Book review: The Vanitas and Other Tales of Art and Obsession, by Jake Kendall

Comprising a series of short stories and a novella reflecting on the lives of various well-known artists, including Manet, Bosch and van Gogh, this is a mixed but promising debut, writes Stuart Kelly

Neem Tree Press has – of course they do – a mission. According to their website they are a “vibrant, independent publisher of books that change and broaden perspectives. We seek out and amplify captivating and crucial voices, wherever they come from… Our mission is to bring you, the literary traveller, the most thought-provoking, profound and provocative stories from all over the world.” I find this somewhat strange, not least because the title under review struck me as fairly old-fashioned. There is nothing per se wrong with that, and its slightly sepia quality is, at times, effectively moving. But I can imagine it being published a century ago. To moderate acclaim. The proof blurb spells out the aesthetic vision: these are stories about “an insatiable hunger for creation – sacrificing friendships, careers, romance and even their own happiness in pursuit of a vision”. This is a “force capable of uplifting and oppressing”.

The vista of great literature would be immeasurably more scant without “artist novels” – not art novels where the novel is the artwork, but novels where the psychology of the artist is important. I am thinking of Gully Jimson in Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, Hurtle Duffield in White’s The Vivisector, Lily Briscoe in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, Wyatt Gwyon in The Recognitions by Gaddis, Elaine Risley in Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Birkin in JL Carr’s A Month In The Country. The French seem to have a peculiar fondness for the form: Zola’s The Masterpiece, Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, de Maupassant’s Like Death, and Proust’s Elstir. If you want Scots, there’s Lanark, How To Be Both and The Marriage Portrait. Somebody called Brown wrote about Da Vinci but it passed me by.

Although visual art and literature may duet together, they are categorically not in lockstep with each other. Indeed, there are “false friends” when it comes to terms for genre. Naturalism, realism, expressionism, symbolism and impressionism mean subtly different things in the differing contexts: I am reminded of Picasso’s scalding remark when Gertrude Stein called herself a cubist with words that that was just stupid.

Structurally, the book has some discrete short stories and then a longer novella. It is a method I find quite pleasing and allows for different variations on the briefer form. It also foregrounds the epiphanic moment in the smaller works: the glimpse of something understood not slowly unveiled or revealed. Stories like the dawn and seascape “Impression, sunrise” have this sotto voce quality. The problematic aspects – the big game nature of “capturing” the intangible – thus play out in against a chilly stillness. The stories about Géricault, Manet (seen askance) and van Gogh are all competent but do not seem to address the double question such stories must confront: what am I learning about the art and artist, and what am learning about a human who happens to be called Géricault? “Earthly Delights”, about Bosch, suffers but not for flaws of its own. Unfortunately, the late and very-much lamented Ruskin Professor of Fine Art Brian Catling’s last novella was about Bosch. It was deliciously horrific, not because the creations were weird, but the gibbering animate desires were recognisable.

The longest of these pieces is “Composition #5”. There is a smart in joke in the piece about the relationship between an obsessive young man and a painter called Abebi Oladele Isah who won the Turner for a sequence exhibited by Saatchi in 1989. 1990 was the year of no Turner as the funding had run out, so Kendall interpolates his fictitious painter into the lacuna. The narrator makes a gauche and supercilious remark, unaware she is his favourite painter. She asks him out for a drink and they have a relationship – with him, in his own eyes, as Muse. The problem is there is something deeply stereotypical about Abebi. A vampiric voluptuary she is also aloof and unknowable, a colonial nightmare of excess and sneer. I cannot really say if her insights hide something more than the platitudinous. There are no saving graces. If you want scabrous contemporary art satire, both Peter Burnett’s The Studio Game and Art by Peter Carty are rollicking, whip-smart and intermittently sordid.

The novella is a replay of the Mozart and Salieri story set in 15th century Rome. Parts of it are very good, such as the fictitious Sandro Signorelli, a man painfully aware he is “on the minor slopes of Parnassus”. This is exacerbated as Rome is aflame with talk about the art and antics of Carvaggio, but very much more about the latter. He is with some justification a disappointed man, as his vision of art is so different from the writhing and grubbiness of the new wunderkind. More so, his is an art of prayerful dedication rather than shock value. It is a lovely study in humility with a gracious twist. But: page 1. “The sky was torn asunder, the clement blue rupturing to reveal the golden splendour beyond this mortal plane”. Page 199-200. “The clement blue sky was torn asunder in revelation of the golden splendour beyond this mortal realm”. Sorry, but it wasn’t that great first time round.

The Vanitas and Other Tales of Art and Obsession, by Jake Kendall, Neem Tree Press, £9.99