Reading the second volume of a trilogy when you haven’t read the first is perhaps not the greatest plan, but I decided to read this second part of the Cornish trilogy for Lory’s Robertson Davies Reading Week purely because all my other RDs are in three-in-one volumes and I was going on holiday and didn’t fancy heaving a huge book about with me. I have What’s Bred in the Bone as a single-vol. Waterstone’s freebie and that is what went into the suitcase. And I am here to say that although I am ready to believe it would be better read in sequence after The Rebel Angels it certainly works perfectly well as a standalone novel.
The novel begins with a row between the three trustees of the Cornish Foundation for Promotion of the Arts and Humane Scholarship. One of them, Arthur Cornish, a respectable banker, has commissioned another of them, the Reverend Simon Darcourt, to write the autobiography of his recently deceased uncle, Francis Cornish. Darcourt complains that the book is proving impossible to write because Francis was such a private man. He can discover nothing about Francis’s childhood and childhood, Darcourt believes, is fundamental to understanding a person, ‘the first key to the mystery of a human creature’. Even worse, the little he has discovered is scandalous and reveals Francis to be not at all the reclusive and rather unwashed art collector of moderate wealth they all knew. Faced with the prospect of making ‘the Foundation and the Cornish name stink’, Arthur is now keen to suppress the book:
‘Oh my God!’ said Arthur Cornish. ‘First you suspect he was a picture-faker and now you tell me he was a poofter. Any other little surprises, Simon?’
Invoked during this conversation are the Lesser Zadkiel, who is the Angel of Biography (and also the Archangel of Jupiter, which fits with the novel’s astrological concerns), and the Daimon Maimas, who was ‘the Tutelary Spirit, the Indwelling Essence’ assigned to Francis. They agree that Darcourt will never know the half of it and together recreate the life of Francis, which forms the core of this novel.
(Angel and demon chatting over a deathbed; Bohun Psalter, Egerton MS 3277, British Library; found here)
The title comes from a mediaeval English proverb, ‘What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh’, given as an epigraph by Davies at the start of the novel. A later version of this is ‘What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh’, suggesting that ‘Lifelong habits or inherited characteristics cannot be concealed’ (Oxford Reference). The earlier proverb emphasises the inescapability of a person’s genetic inheritance and childhood experiences and the novel devotes much of its energy to exploring Francis’s genesis and childhood in the backwater Canadian town of Blairlogie. It also gives importance to the stars and to the practice of astrology: Francis’s astrological chart and his painting The Marriage at Cana are the two keys to understanding him (and to some extent understanding this novel).
The title also touches on another concern in the novel, the difference between the inner (the bone) and the outer (the flesh). Francis’s life appeared uneventful and the trustees do not consider him a ‘great man’. Yet in fact he was both a spy and a considerable artist. Both these rôles remained hidden: a spy is necessarily a secret job but Francis’s artistic talents went unrecognised because they were directed – not exactly into forgery, but into the creation of two paintings which were passed off as by an undiscovered Old Master and to which he therefore could never lay claim.
In fact, this novel could be subtitled ‘Art and Lies’. Deception, through spying, faking and smuggling, riddles the story. Art and beauty can trick the eye and confuse the mind. Illegitimate babies are passed off as legitimate. Francis appears to be the eldest surviving son of his parents. However, there was a first Francis, whose death as a baby was faked. This first Francis, the Looner, is kept secretly in the attic. The Looner is illegitimate and none of the characters ever know his true father; his mother and grandmother try unsuccessfully to induce a miscarriage and this affects him, leaving him with mental and physical disabilities. The Looner is described in ways that emphasise his animal-like nature, yet he inspires great love and tenderness in those who take care of him. In the Jungian symbolism of which I am too ignorant to discuss in any meaningful way, but which forms an important element of the novel, the Looner may be Francis’s shadow self and he is one of the forces which shape Francis’s character.
(Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, oil on wood, c. 1545; National Gallery, London; found here; the painting is called Allegory of Love in the novel but is also known as An Allegory of Venus and Cupid and The Triumph of Venus)
Art is profoundly important to Francis, from the religious prints in his grandparents’ house, to his own talents in drawing and painting, to his deep expertise in the history of art. In this novel, art’s fundamental significance derives from two things: its beauty and its symbolism. Bronzino’s Allegoory of Love attracts Francis for its beauty but when explained to him helps him to understand his mother: it has beauty and truth, meaning. The two paintings Francis paints – Drollig Hansel and The Marriage at Cana – are his greatest achievement in life: they are rich and beautiful and symbolic. Ironically though, as modern paintings they would be considered anachronistic (like the work of the Pre-Raphaelites whom the young Francis so loved) and without much merit. Their value in the eyes of the world lies in their age. (Another irony is that Francis complains that most modern art contains symbolism which is personal to the artist and often inaccessible to the viewer: his own two paintings contain portraits of his family and acquaintances and thus also layers of meaning inaccessible to anyone who believes them to be sixteenth-century artworks.) But Francis is out of step with the times, unable to paint in a ‘modern’ manner but only in a style taken to be that of a Renaissance artist.
I too find this double standard in art perplexing. A painting may triple in value when someone decides it is by someone famous, yet actually it remains exactly the same thing as before.
So beauty and truth can be found in fakes. And surprisingly – or perhaps, not surprisingly – the picture that remains closest to Francis’s heart throughout his life is not a Renaissance oil but a cheap print of a sentimental Victorian painting, Love Shut Out by Anna Lea Merritt. And other neglected art forms are promoted in this novel. Francis learns to draw first by copying from a book on caricatures by Henry Furniss, an Irish illustrator. Caricatures reveal the inner truth of a person, disguised by the flesh. Francis improves his ability by sketching corpses in a funeral parlour, while his great friend Zadok practises another art form, painting the faces of the dead and arranging them ‘for the viewing. At the end they must look as they’d have looked on their wedding-day, or better. Probably better,’ Zadok tells the boy Francis. Here too a sort of falsification reveals a deeper truth about the deceased and winkles forth a ‘best’ version of them.
(Harry Furniss, pen-and-ink drawing showing himself barring the door to his studio to Lewis Carroll, whose Sylvie and Bruno he illustrated and who proved a trouble to Furniss; before 1901; National Portrait Gallery, London; found here)
Neither fake nor ‘authentic’ art, high art nor these other art forms, is presented as ultimately ‘better’ than the other. Davies is happy to let them sit together. The novel is packed with dualities, and they are dualities which enrich each other. The Marriage of Cana exemplifies this. Saraceni, the art expert, master artist and forger who taught Francis all he knew, interprets it as being both Christian and alchemical and both Bride and Groom seem to be portraits of Francis. They stand with portraits of his parents, his aunt and brother, his grandfather, even Saraceni himself. The painting depicts the union of the male and female aspects of Francis and comments on the figures in his life who have made him who he is.
As this long rambly post indicates, What’s Bred in the Bone is complex and interesting as well as being entertaining, and I haven’t even touched on the use of Jungian archetypes, astrology and the Grail legend. Read it! Thank you so much to Lory, for hosting Robertson Davies Reading Week and for prompting me to read him again. Now that I am home, I am contemplating getting stuck into those big trilogies I was too feeble to pack for my holiday.
(Anna Lea Merritt, Love Locked Out, oil, 1890; Tate Britain, London; found here)