Reading:
Soutine faces He did the strangest work I’d ever seen. Picking up a piece of board someone’s used before He larded on the oil paint with a palette knife. At once he’d conjured up a human head, A rag-doll face stared straight ahead, Portrait of a lunatic or some captive under torture In the last extremity of terror (or was it pain?) But no sooner than it came to life Than he’d destroyed it with another savage gesture. He muttered to himself then scraped it clean With but the gentlest hint of resignation. Next week he did the very same again As if driven by profound compulsion. I asked what lay behind this odd routine. He said that he admired the paintings of Soutine. ‘Those scars? Oh, that happened near Tobruk. They’d sent out another green lieutenant, not very bright, As the tank commander. Panicked when the shelling started. Thinking we were lost he fired a Verey light. Except that this one missed the turret hatch And roared around inside, setting fire to all it touched. If our petrol tank had gone up we’d have had it. Without thinking I picked it up and chucked it out. We were saved but I got rather toasted.’ (Bubbly weals ran up his arm and from the neck right down his spine.) ‘That bloody fool was the second one. They all do the same thing In their first battle when they can’t see what’s happening. I tried to stop him but he was the commander I was just the sergeant number two. It was an order. He stuck his head out and at once got hit by canon fire. God knows how I got our tank back after that attack.’ ‘In my final job before I got my demob papers I was put in charge of catering for the sergeant’s mess. I had to take a truck down to the railway station in Milan And eye that endless queue of refugees, waiting for a train, A train to anywhere. They’d been standing there in sun and rain Heaven knows how long. Most hadn’t eaten properly for days. We’d pick the young and pretty ones (even the ‘not too bad’ - Standards were by then not high) and take them back to base. We’d treat them to the finest dinner we could make from what we had. As much as they could eat and what they couldn’t eat they’d take away. And then we’d shag them rotten. Returned them to the queue next day. Terrible! But that was war. Same in any army. We were all half drunk And after years of living with fears of being blown up in in a tank Half barmy. But even now I still feel I’m at least in part to blame. There was one girl in a blue dress… I wish I could recall her name.’ I looked at him with awe and admiration. And I shared his shame. Seventy years went by before I understood those Soutine faces. They’d not come from museums or from books on painting. His night class scrapings were never aimed at making art. They were images of horror drawn from dark, unconscious places, Horror at the things he’d seen and for the things he’d done. He’d stared into a looking glass and there, facing him behind his eyes, Was what he had become. And with him was the head of that dead Officer he’d managed to bring home. It was his scream that drove Those frantic knife-strokes. That and the smell of flesh burning. His twitch began again and closed his eyes completely. How could I think he’d use a sable brush and put down oil paint neatly? Memories of war still blighted all that should have been his leisure. ‘I’m not a painter really,’ so he said, ‘I just do this for pleasure.’
Peter Lloyd Jones 