are clothed in Light. Besides I shall not paint today. Show me instead, O Angel of the Hearth, a Wonder.’
‘Ooh, I know what will interest you. I have been reading about them in Shirley Conran’s Superwoman.’
I am about to show him some interesting specimens of Lepisma saccharina or silver fish. These tiny, brilliantly scaled vermin lurk about under wallpaper, particularly in damp corners. They eat the backing off the wallpaper. Although they are born in damp, when winter comes they look for warmth and move under the wallpaper towards some convenient fire or stove.
But Blake is there before me and recites from his epic poem ‘Collembola’:
‘Lo silver fish
That thread the walls!
Silver fish that eat on paper balls,
Cryptophagic little beasts,
Eating starch, consuming yeast!
Seek out the fire, my little ones,
And find the heat.
For fish to fire must come to fry,
And little fish just burn to die …’
He breaks off and concludes, ‘There is a Wonder indeed.’ But darkness passes over his face. ‘Angel Marcia, I am come to warn you of your peril. Walk with me thro’ to the hallway.’
In the hall Blake has no trouble in finding the mouldy patch on the carpet. This he apostrophizes:
‘Mucor, fearsome creature of dust!
Dost think thyself a Thing of Joy?
Shak’st thou thy shaggy spores at us?
Vermin of mould and slime and must!
Vap’rous Horror in the Optic nerve,
Eagerly festering, Satan for to serve.
In a dream when I was sleeping,
I saw a maid with duster in a room.
Maid, I called in tears and weeping,
Or is it Angel? There is your doom.
What is the Hoover but the breath of Man?
And what is mould but death to Kate or Nan?
What is Mould but Death of man?
& what does a Hoover with a broken fan?
‘Mucor has been sporting with you,’ he continues, ‘but when your husband returns, its pipe-play shall cease, yet your body will dance in pain in the wine presses of the mould. Marcia shall be sunken and Mucor risen. Your husband is a man of commonplace reason, and I fear he will think you mad. I hope he will comfort you, yet I prophesy some London hospital’s mind-forged manacles and cage. My wild Angel shall be ensnared and when Mucor comes down the ward hissing with delight –’
Mucor, below, hisses with delight. I stamp on him with my heel.
‘– you shall be transformed into an Angel of Darkness!’
Now there is a giddy moment when I think Blake is trying to trip me up. It turns out that he wishes to scrutinize the spore-print on my heel. Every fungal spore-print is different. This one is of course household mould. He has got me worried.
‘Come off it, William. I’m not mad.’
‘You see too much and yet not enough,’ he replies gravely. ‘Too much for Philip and the doctors, not enough for the Truth. You must see deeper. Your visions should be minutely articulated beyond all that mortal and perishing nature can produce.’
He scrapes something from the wainscoting.
‘Look at this atom dancing in my palm.’
I look at the inert speck of dust.
‘Can an atom be envious? Are the stars chaste? Are there galaxies that are gluttons? Morality is a matter of scale. Come closer. See smaller. The Gates of Heaven and of Hell open into one chamber. What is dust but atoms? What is a duster but atoms? Dirt and cleanser are one in this Infinite Littleness. The living and the dead are one in this Infinite Littleness. The atoms of the Dead dance as swiftly as the atoms of the Quick and both their dances are holy.’
So then, as I looked on amazed, I saw that the speck was not inert, but it constantly vibrated with the running and the crashing of the electrons and the neutrons, and, seeing that I had seen, the poet recited:
‘There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find,
Nor can his Watch Fiends find it; ’tis translucent and has
many Angles,
But he who finds it will find Oothon’s palace; for within
Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven.
But should the Watch Fiends find it, they would call it Sin.
‘Mucor’s kingdom is not indivisible. So be cheerful, but wary. Is it time for tea?’ he breaks off.
‘Not yet. Almost an hour to go.’
‘Oh. In that case I will be back later. Be Undressed and Ready, My Angel.’
‘Goodbye, William!’ I cry.
It is always good fun to be with Blake. His visions are quite interesting. But I wish that I understood the half of what he is on about.