Gould's Book of Fish Read online

  In argument the King sets an admittedly wide compass, allowing his opponent—me—to play out my own line of reasoning so far it unravels & snags on its own impossibilities & contradictions. It may be objected that he says nothing new, but he communicates it wonderful well.

  An example: one day, admittedly as a needle, I put it to him that Scottish Presbyterians had produced numerous works of great theological worth. Typically he was some time replying, but I knew he was thinking, There is not one work of theology worthy of the name produced by those non-conforming oat-eaters. I myself had no idea whatsoever, but by a lucky coincidence I had noticed in one of the Surgeon’s catalogues sent him from London bookshops, the title Aberdeen on the Sumerians. Armed with this slight, possibly irrelevant knowledge, I stuck the knife full in: ‘Perchance you have read Aberdeen’s magnificent discourse on the Sumerians?’

  He said nothing, admitted nothing. It was an accusation, all the more telling for remaining unspoken. I felt a heat rising & then went full red in the chops, & it was all over, we both knew it, I was exposed as a fraud, yet typically he spoke not a jot more on the subject, & has never raised it since.

  There is about him something majestick which produces effects of great regality. I have seen even Pobjoy stunned by the mere sense of the King’s presence, though Pobjoy of course fails to see what I do; still he wrenches his nose & lemons his face & I am sure he shrivels his arsehole, as you do only on two occasions: when in the presence of a great power or of a terrible stench.

  I would, it is true, like the King more if he were a little more outgoing, more easy with others. He makes no effort with Pobjoy, & though I urge him on about the obvious benefits of a social life, he has no desire to be part of either my turd-tossings or Pobjoy’s beatings. Still, such is his choice, & I know he has his reasons. An oak cannot bend like a willow. It is things other than hail-fellow-well-met falsely fawning that mark the King out as remarkable.

  Another example: his complexion. Most of us go paler than the Surgeon’s white lead in these cells. But the King, manifesting some regal hereditary disorder, some Hapsburgian pigmentation perhaps, grows daily darker, his skin blacker, & more recently, disturbingly greener. But he suffers not to suffer: no word of complaint or distress passes his lips.

  As I drift around our wretched cell, I sometimes look back with—well let’s just admit it—an envy of my life at that time I arrived here. Because I have come to believe that trajectory is everything in this life, & though at the time it felt anything other than promising, the trajectory of my life was that of a cannon ball fired into a sewer—hurtling through shit, but hurtling nevertheless.

  In Pobjoy’s dull dog-like eyes I can see he knows it’s the second time around for me on the fish; he can see that I paint from my memory of my first book of fish that was so cruelly taken from me. But what Pobjoy doesn’t know is why I paint them. What Pobjoy doesn’t know is what I am about to write here, an annal of a life etched in blood.

  IV

  BEFORE I BEGAN writing, I asked the King:

  ‘How might I commence such a mighty chronicle? By singing a new genesis? By singing of fish & of the man, fated to be an exile, who long since left the land of the English & came to Van Diemen’s Land to this island gaol; & how great was his suffering by land & by sea at the hands of gods thought long dead because his crimes demanded that he suffer retribution in the same coin?’

  No. I could see the King thought it better to cack your dacks & smear it over the page than to write such rubbish, for who would ever wish to sing this country anew?

  The King knows as well as I—indeed better—that this place & its pathetick people will be far happier being eaten up over & over again by the same dreary songs & pictures of the Old World, telling them the same dreary story I have been hearing ever since I went the fall at the Bristol Assizes—you are guilty & you are to blame & you are less—& you will hear all the new singers & all the new painters saying the same nonsense as the black-wigg’d judge. Long after these bars have fallen away, they’ll sing & paint the bars anew & imprison you & yours forever after, gleefully singing & painting: Less! Less! Less!

  ‘Artists! Ha! Turnkeys of the heart!’ I roared at the King. ‘Poets! Ha! Dobbing dogs of the soul!—what here I write, & what here I paint are Experiment & Prophecy—do not judge any of it by the shorten’d yardstick of what they call Literature & Art, those sick & broken compasses.’

  To clarify my point a little further, I threatened the King in the manner I had found to be so effective with Pobjoy, & seeing what I had in my hand ready to lob should he say a word in criticism, he ventured no folly of comment. Still, as always, he had a point, so instead of singing a new country & noble race into being, I began with the dirty truth as follows:

  I am William Buelow Gould—convicted murderer, painter & numerous other unimportant things. I am compelled by my lack of virtue to tell you that I am the most untrustworthy guide you will ever trust, a man dead before his time, a forger convicted in the gloomy recesses of the Bristol Assizes on that muggy afternoon of 10 July 1825, the judge noting, if nothing, else, my name was good for the Newgate Calendar along with all the other condemned men, before doffing his black cap & sentencing me to death by hanging.

  In that courtroom there was a lot of dark wood trying to take itself seriously. In order to lighten all that sorry timber up I should have told it the story I am telling you now, of how life is best appreciated as a joke when you discover all Heaven & all Hell are implicit in the most insignificant: a soiled sheet, a kangaroo hunt, the eyes of a fish. But I said nothing, grossly overestimating the power of silence. The judge, believing me penitent, commuted my sentence to transportation to Van Diemen’s Land.

  Quarter-flash, half-hopeless, not quite the full bob Billy Gould, who was once pompously ordered to depict the great sea god Proteus who can—as the Surgeon with his dog-Latin was wont to remind me—miraculously assume the form of any aquatic creature. I was to paint fish, you see, all manner of sea life: sharks, crabs, octopuses, squid & penguins. But when I finished this work of my life, I stood back & to my horror saw all those images merge together into the outline of my own face.

  Was I Proteus or was Proteus only another mug like me? Was I immortal or merely incompetent?

  Because you see I was born not an evil man, but simply the bastard issue of a fair day’s passion, a folly, a three-thimble trick like my present name, & beneath whichever one you lift there is … nothing!

  A fate that leads a French Jewish weaver to an Irish fair is curious, but it is nevertheless Fate that then saw the weaver—‘father’ seems to me rather too generous a description—struck down with apoplexy at the height of his rude passion in that barn, thinking he was going to ride a cock-horse all day long. But you see there he was, suddenly struck dead in the saddle, beyond life & gone from this tale as soon as he had come. The woman whom he had met no more than half an hour before, laughing in the furmity tent over the rumlaced porridge she had there partaken of liberally, was now too frightened to scream, to curse or cry. She just pushed him off & wiped herself on his fine fustian waistcoat which had first so impressed her, such a dandy-o he had seemed, what with his clothes & long come-hither eyelashes & Frenchie accent, & she ran out to wander morose until she came upon a large crowd in a field.

  Being short as a spud (&, or so I was told, of similar demeanour, with a mouth like a spinning jenny) she could not see what it was that had caught the mob’s attention, & being suddenly curious, perhaps as some sort of diversion from what she had just experienced, she pushed & shoved until she burst out of the crowd to see the front of a makeshift wooden stage.

  The babble of the crowd unexpectedly died away & she turned back around to see what it was—to see whether it was indeed her—that had quietened them so. She saw the gaze of all the people behind her focused not on her at all, but looking over her & up much higher, & she twisted back around & following their line of sight upwards saw that the stage was in fact a tempor
ary gallows.

  At that very moment she heard the quick creak of the trap door open & saw a skinny man in a long dirty smock with a noose around his neck & a limp cod in his hands fall from the sky in front of her. As his body reached the bottom of the drop, taut rope conspiring with the sudden weight of the falling body to break his neck, she heard the small but undeniable sound of bone snapping. Afterwards she dreamt the skinny man opened his mouth as he fell, & what came forth was not a cry but a shimmering shaft of blue light. She watched the blue light fly across the field & leap into her mouth, open in astonishment.

  The wretched woman became convinced that she had been taken possession of by the condemned man’s evil spirit, & gave up on life, surviving only long enough to deliver me into the world & then to the poorhouse, believing that as I was born blue I must needs be the very embodiment of that evil spirit.

  I grew up in the poorhouse full of old women, some mad, some loving, some neither, & all as full of tales of the dead & the living as the slops clothing was of lice, for that was all they had in that dark, dank poorhouse—lice & stories, & both left me with a bad itch & scabs that turned into dirty little scars. I grew up with these tales (including their favourite of the weaver dying on the job & the gallows man, his limp cod, the blue light & me) & little else to sustain me.

  The old poorhouse priest for a time mistook me for a scholar. He used to read to me from a Calendar of the Saints, in which for every day there was a saint whose life was an exemplary tale of suffering, torture & original punishments; a fabulous catalogue of virgin martyrs whose voluptuous but eternally pure breasts were smote off by lecherous Roman prefects; medieval monks whose levitating became so annoying they were tied down so as not to disturb the mealtimes of their fellow brothers; anchorites who became famous for flagellating themselves for forty days & nights merely for farting. Really, nothing could have prepared me better for the reality of Van Diemen’s Land.

  The priest supported me with his teaching like the rope had supported the gallows man. He taught me the 26 letters of the alphabet & would have me read aloud the Bible & Prayer Book as he washed the soles of my feet, my skinny calves, all the while whispering, ‘Tell me when your seed is about to spill, tell me, please.’

  I would just reply, ‘A-B-C-D-E-’ etc, etc, & imagine all God’s words were to be had in these letters, & He could just muddle them up into whatever Perfect Prayer & Holy Scripture he wished, if I could just send up those 26 letters each day to Him, A-B-C-D-E, etc, etc, but then when the priest ran his chapped hand like broken chalk sticks up the inside of my thigh I kicked him with my washed foot fair in his gummy gob.

  The old priest cried out in pain & hissed, ‘God may have your letters but the Devil has your tongue—you are no scholar but Beelzebub himself!’ & would have not a bar of me or my feet ever after.

  One of the old women was so impressed, she hated that priest so, she showed me her library of a dozen 6-penny pamphlets she was allowed to keep as a special privilege, & she thereafter lent me first one then another.

  I began to worry that each night as I slept the letters in the 6-penny pamphlets might rearrange themselves into new shapes & meanings within the blue covers, for in them I discovered that God did indeed mix those 26 letters to mean whatever He wished, & that therefore all books were holy. If God did indeed have a Mystery as the priest had insisted, then perhaps it was in the ongoing itch of all those stories.

  Such 6-penny books can be had at any market stall, yet I loved them no less, but more for belonging to all. Everything from Old Widow Hickathrift’s Nursery Rhymes to Aesop’s Fables did so delight me that long before I knew of the Bard & Pope & Frenchie Enlightenment, they were all Literature & all Art for me. Even now oranges & lemons & the bells of Saint Clements riding a cock-horse to Banbury Cross are to me true poetry that has cast a spell I cannot escape.

  Then the priest conspired with the beadle to have me sold off to a stonemason, for whose heavy work my wretched body was unfit, & when I ran away across the water the stonemason must have thought himself well rid of such a clawscrunted rascal, for he made no attempt to get me back.

  At first I survived in London by selling myself to those who I thought ought pay to wash my feet & giving myself to those for whom I felt pity. Deciding who should pay & who shouldn’t made me feel I had some power, but I had nothing really, nothing but rotten inconsolable itches covering my heart ever more & more dirty little scars that kept multiplying to cover such nameless shame as was mine.

  For a time I roamed & robbed, feeling with these ventures that the dirty little scars had been covered over by bigger feelings of excitement & fear & pleasure. Then I was a Villain, you see, a truly haughty Bad Man, most proud of myself. I went hither & thither, at first in search of gold & glory, & then in search of an explanation, & I was greedy for all, but only because the capture of any might prove I lived & was not a nameless man born of a nameless woman in a nameless town whose only sustenance was itchy stories that had to be teased by gummy old women out of oakum & scabby songs stolen from God out of 6-penny pamphlets.

  I saw all this & that & much else besides in the morning of my life & many things shocking, near as fabulous, but of an evening there was not one among my new-found world of blue-gin riders & gaberlunzie men & pimps & swing-swang girls & their hanky thieves who could answer my insistent Why? which I came to know as the most stupid & pointless & destructive of questions. Deciding that nothing benefits a man other than his own earthly endeavours, I abandoned my uncertain search for an answer to a question that made no sense. I grew Old World-weary & late one evening in a grog shop with some Spitalfields girls with whom I was extolling the virtues of 6-penny pamphlets I found myself agreeing—after a few hard cuffs around the ears & reasonable threats of far worse injury from a press gang, the cream of the English nation—that in truth I had actually all along wanted to join Lieutenant Bowen’s mission as a deckhand to assist in civilising Van Diemen’s Land. In this way I was persuaded to venture to the New World where Progress & the Future are said to reside.

  V

  AT FIRST MY painting was an accident & later it came to be the only thing I could do half well. I reckoned it easy work, & by the time I realised it wasn’t, it was too late to learn any other trade. It was in the New World, while on my surreptitious return from my successful if misunderstood invasion of Australia, that I met up in the swamps of Louisiana with a Creole who in his own way was responsible for my passion for fish. His name was Jean-Babeuf Audubon & he was a plain-looking man, short, whose most distinctive feature was the large lace cuffs he insisted on wearing everywhere, & which were in consequence always frayed & filthy.

  Jean-Babeuf Audubon persuaded me that being in my twenties, I was obviously a man in the prime of his life who would wish to secure his lot against a hostile future by investing the small capital I had brought with me in a business venture he was pursuing with an Englishman called George Keats—running a steamboat in a tiny Kentucky hamlet. His purchase of some very fine frock coats immediately after I handed over my money did nothing to lessen my belief in the dreams of this bedraggled quail of a man, for like all true villains I was credulous in the face of any idea larger than obvious & immediate theft.

  Though we all wanted to be Capitalists, it was through Audubon that I was to learn about painting, for Audubon’s business was as implausible as his stories of his father—like mine, supposedly French—his purportedly the Dauphin, who under an alias fought with Washington at Valley Forge. We saw ourselves as hardheads & roundly laughed at Keats’ story of his dreamy brother John who wished to be a poet in the Old World & who, unlike us, was never going to amount to anything. But no measure of hardheading, of Capitalist Desire, could help when the steamboat’s boiler blew up, & the local farmers preferred to use the traditional poled & horse-pulled barges to Audubon & Keats’ folly, & the itinerant niggers & backwoodsmen preferred to walk than pay the money we had to charge not to go under.

  But the lack of interes
t in the boat & its consequent lack of movement did at least enable time for other things, mainly outings into the woods where we’d shoot birds & bring them back. I’d watch as Audubon wired their bloodied corpses up to form dramatick shapes of ascent & descent, stretching wings this way & that, & then sketched & painted these bedraggled tormented forms as beautiful birds.

  I thought him an exceptional painter & said so, but he was ungracious in the face of compliments & in his heavy Creole accent berated me. He disliked art. It was, said he, the name given to paintings after they had been stolen & sold. He was only a painter of birds.

  I learnt also—though more from the birds Jean-Babeuf Audubon failed to shoot than from Jean-Babeuf Audubon himself—the importance of always being a moving target in this life, for there is nothing that people love more than their opposite. Thus in America I learnt the value of being an underworld Englishman, while later, when back in underworld England, I played upon being an American adventurer, & here in Van Diemen’s Land they seem to like nothing more than the Artist From Elsewhere—by which, of course, I mean Europe—no matter how mediocre. If I ever get back to Europe I will, I suppose, feel compelled to play the part of the wronged, wide-eyed rustick colonial.

  Audubon knew a great deal about birds & their customs & society, & very neat & hard & not fuzzy or soft at all were his bird pictures. As if from under the feathered wings of their mother, Audubon’s birds would emerge from beneath his dirty lace cuffs, fully formed, beautiful, sorrowful, alive. From Audubon I learnt to search the animal being painted for its essential humours, its pride or its earnestness or its savagery, its idiocy or its madness. Because to him nothing was ever simply a specimen: all life presented him with an encyclopaedia of subjects, & the only troublesome task—and he conceded it sometimes came less than easy—was to understand the truth that the subject represented & then get it down, as honestly & accurately as possible. To do this—to distil into a single image the spirit of a whole life—he needed stories, & his stroke of genius was to find his stories not in the trees or forests or bayous, but in the new American towns & cities erupting like a fatal attack of pellagra all over that land, in the dreams & hopes of those around him.