Long time ago I read his Siddhartha, which houses one of K’s favourite quotes, “I can think. I can wait. I can fast.” Something to aspire to live by and perhaps something quite apt for the strange current times too. More recently, I read Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. I loved the timeless sci-fi/ alternate reality book. That book too, like Siddhartha, seemed a world removed from ours, woven around an idea. The narrative held me quite well, but what I valued most is the thought-space that the book left me with - more than a fiction, a meditation on what living well could be, pursuing riches in thoughts, ideas, time and space to think and wonder rather than the material riches which tends to be the default hankering in our modern world.
Books such as these can be a treasure, not only providing the narrative satisfaction but can also leave you in a better space mentally/ richer in meditative, sorted thought or inspired thoughts not as instruction but as kindling for your personal thoughtspace. Perhaps it is for books like these that Virginia Woolf says explode in your mind in a hundred questions, and open up several thought chains (or something on similar lines).
Similar to them in the treasured quality, but compared to those two, Rosshalde is relatively rooted in relatable realities. The story revolves around Veraguth, a famous painter and his idyllic estate, Rosshalde, where he lives with his wife and child. They live in the same estate, but separated. A visit from his highly adored friend opens up some of the packed emotions and seems to provide an inflection to Veraguth’s life.
The very first chapter sketches the scene around the artist, his work, his friend, his wife and his child. The rest of the book evolves like a painting in progress, with each successive chapter layering brushstrokes to this detailed opening sketch. The narrative starts to slowly deepen the colours of foreboding, of something very precious about to be lost, eventually mingling them with the dark colours of regret for the final stroke on this artwork of a novel.
Although this is a translated text, the writing itself echoes the artist it portrays. The novel reads like a word painting, if there were such a thing. Like an artwork commanding deep engagement, the book makes you want to linger on the pages longer, savouring and re-reading. Trying to think back to what other books or stories have brought up similar thoughts, and I think of AS Byatt’s Matisse Stories. There seems to be something that when authors start talking about visual artists, their own works seem to become multidimensional – they invoke not just the visual, but almost every other sense, as if the influence of a great artist at work, influences them to pin down all the details of the moment that can bring it alive in the reader’s mind. There are others too, people like Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, whose prose can give you that feeling, but perhaps not in so few words. Here, Hesse does it like poets. I do not understand musical harmony, but I think of the word harmony in the context of this novel. And the balance is that of a koan writer’s. Just enough and no more.
**
Attention, observation, noticing, registering – all the things perhaps we should load our moments with when not completely absorbed or occupied. This is what I takeaway from the novel. The frames of the novel move forward through these scenes expressed in perhaps one, two or three paras, a lot of breathing space for the imagination to participate and help unfold a chapter worth’s of detail around its characters and their living. Intensely observed moments.
For example, in the opening pages, there is this little section where the painter after his coffee, cigar, conversation is settling back into his concentrated perusal of the art that he’s working on, and the servant is observant enough to realise that slow vanishing and reminds Veraguth of something, and as of ‘in the manner of an exhausted man spoken to when on the point of falling asleep’, he is pulled out and you can intensely feel the loss that he feels - this broken concentration, and the way he reacts, trying to establish his authority back over the moment, miffed, and then ends up annoyed with himself. So long it takes to find that elusive space, so many things need to go right, and takes little to throw you off. Just three paragraphs and so much conveyed!! And you feel with him.
For someone to capture life like that, not just in the noticed sensory details, but in the observed, fluid, seemingly unavoidable mixing and splashing of consecutive moments and yet, the artist’s keenness to retain the purity & sanctity of moments. Difficult for me to put it in words, and I can just wonder at how the characters observe and how the author manages to convey something in a hundred words that would take me pages and pages to explain the delight of. A pleasure, and a real privilege to stumble on pages like these.
In one of the opening pages, over a few lines, we understand how Veraguth and his wife feel towards each other, we sense the estrangement, the tension, yet the unrevealing front towards Pierre. Just a few words and the scene is sketched. And through the book, a phrase here, and a para there, fills in the rest of the picture.
"Though she had ceased to love her husband she still regarded the loss of his affection as a sadly incomprehensible and undeserved misfortune."
Another instance, where, between the couple - ‘a strange shadow of resignation, patience and politeness’. And it unsettles one. These three emotions, all very nice perhaps, but can really be perceived cruelly when what is expected is passion. One feels that things that perhaps require a passionate discussion or address, get smashed, trashed and totally crushed under resignation, politeness and patience. Good emotions to wear for strangers, neighbours and acquaintances, maybe relatives, but cannot be all that is in between a husband and a wife. Those three words, and one can feel the cold distance between them.
**
For me, the best loved parts in the book are around the process of art. The joy and wonder of seeing an artist at work, in process, creating a masterpiece. Insights which one doesn’t usually stumble on, so beautifully laid out for you. For instance, in the opening chapter, this image captivates the artist - a fisherman on boat who has just appeared through the milky morning mist on the silvery lake and the mirror-like lake, the elusive mist, the silvery fish:
Veraguth saw a “Dark outline bathed in the cold, faintly quivering light of the milky rainy daybreak” and was “Instantly captivated by the scene and by the strange light”. “Since then he had turned the picture over and over in his mind, suffering torments until it took shape.”
This torment to captivate that image on canvas. He submits all of his conscious and unconscious hours to the image:
“In the last few years he had become accustomed on nights before working days to take no other image to bed and sleep with him than that of the painting he was working on.”
”Compelling the picture to take form on his retina. Saturated with it, he closed his clear grey eyes, heaved a gentle sigh, and soon fell asleep.”
He sees something - a minute of seeing, and weeks of tormented preoccupation. Leads me to think that if one were to aspire to make art, then perhaps something like this, and nothing less - the output that can engage for a minute but captivate and occupy a willing audience for much longer.
This bit here, is more of an inspiration section for me. I have a lot of ideas, and little skill, but at any time I try to sketch, I can, as if, dip into a richer reality because, suddenly, one observes and notices so much more, that even if you close your eyes, you can almost see the colours, how the light falls, the curves, the angles, how reflections interact with shadows, all summoned to the deeper reality by that 'unrelenting line'. (here I am reminded of this quote from one of Annie Dillard's books - "The draftsman must aggress; only by persistent assault will the live image capitulate and give up its secret to an unrelenting line." )
Even if one has tried to sketch nothing more than a cup and saucer reflecting light or tried to paint flowers and wondered and wondered and struggled with how to capture that elusive white streak to make the picture come alive, one can gain some sort of an almost understanding of what the author expresses here:
Veraguth stood facing his large canvas with the three figures, working on the woman’s light bluish-green dress. On her throat a small gold ornament glittered sad and forlorn, alone to catch the precious light which found no resting place on the shaded face and gilded alien and joyless over the cool blue dress…the selfsame light which played gaily and tenderly in the blond tousled hair of the beautiful child beside her.
He felt the music of the light, how its resounding stream dispersed and came together again, how it flagged on meeting resistance, how it was absorbed but triumphed invincibly anew on every receptive surface, how it played on the colours with capricious but infallibly precise sensibility, intact despite a thousand refractions and in all its playful meanders unswervingly faithful to its inborn law. And with relish he breathed the heady air of art, the bitter joy of the creator who must give himself till he stands on the brink of annihilation, and can find the sacred happiness of freedom only in a n iron discipline that checks all caprice and gains moments of fulfilment only through ascetic obedience to his sense of truth.
And as any good art that needs to transcend the labour and technique that goes in it, and yet convey the magic, here's his desire:
But the things that torment me now have nothing to do with technique. Do you know, more and more often in the last few years something I see brings back my childhood. In those days everything looks different; one day I hope to put something of that in my painting. Once in a while I recapture the feeling for a moment or two, suddenly everything has that special glow again – but that’s not enough. We have so many good painters, sensitive, discriminating men who paint the world as an intelligent, discriminating, unassuming old gentleman sees it. But we have none who paints it as a fresh, high-spirited, imperious boy sees it, and most of those who try to are poor craftsmen.
**
Through the book, there are numerous references to the discipline and loving hard work, the attention and the at times achieved with difficulty and at times, the byproduct of his life choices – the artist’s solitude that he offers his art. It is inspiring to see people pursuing something and working intently. Here’s one of those instances where what’s on display is the life behind the art that is on public display.
“So this was how these pictures, hung in the places of honour in galleries all over the world and sold at higher prices, were made; they were made in rooms that knew only work and self- denial, where one could find nothing festive, nothing useless, no cherished baubles of bric-a-brac, no fragrance of wine or flowers, no memory of women.”
Eventually, the choices that lead him to this solitude, or the compelling nature of his art comes in sharp focus under the lens of regret when he sits near his child, Pierre as he breathes his last few breaths.
"Oh, how often little Pierre had come to him and found him tired or indifferent, deep in his work or lost in care, how often his mind had been far away as he held this thin little hand in his and he had scarcely listened to the child's words, each one of which had now become an inestimable pleasure. That could never be made good."
And this deep regret, which is perhaps the most natural human reaction in the face of deep grief, sends me tangentially on this wonder about how human mind works. Our immediate tends to take significance magnitudes beyond anything that goes prior, even at times seemingly aligning past narratives, nudging them such that they seem to thread causally to the present.
But isn't this cats in the cradle feeling (the song) a one-dimensional way of looking at things? This way of seeing things, this knifing/ shuffling through the memories foregoing all other angles, with uneven weights - on one end, the present with this child and the grief, and on the other, all the decisions you ever made and all the things you did, in each lived moment making your choices and assigning weights relative to the time and understanding then, and then arriving at this moment of grief, to reassign new, big weights to the end with pain, with the vulnerable child, and the misery – it seems a very uneven comparison, set to throw everything off. In the face of the tragedy in the book, this, my writing it like this sounds inappropriate, heartless and rude at some level. Still, just to think, given a chance, how many people are willing to change the lived lives to align it to the new weights and narrative.
Living through our perpetual now, if we already knew of what's to be to help us weigh in everything and make good decisions, then where is the joy of living and stumbling and discovering your future with all its faults, follies and foibles.