From the Inside Flap
During their privileged, eccentric English childhood, Jack Rathbone enjoyed the unstinting adoration of his sister, Gin. So when both are art students in London, it is wrenching for her to watch him fall under the spell of Vera Savage, a flamboyant and reckless painter from Glasgow.
Jack and Vera run off to New York City within weeks of meeting, and from a bruised, bereft distance Gin follows their progress south through Miami and pre-revolutionary Havana to Port Mungo, a seedy town in the mangrove swamps of Honduras. There, in an old banana warehouse, Jack obsessively devotes himself to his canvases while Vera succumbs to a chronic restlessness that not even the birth of two daughters can subdue.
Gin is the far-from-objective chronicler of these lives, across decades and continents. Over the years her Greenwich Village house becomes a haven for Jack, for his buccaneering mate, and for Peg and Anna, the two girls left to bob in their chaotic wake.
Passion, narcissism, and the relentless demands of creativity hold these riveting characters in thrall, and McGrath skilfully evokes a feverish world of tropical impulses and artistic ambition that leads ultimately to dark secrets and to death.
About the Author
Patrick McGrath lives with his wife, Maria Aitken, in New York and London.
From The Washington Post
During a pleasure hop through Central America several years ago, my wife and I stumbled into an aging Victorian hotel at Puerto Barrios, a once-upon-a-time lively shipping town on the eastern coast of Guatemala. The once-regal inn's weathered wooden planks had been covered by thick dabs of canary-yellow paint -- an aging grande dame buried under a stiff pat of makeup. Its restaurant and bar were empty, as were most of the rooms. One of them was regularly rented, however, to an obscure American writer who had put down roots on the top floor, where he pounded out sentences on an old black Royal and was tended to by young, café-con-leche-skinned staff women in white canvas uniforms.The juxtaposition of a lone American writer, an empty room and a seemingly forgotten if exotic place struck me as both vaguely poignant and hopelessly trite. What was he doing there? And whose vision of artistry was he derivatively living? Hemingway's? Melville's?
The memory of him and the hotel churned up often as I turned the pages of Port Mungo, Patrick McGrath's novel about Jack Rathbone, an English artist who smears paint on canvases in an imaginary, Caribbean-coastal town in Honduras, and the demons -- for the most part, the usual suspects: a troubled relationship, alcoholism, boredom -- that keep him company. Painter Jack's life is spent making art in a ramshackle former banana warehouse on the edge of a river, a physical and existential entanglement of islands, crocodiles, violent weather and mangrove swamps. He spends much of his time wondering where his free-spirited, rash wife, Vera Savage (McGrath obviously thinks there is much in a name), has run off to, leaving him to take care of their young daughter while he suffers from Vera's loss and for his art. Frequently, he hangs out at a down-at-the-heels, once-grand hotel bar with Port Mungo's "prickly community" of "gringos who'd stayed on after the banana boat pulled out." Through much of Port Mungo, McGrath does little more than navigate the shoals of cliché.
Told by Jack's adoring sister, Gin, the novel veers between her memories of Jack as a brilliant, often reckless spirit during their childhood in their native England and the duo's time together in New York, where they both end up, in their waning years, living off of Gin's considerable inheritance from their father, who favored her at the expense of Jack and another brother.
In between are tales of Jack's nature-boy-grown-up life in Port Mungo, where he makes a minor name in the world of art by turning violent colors and thick washes of paint into something called "tropicalism." He's a kind of modern-day Gauguin. Jack's primal energy has always held Gin in awe, including the time when, as a teenager, she found their tutor, Helen Splendour, and Jack, his "huge" member evident, playing in the library. She's awed again when Peg, Jack and Vera's wild-in-the-streets daughter, comes home with a thorn in her filthy foot and Jack rips it out with his teeth, then cleans the wound with an expertly applied spray of his urine. Because Jack is always on a pedestal for her, Gin's reliability as a narrator is severely compromised, as we later learn.
The plot's driving force is the mystery -- or "secret," as Gin repeatedly suggests -- surrounding the death of Peg at age 16, apparently after she is lost at sea during a boat ride with the typically drunken Vera. The death finally splits the barely-held-together relationship between husband and wife and eventually sends a despondent Jack to New York, where he works in a loft before moving in with Gin.
The book moves into its concluding phase early, then plods on for about 100 often-redundant pages (What? More roguish male artists? Another bout of artistic self-doubt? A Peg doppelganger? Do tell) before McGrath delivers what, with a more compelling setup, would have been a semi-shocking conclusion.
Throughout, the reader is confronted with a numbing litany of questions: Is McGrath saying that art requires madness to be vital? (He's said something similar in Asylum, his 1996 story of a sculptor institutionalized after murdering his lover.) That the desire to create also inspires madness? Or that an empty room, as he notes in Port Mungo's acknowledgments, is both an artist's refuge and exile, and that "what happens there to a great extent depends on the web of support we enjoy outside the room"?
But one could make a similar argument about software salesmen and bistro waitresses -- they need love and support too. Artists are humans no less under pressure than the workaday are, and hence no less or no more prone to rash, destructive acts. But perhaps the artist's calling demands a more self-critical professional examination based on uniqueness, depth and genuine provocation.
The shotgun marriage of melodramatic overkill and hackneyed "artistic" behavior in Port Mungo would fail that exam. McGrath's tortured-artist tale is more of a grotesque than his usual gothic. It's a novel that gives you just what you expect from your stereotypes -- and then some.
Reviewed by Michael Anft
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
When he first came back to New York, and that would be twenty years ago now, my brother Jack was in a kind of stupor, for it was shortly after the death of his daughter Peg. What can you say about the death of a child? She was sixteen when it happened, and the impact on all of us, Jack of course in particular, was devastating. When I glimpsed the extent of his grief, after the first shock wore off, and he awoke to the grim slog of flat, empty days that yawned before him—all meaning, hope and pleasure drained from life—I called out to him from across what seemed a chasm, and got back only the faintest of answers, which might have been no more than an echo; I mean I did not know what to say to him to bring him back into living contact with the world, and more immediately with myself, his sister. I don’t suppose there’s very much you can say.
I never feared for his sanity, however. I never feared that he would attempt to do harm to himself, and for this reason: he had his work. And with the first, weary, reluctant attempt to pull himself together came a return to the studio, a loft I had rented for him in an old warehouse building on Crosby Street. I remember watching him silently building stretchers, the very mindlessness of this familiar activity giving palpable relief to a soul in pain. I sat in that loft drinking tea and trying to make conversation as he nodded and grunted and nailed his stretchers, and the next day he cut canvas, and began to staple it to the stretchers, and again I was the one who sat there with him, talking or silent, whichever he seemed to prefer, simply a familiar body in the same bleak space during those slow wretched days. I was also there when he mixed paint in a bucket, Indian-red and black pigment, and thinned it with turpentine to the consistency of soup, and I remember how he turned the brushes over in his fingers, running the fibers across his palm. He had discovered second-hand paintbrushes in a hardware store a couple of blocks east, in Chinatown, big floppy decorators’ brushes softened by long use by working men.
And as I watched him I saw what the years in Port Mungo had done to his hands. Jack’s hands were once like mine, our best feature, I used to think: thin, and long, with slender tapering fingers, elegant white bones intricately assembled for fine work with the violin, perhaps, or the fountain pen. Mine were as white as ever, Jack’s by contrast had become purely functional entities, and like any tools put to daily work they showed the marks of use: scarred and chipped, horny-nailed, the skin burnt brown, old paint baked into the beds of the nails, and the backs matted with bristles pale as straw. And as he nodded and grunted I began to see that the cast and temper of the man were similarly coarsened and scarred, and it struck me that he had spent too many years working in the harsh sunlight of that shabby town.
Then one day quite without warning he told me he didn’t want me to come to the loft any more. He said I was suffocating him—me suffocating him! I was wounded by the abruptness of this rejection, also by his lack of gratitude, though not entirely surprised. For it confirmed that the years in Port Mungo had done nothing to civilize him, in fact I had the distinct impression that he’d deliberately destroyed in himself all remaining traces of a social decorum learned as a child in a country he no longer called home. It wasn’t until six weeks later, and with no word from him in the meantime, that he called me up and suggested we have a drink.
We met in a bar on Lafayette Street, and I have to say I was dismayed at the state of him. In six weeks the man had turned into a husk, no flesh on his bones at all. I subdued the gust of irritation his appearance provoked in me, and aroused the familiar dull wave of rising concern. We sat at an obscure table at the back of the bar, he took off his glasses and I saw in his eyes what I can only call an extinction of the spirit; and I strongly suspected it had to do with something other than grief. I waited for him to speak. He played with his cigarette. There was a trembling in the yellowed fingers as he lifted his drink to his lips. He tipped back the vodka in one movement.
—What’s the problem, Jack?
He said something about not being able to eat, or sleep, or work, or think properly any more.
—Why not?
He flung a look at me, then turned his head away. I knew the gesture well. He’d mastered it years ago, it was meant to suggest depths of torment no average mortal could be expected to comprehend, such sentiment being reserved for a certain few select noble souls. It had intimidated me once.
—You’re not using needles, are you?
For a moment it looked as though he’d rise from his chair in a towering rage and sweep out into the night to do more damage to himself because nobody understood him. He was nearly forty years old! But he hadn’t the juice in him to make such an exit. A bit of a sigh, sardonic and private, and he rubbed his face. I wondered if he wanted money, if that’s what this was all about. I paid his rent and gave him an allowance—this we had organized immediately on his return to the city—but perhaps he had a habit and his habit had outrun it.
—No, Gin, I’m grieving.
Then it all came out, how lonely he was without his girls, for not only had he lost Peg, but his younger daughter, Anna, had been taken away from him and was now living in England with our brother, Gerald. He said he felt utterly friendless and bereft in New York, it was too much for him, he couldn’t stand to be by himself in the loft any more—could he come live with me for a while? I had thought this might be what he was after. I wanted to say yes but something prevented me, and I think it was connected to this intuition, or intimation, rather, that he had drifted far from civilization’s ambit down in Port Mungo, and had much to conceal from me. But it broke my heart, him coming to me in need, and me prepared to give much, but not everything, no, I had to keep some distance from him, and I said this. I’d sort him out if he wanted me to, but I couldn’t have him in the house.
—You can’t have me in the house.
The way he said it, I might have been speaking to a dog.
—No.
He nodded, he accepted it without argument. I think he heard it in my tone, and understood that I was not the compliant adoring uncomplaining sister I had been once, and he said yes, that was just what he needed, a good sorting out, and he grinned at me, which created such creasing and cleaving in the taut flesh of his bony head that I realized he hadn’t grinned at anyone in quite some time. It warmed me to see it, and I grinned back, and there we were, Jack and Gin, just like old times.
We got drunk and talked about Peg, also about Vera—Vera Savage, the painter, the mother of his girls. He wept a little, and I did my best to comfort him. The depth of his emotion impressed me, but he had squandered much of his strength and had few resources left with which to cope with his grief. We parted warmly, and with various resolutions made. I told him to go straight home, no drifting about in the night. He said he would. I didn’t altogether trust him. Jack’s will, once roused, was fierce, but he was weak, and he was drunk, and drink undoes the will like nothing else. But when I got to Crosby Street the next morning he was clear-eyed and alert, having slept, so he told me, better than he had in months. I was gratified to know I had some influence over him still. Nobody else could have turned him from the trajectory he was on, even if I did apparently suffocate him. So we got the loft organized, we put his work table in some sort of order, and talked about what he wanted to do. All rather dark and bleak, his ideas, but this was not the point. Work itself was what he needed, and if his brief season in what he regarded as hell was the engine of fresh creativity, then so be it. I left guardedly confident that he was once more on course. I visited him again the next day, and for several days after that, and I saw him steadily resuming his old habits, the long hours of daily work, I mean, the deepening immersion. A corner had been turned, and having begun to work he never again sank quite so low as he had in those first weeks. Of course he never properly recovered. To the end of his life there was a chord in Jack’s character, softened with the years to a kind of melancholy drone, but once a howl of misery: Peg’s death created it, and Peg’s death sustained it. But Peg’s death did not stop him working, and working, for Jack, generated a kind of stamina which dissipated the worst of the grief.
As to what he was painting, it was disturbing because so strongly pervaded by what I understood to be the emotional residue of loss. Tones and values were heavy, laid thick on splintered armatures of black brushstrokes, and the dominant impression was of heat, sickness, darkness, decay—he referred to them as his “malarial” paintings, and certainly they aroused in the viewer ideas of dank swamps steaming with disease and such. To me they lacked the force of the paintings done in Port Mungo, being sombre where the others were vivid, but of course I did not say this.
When he stopped work, and came away from the canvas, and flung himself onto the couch, he would talk about Port Mungo, and his thoughts emerged so disjointed and fractured I would have thought him psychotic had I not understood the state that the act of painting put him in. I remember him talking about the night when Vera in her rage seized a kitchen knife and attacked not Jack but their bed, tearing and slashing at the mosquito netting, stabbing the mattress and ripping the sheets to shreds, this insanity not exhausting her fury but inflaming it, rather, and then she went for his canvases, and ...
