Meetings With A Remarkable Man

There used to be a series in the Reader's Digest called "My Most Extraordinary Character", or something like that. They would tell, as I remember, of some person who had a formative influence on the writer’s young life and, being mostly American, were generally full of healthy moral uplift. Mostly they were accounts of "inspirational" - that quintessentially Transatlantic adjective! - teachers and the like. I am sure these good people were indeed extraordinary in some way or other - most of us perhaps are - but not in every way. My "Most Extraordinary Character" was really unusual because he was not extraordinary in one or two ways, but in every way. And yes he had a formative influence on my young life; and, yes, I believe that influence was an uplifting one, but in a very unconventional sense.

When and where did I first meet him? I honestly cannot remember. This is often the case with people who have a strong influence over you: they exist in your mind as a presence rather than through isolated incidents. However, I do remember how I came to know him, or rather how my parents did, and that encounter was entirely characteristic.

The name Denzil Bachelor probably means nothing to most people now, but in his day he was a prolific and successful writer and journalist. He was genial, spontaneously witty, a bon viveur, an expert on food and wine and cricket. My father, a magazine editor, frequently employed his fluent pen which is how he and my mother happened to be at a party of his. An unusual feature of this party, the "conversation piece" you might say, was a portrait of Denzil newly executed by a young artist not yet out of his ‘teens. The painting itself was inspiring a mixed reaction. It was obviously a work of great technical brilliance but there was something about it which troubled and embarrassed many of the partygoers there. The picture was a good physical likeness, certainly - an excellent one in fact - but this was not the witty Denzil that most people knew and were comfortable with. This was a picture of a wistful, melancholy man, full of unfulfilled hopes, staring out of the picture into a very uncertain future. My parents who in their differing ways had a pretty shrewd understanding of human nature recognised immediately that the young artist had got beneath the amiable surface of Denzil to the man beneath. They knew that Denzil had once been a poet with ambitions to be a great writer, but that he had come to realise that he was only an extremely competent one. They knew that he was a highly emotional lover of beauty who was embarrassed by his own rotund and commonplace appearance. Unlike some others present on that occasion my parents were not embarrassed by the artist's revelation; they were intrigued.

Noticing smartly dressed young man in the corner of the room who was being politely shunned by the rest of the crowd, they put two and two together and went over to talk to him. The year, I believe, was 1963, the young artist to whom they talked was then calling himself Anthony Christian Howard.

He was of middle height, wiry and well built, with powerful, intense features and a fearless gaze. The young Michelangelo might have looked like this. But the word "intense" has to be qualified. This was someone who was extremely serious and dedicated about his work, but not at all solemn or pompous. His fluent conversation was shot through with a vein of fantastic, outrageous humour, about himself, the people he encountered, the world around him. But there was also, in those days, something about him of the young giant who does not know his own strength. The story of another portrait will serve as an example.

Denzil, to his credit, recognised the truth of his picture and cherished it, but there were others who found Anthony's brand of reality rather harder to bear. There was once a rich man who commissioned Anthony to do a portrait of his wife whom I shall call C. I remember going to Anthony’s studio flat and seeing the picture that he had made of C. She had been painted seated in a high backed upholstered arm chair. Obviously she was an attractive woman, but there was something about her expression which was profoundly disturbing. Menace does not exactly describe it: feral, predatory might be more accurate epithets. I was taken aback by the picture and I was quite surprised that Anthony did not seem fully aware of its malign power. He simply said: "That's how I saw her," or words to that effect. Something from her of which he was only partially conscious had come through him onto the canvas. Needless to say, the rich man was outraged by the picture, even though he could not deny its brilliance, and I understand that subsequent tragic events fully confirmed Anthony's artistic intuitions about C.

Soon Anthony was paying visits to our house to paint a portrait of my mother and to draw me and my father, and we were visiting his flat in Hammersmith with its red walls covered with drawings and canvases. Frequently my brother and I would visit Anthony on our own, and he treated us not as the very young and naive people we were, but as equals with whom he could share thoughts, experiences and enthusiasms.

I will not talk about his amazing artistic gifts: you will have to, if you have not already, take them as read. What interests me is what underlies them. One of the first things about him that struck me, though I would not have been able to define it at the time, was the strength and refinement of his sensuality. Taste, smell, colour, touch were all intense experiences for him. I remember him coming one day for a portrait session with my mother and rhapsodising about the duck he had eaten the night before at a restaurant: "the meat just fell off the bone," I remember him saying. My mother who, like most properly brought-up Englishwomen, enjoyed food but did not think it quite polite to talk about it, was slightly bemused. I remember too how Anthony became a great connoisseur of wine and tobacco, relishing a very expensive brand of cigarettes called Perfectos. He sought these things out, not because they were grand, or expensive or fashionable, but simply because his palate told him they were the best. Nowadays Anthony is a non-smoking vegetarian who hardly touches alcohol, but that does not surprise me. In the true sensualist there is always an ascetic lying in wait.

It was from Anthony that I learned the rarest of lessons which is that the spiritual and the sensual are not enemies but are, if properly understood and experienced, two aspects of the same universal truth. I remember that the only time that Anthony spoke to me sharply was when he first showed me some of his erotic drawings. I laughed, and he was disappointed by my reaction. In my defence, I would say that I was a rather immature fourteen year old for whom sex was an unknown quantity but obviously dirty and probably ludicrous. Anthony was and is one of those people for whom, like Blake, "everything that lives is holy."

In 1966 I went with my brother and my mother to stay with him and his wife Sue in Rome. It was there that I became aware of another of his extraordinary gifts. Not only can Anthony absorb languages with ease he has a knack of inhabiting any place he comes to as a native. That Easter in Rome we also became Romans thanks to him. We even went to St Peter's Square on Easter Day to see the Pope give his benediction from the balcony. Given Anthony's trenchant views on religious, and in particular Catholic, hierarchies, I think in retrospect that he demonstrated considerable forbearance in allowing this to happen. In the seventies I saw less of him as he was travelling more. Then thirty years passed before a few clicks on the Internet brought us together again. Time had not dimmed his energies, but it had deepened his genius. But during that time I had carried with me ideas and inspirations planted by him: above all a sense of the importance of art, life and experience, a sense that, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins - a Jesuit Priest, by the way! - "there lies the dearest freshness deep down things."

REGGIE OLIVER November 2005

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