In today's blog, acclaimed Carcanet poet Anthony Rudolf, who will be seventy on September 6th, has adapted a piece from his forthcoming book, Silent Conversations: A Reader's Life (January 2013, Seagull Books, Chicago University Press).
The extract, concerning his partner, Paula Rego, is accompanied here by some of her paintings. A larger selection of her work will appear in the next issue (no.207, September/October 2012) of PN Review, the leading literary journal. You can subscribe to PN Review here, or through the App Store on iPhone or iPad, or via the Exactly App in the Google Play Store, for Android devices. Individual copies of the magazine are available at www.carcanet.co.uk. |
| Painting Him Out, 2011 by Paula Rego |
Paula Rego’s non-art reading matter is mainly folklore: Portuguese, English, German and so on.
Martin McDonagh’s play
The Pillowman affected her so powerfully when I saw it with her at the Cottesloe that she made a sculpture of a pillowman in her studio and imagined him into paintings via her technique of copying, which is what we want to do when we find something beautiful.
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Paula Rego
with Anthony Rudolf
Madrid, 2007 |
Paula and McDonagh have a powerful affinity, no doubt about it. A review came through of the New York production of
The Pillowman, and lo and behold Paula’s work has fed back into its staging. McDonagh sent Paula unpublished stories he wrote when he was young, raw prose and raw material for this and other plays, and these nourished her imagination, as I know from having read the stories and from the possibility of posing with turtles on my hands, or rather with turtles as my hands. The very first play to which I took Paula, back in 1996, was by McDonagh,
The Beauty Queen of Leenane: she found it attractively cruel and seriously powerful, although she (and I at times) found the stage or cod Irish hard to follow. The stories reveal a cruel and harsh imagination, almost but not quite 'sunk too deep for human tenderness', like the drowning soul in
Isaac Rosenberg's 'Dead Man’s Dump'.
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| Baby Chicks, 2005 by Paula Rego |
One August, while Paula was in Portugal, I went to the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford to see a play explicitly influenced by her work,
Polly Teale’s remarkable
Brontë, which uses Paula’s Jane Eyre images as backdrops; these, in turn, affected Polly’s choice of costumes. The play integrates
the three sisters and their characters in a dialectical counterpoint, as the words segue back and forth, between Bertha and Charlotte, Cathy and Emily. The three men in the famous saga are often neglected, though not by Polly Teale. Branwell, Patrick and Arthur all come to life on stage, and Teale makes a lot of Branwell as a source not only of pain and grief for the future novelists, but also of psychosexual and indeed sexual information. What, one would dearly like to know, was so shocking in Emily’s supposed second novel that Charlotte destroyed it? In the context of Teale’s reading of Emily and Charlotte, it has to have been either religious (her lack of faith, perhaps a prequel to Arnold’s ‘Empedocles on Etna’ or ‘Dover Beach’) or sexual (perhaps a prequel to George Sand). Paula suggests a third possibility: Charlotte was jealous. I have just thought of a fourth: it was very bad.
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Mary of Egypt, 2011 by Paula Rego
Anthony Rudolf sometimes models
for Rego's work |
On the way home from Guildford, I telephoned Paula to tell her what I thought about the play and she revealed that a Portuguese newspaper had picked up a
Guardian feature which I had deliberately kept quiet about before she left London, a ridiculous silly-season piece worthy of a tabloid, announced on the
Guardian cover as 'the worst ten pictures in Britain': when you opened the paper, they turned out to be ten pictures hated by ten pundits, which is something else entirely. Tristram Hunt, a popular historian, and since 2010 a Labour MP, chose Paula’s ‘Germaine Greer’.
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| The Balzac Story, 2011 by Paula Rego |
There was I, trying to protect her feelings before she went to Portugal, and a Portuguese paper reveals Hunt’s choice to her a few days before she starts painting the president’s portrait in the palace in Beleym! Before we rang off, I mentioned an article in the
Daily Telegraph about Henry Darger and outsider art, and should I keep it for her. No. The brutal fact is she no longer needs him. Why brutal? That’s me being sentimental. Many years ago, Paula went on a pilgrimage to Chicago, to Darger’s room, where the door closed on her fingers. The ghost of this extraordinary artist did not like the fact that she was making her own version of his Vivian Girls.
The next day, I rang Polly Teale with high praise for her writing and direction and alerted her to one factual mistake in the play, concerning the whereabouts (National Portrait Gallery) of Branwell’s portrait of the sisters; he eventually painted himself out of it: as for the Brontës, words did not fail the sisters and words have not failed Polly Teale, even though Paula is less convinced than I am by the sexual dimension of the play, which she saw in rehearsal.
Text copyright © Anthony Rudolf. All artworks by Paula Rego, copyright © the artist. Photographs courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd.
