A NICHE IN TIME

BY WILLIAM F. TEMPLE

It had to be a painter this time. My kind of painter.

I’ve catholic taste, but a natural bias. Music, literature, poetry, the theater, sculpture, architecture: all stairways for my spirit. All tracks up the slopes of Parnassus.

Yet to me the crest meant just one thing: a certain masterly arrangement of colors and of light and shade, bringing blazing exaltation.

It had to be Van Gogh.

Concerning others there was usually doubt about the right Moment to choose. Vincent’s Moment for me, personally, was the painting of his masterpiece, “The Yellow House.” For my employer, the University, Department of History, sub-department A.E. (Active Encouragement), the Moment was in the Borinage, during Van Gogh’s period of greatest early discouragement. The Church Council had declared he was a most unsatisfactory preacher, and flung him out.

He didn’t know which way to turn. So I visited him.

Shortly afterwards, he wrote to his brother, Theo: “I decided to take up my pencil and start drawing again, and from that moment everything looked different.”

He was twenty-seven then.

I had been the man of that “moment,” which it’s my job to be: I am a Visitor.

It’s a responsible job, and the strain of saying the right thing at the right time can be wearing on the nerves. So the University, which is sometimes understanding—but often not —allows me the odd trip now and then purely for relaxation. A little holiday.

This holiday I wanted to see a painter. My kind of painter. I chose to revisit Vincent eight years after the Borinage— eight years of his time, of course. On a day when the paint on the canvas of “The Yellow House” was still wet. . . .

* * * *

In my excitement I miscalculated, and instead of the tree-sheltered part set the chronocab plumb in the center of the lawn in Place Lamartine. But no one was around to witness me stepping out of nothingness. I was in costume, as always. This time masquerading as a French agricultural laborer, with walnut juice brown-staining my face and arms.

One must never excite the attention of the populace.

There it stood, on the corner. The yellow house itself, with its green door. The sun drenched it, but the yellow was hard, lacking the honeyed warmth from Vincent’s brush. The sky above it was pure cobalt, lacking the magic ingredient of black Vincent had worked into his sky. It takes a master painter to gild Nature.

Beyond, on the right, the glamorous Café de Nutt—dusty, crumbling, prosaic in plain daylight. Also, the two railroad bridges, and just crossing the nearer—a timely gift from Time!—a slow, slug-back, smoky train.

Wide open to every precious nuance of awareness, I lounged across the brown grass.

This time it wasn’t necessary to explain that I was a Visitor. It’s never easy to do, and it was nice to be able to relax. Vincent Van Gogh still had two more years—the terrible years—to live, and there was nothing I could do about that. His disease was already deep-rooted in his brain.

My French was far better than his, and he accepted me as a Frenchman. An odd type, admittedly: a laborer who knew something about the technique of painting. But Vincent was already dwelling in a fantasy world, and I became merely part of it to him.

On my first visit it had been more difficult. He had been let down badly. He was suspicious: thought I was an agent of the Evangelist Committee. I was a pretty good linguist, even then, but Dutch wasn’t my strong suit. He’d been teaching—and preaching—in England, so we got by in English that time.

And that time I took him back to England—in the chronocab.

London in midwinter, 1948. A dark gray day by the dark gray Thames. There was an endless drizzle from a sky of mud. We arrived behind a telephone booth—its red was the only visible splash of color—on a side street.

I led him around the corner, and there on the sidewalk, patient in the rain, was a line of more than a thousand people. Slowly, they were shuffling into the Tate Gallery. And as the big building swallowed the head of the line, so others joined the tail, keeping the line at a constant length.

“That,” I told him, “has been going on all day. It went on all yesterday. So it will go on, day after day. A thousand people an hour, every hour. All records for attendance at an art exhibition have already been smashed. These people, weary after a long war, are starved of sunshine and color. They flock here to feast their souls on the work of one great artist.”

“Rembrandt?” he guessed, innocently, watching the traffic on the street with a wondering but wary eye. It was thin today, but I had warned him of it.

“No. You-Vincent Van Gogh.”

He was stunned, and had no words. Those wild pale-blue eyes rolled more wildly. I feared he would have one of his fits, but his shaking was only excitement at this evidence of his unbelievable success.

We stood in line, so that presently he could see for himself the blazing sunflowers and orchards of the future in his style of the future. . . .

* * * *

And now, in that future, of his, in Arles, on my second visit, I stood with him again, looking at some of those very same paintings: unhung, unwanted, unbought.

The thick paint of “The Yellow House” was damp as toothpaste on the canvas: he’d just brought it in from the square. I could have left my thumb print on it for posterity—theoretically.

I savored this historical Moment.

I pictured this little house when the mistral howled around it, setting the windows rattling, the doors banging, and Vincent’s super-sensitive nerves on edge.

I looked at the mess of dropped paint on the floor and the splashes on the walls. Soon Vincent would clean that up and whitewash the walls. For his hero, Gauguin, was coming to stay.

And one day, during Gauguin’s stay, the red-tiled floor would become redder yet, with Vincent’s blood, and all the splashes on the walls would be crimson.

I glanced at his right ear, and felt again the old awe of Nemesis. Effectively, the chronocab was like a fly buzzing across the path of a runaway truck.

Maybe the universe is mad. If so the most you can do is try to give people courage to face it

If ever a man needed encouragement, Vincent did. Pick a moment at random in his life and you could reasonably call it the Moment. Here and now in Arles, for instance. He still hadn’t sold a single painting. He was to sell only one in his life, and that for under four hundred francs.

Would it help if I told him that in Paris, in 1957, just one of his paintings would be sold for the equivalent of two hundred fifty thousand of those same francs? And at that period his total output was to be valued at thirty million francs? He needed money and food now. More likely it would embitter him to learn that art dealers, of the same ignorant breed that had spurned him all his life, would make fortunes from him when he was dead.

So I didn’t tell him.

In any case, this time I had no authority to back such a statement. The first time, I revealed my identity and proved it by demonstration. Then, my mission completed, electronically erased the traces of it, which was standard procedure. This time I was just Francois, an appreciative peasant, who wanted to learn about technique from an obvious master.

As I hoped, lonely Vincent, deprived of communication on the subject, except in letters to Theo, was eager to expound.

Finally, he settled on the bed, smoking and talking nonstop. While I sat on the rush-seated chair he was to make so famous, drinking his words in. My hero, the genius who it had been my privilege to help, explaining himself and his work to me personally, on a warm evening in Arles, far away in time and space. ...

It was unforgettable. Nevertheless, I dutifully transcribed it from the tape directly I returned. It was practically a two-hour monologue.

* * * *

Would you like to know what Vincent Van Gogh said? You can. Just read on.

My mind is purely that of an artist. It feels its way through a kind of colored fog. It reasons poorly, sees nothing sharp and clear in black and white. Mathematics has always baffled it. It can’t grasp scientific technicalities. It merely apprehends form, tone, shades. . . .

How was such a vague person as myself appointed a Visitor? Well, of course, I’m restricted to the Arts, just as my colleague, Blum, is confined to the Sciences. Sometimes I envy him his keen, precise mind. His task is to encourage the scientific geniuses at times when superstition, incredulity, or prejudice are stifling their creativity.

At least, he can offer a logical explanation of how past, present, and future are not merely interdependent but an immutable whole. And how an as yet unborn man can put his oar into some current human situation and add his pennyweight of influence to the scale-pan when a despairing creator is wavering between renewing the struggle or giving it up altogether.

When my particular nurslings of immortality ask me to explain the apparent time paradox, I begin to stammer. I fall back on insisting: “Well, it is so. For here I am. For further proof, I’ll take you through time to my world, which is your world also: for you have conquered it.”

Once, of course, they’ve tasted future—and often posthumous—fame, they never revive the argument. It might spoil the dream. When they’ve seen their paintings or sculptures in the Louvre, heard audiences cheering their operas or plays, handled many editions of their books in libraries, they’re reborn.

The surly Beethoven, for instance, bitter through neglect, anxious about his growing deafness. Following the visit to Carnegie Hall he was as benign and joyous as his own Pastoral Symphony. It was the joy of faith vindicated.

Another paradox. Man is never without faith. He always believes. If a man says he has lost his faith, he yet has faith —in his belief that he has lost his faith. All the same, this loss of faith can cause spiritual stasis. It’s a whirlpool trap for a man’s soul, which could circle pointlessly until he dies.

I explained to Ludwig von Beethoven that it was a Visitor’s job to throw a line to such trapped souls.

He said typically: “I am not the only one. I know of friends—”

“I cannot help your friends,” I said. “Even if I tried to, I couldn’t give them what fate has denied them. They have talent, not genius. Experience has shown that genius responds, talent does not. I can do nothing for them.”

This led to a discussion on the nature of genius.

Beethoven’s view was. . . .

You can learn Beethoven’s view on genius. And it will cost you nothing. Read on.

Analyze the most magical lines in poetry and you’ll find they’re evocative of the inexorable passage of Time.

But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.

Or:

Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.

Or:

Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more. (A line which always moved Housman to tears.)

Shakespeare, of course, was the most Time-conscious of them all. He refers variously to Time as: “The clocksetter, that bald sexton . . . That old common arbitrator ... A whirligig ... A fashionable host. . . The king of men . . . Eater of youth ... A great-sized monster of ingratitudes . . . Envious and calumniating Time.”

And bids us: See the minutes, how they run.

And asks:

Whet strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

And:

But wherefore do not you a mightier way

Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time?

And declares:

Time, that takes survey of all the world,

Must have a stop.

His Sonnets are one long defiance of “Devouring Time.” Constantly he repeats that, although Time will devour him, his lines will defeat Time.

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Which leads to a mystery. After his retirement to Stratford he made no attempt to publish any of his plays. After his death, they would have been lost forever had not a couple of his friends collated some old prompt copies.

Was Shakespeare finally resigned to the inevitable victory of Time? Or was he just thumbing his nose at it?

I wanted to visit him in his retirement and solve this mystery. Some day I shall.

I must hear that beautiful, gentle voice again, speaking his lines with that fascinating Warwickshire accent he never lost. Men have wondered that, reputedly, in his manuscripts, “he never blotted a line.” Of course not. He was an actor. It was his practice to speak his lines aloud many times until they sounded right. Then it was merely a clerical job to write them down. So naturally, as Heminge and Condell remarked: “His mind and hand went together.”

I would have thought that his Moment for A.E. treatment was fairly late in life. Say, when in bitter despair at human ingratitude, he wrote the searing “Timon of Athens.” But the departmental heads held that it lay somewhere in the Sonnet period, when he was in distress over his capricious rejection by the Dark Lady.

Maybe they were right. Anyhow, I visited him officially then.

The mysterious Dark Lady was certainly a femme fatale. There was poor Fortesque who, because of her, jumped from Old London Bridge....

She was . . .

Perhaps you know who she was. Again, perhaps, like those who strove for four centuries to uncover her identity, you are still in the dark. You need be no longer. On the last page of this brochure you will find the key enabling you to unlock not only her mystery, but also many other mysteries of history.

* * * *

It was the night of March 3, 1875, the premiere of “Carmen” at the Opera Comique in Paris.

The audience was ice-cold. It didn’t understand the opera, so it was bored. The curtain came down to a snakepit chorus of hissing.

There was a well-known report, repeated by Bruneau, that Bizet walked the streets of Paris till dawn next day, hysterical with shame and despair. Later, Halevy testified that such was net the case. That after the show Bizet returned with him to their lodgings. That was so. I know. I walked behind them.

In some ways, this was the strangest of all my missions. Doomed to failure, yet it was written that I had to try.

The whole point of life is that we all have to try.

What I shall never quite understand is how encouragement given after a work is created can assist its creation. Blum tells me I must cease to think of time one-dimensionally, as a continuous line. I should picture it three-dimensionally. Say, as a cube.

A man’s conscious mind moves from point to point over the surfaces of the cube. But his subconscious mind moves below those surfaces, darting around like a firefly within the cube. It can touch points of time anywhere on the cube long before conscious attention does.

Not that this is any new discovery. In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries experimenters confirmed the phenomenon of pre-cognition clearly enough.

Anyhow, the fact remains that the subconscious is aware of the Moment of Active Encouragement, and it’s immaterial whether that Moment lies in the conscious future or past For it is from the subconscious that all creation proceeds.

Bizet was alone in his room when I called in the small hours. He was still fully dressed, sitting at a table with a bottle of champagne, and a half-full glass before him. He’d drunk only a little and was quite sober.

His face was impassive—and haunts me still. He had just received a mortal blow, but his self-control was almost superhuman. I respect him as a man perhaps more than any other man I’ve met, past or present. I’ve painted his portrait from memory. It depicts merely a fair-haired, fair-bearded man who looks thoughtful and—nice. (That unsatisfactory, and yet the only satisfactory, word.)

I’ve failed to capture, in paint, the essence of Georges Bizet. I shall try again.

I introduced myself and explained my presence. He seemed to believe me without proof, almost as though he were expecting me.

I told him: “In 1880 Tchaikovsky will publicly predict that within a decade ‘Carmen’ will become the most popular opera in the world. I’m glad to assure you that he will be perfectly right.”

He smiled and poured me a glass of champagne.

“Let’s drink to Tchaikovsky, then.”

“No,” I said, raising my glass, “to Bizet.”

“Thank you. You are the only man to toast me tonight. At this moment, all the critics are busily ripping ‘Carmen’ to shreds with their pen-nibs.”

“Critics! On the rare occasions when their verdicts are unanimous, their reasons for giving them are totally different. Ignore them. You didn’t write ‘Carmen’ for them. You wrote it for the people.”

He sipped at his glass.

“That is true. And the people have rejected it.”

“Come,” I said, rising, “we’ll go to the opera. I’ll take you into 1905, and the night of the thousandth performance of ‘Carmen.’”

He remained seated. “No, Monsieur Everard. The next generation is not my concern. I shall not live to know those people. I wrote for this generation, my fellow human beings. I have failed them.”

“Nonsense! They have failed you.”

“We’ve both failed—to communicate. And now something has broken in here.”

He tapped his chest

In three months—at only thirty-seven—he was dead. Of heart disease, the doctor said—though Bizet had shown no symptom of it before. Bizet’s friends said yes, it was heart trouble: a broken heart.

It is true that when a man’s spiritual mainspring breaks, it’s beyond repair. The best that one can do is face the situation with calmness and courage. Bizet did just that. I shall always envy him his maturity.

* * * *

There were other composers, too, of course, who died even younger, neglected “failures.” The poverty-stricken Mozart, for one: he was buried in a pauper’s grave. And the equally poor Schubert, for another, deeply frustrated in his love life also. Jon Everard met them both. His descriptions of those meetings will move you profoundly.

Vincent Van Gogh and I are totally dissimilar in style, although I owe so much to him. If there is a distinct Everard style, then I have achieved it in my “Calvary.” The version on my studio wall is actually my third attempt: I destroyed the others.

Strange how people who have admired it all assumed it to have come solely from my imagination. In fact, all three were painted in the neighborhood of Golgotha, and depicted the actual scene at the actual time.

Three crosses on a distant hill against a stormy sky .. .

Why didn’t I approach nearer? I tried to, but something barred me each time. Possibly my own awe. Possibly some influence I don’t understand.

Earlier, with the innocent daring of youth, I sometimes wondered whether I could possibly be intended to serve as a humble instrument in the Second Coming ...

* * * *

Naturally, we hope that these brief extracts from the famous JOURNAL OF JON EVERARD will whet your appetite for the whole wonderful story. You can have copies sent to you in two handsome cloth-bound volumes. Simply fill in the form below and mail it to us. SEND NO MONEY until you have inspected this bargain of a lifetime at your leisure in your own home.

Escape from the long winter evenings on golden journeys through time with Jon Everard to meet face to face many of the greatest men who ever lived.

* * * *

When he had finished reading the shiny brochure, Jon Everard pursed his lips and laid it on his desk.

He looked at the Visitor, who eagerly and a little nervously awaited his comment.

“An ill-judged selection, I’m afraid, Mr. Bernstein. Certainly not the best of my passages, and the balance is poor. And that cheapjack get-the-customer-hooked gimmick is deplorable.”

Bernstein looked crestfallen.

“Of course, some of the advertising copywriters do tend to lack taste, Mr. Everard. But their job is to sell the book to the widest possible public. They have to set their sights low . . . But that wasn’t very tactful, was it? I’m making a mess of this. I thought bringing that brochure was a good idea. It would show you at a glance that you would become the most famous and popular diarist since Pepys. Maybe I should have brought one of the tooled leather editions—”

“No, it’s all right,” cut in Everard. “You did well. Forgive my carping. My nerves have been in poor shape lately.”

“Yes, I know. I must be your greatest fan, Mr. Everard. I know your Journal almost by heart. I can tell from the tone that around this period you had a bout of nervous depression, although you didn’t record it in so many words.”

“It showed, huh?”

“It seemed to me you’d gotten in the way of measuring yourself against these great men you were meeting, to your own detriment. You were losing the sense of your own worth. That’s why I picked on this period to come back and show you that, probably quite unconsciously, you were writing a masterpiece. None of your successors has accomplished anything like it. I know I’ll never be able to touch it, though I do keep a Journal. I’m still green at the job. Frankly, I hoped to pick up a few personal tips from you, as you did from Van Gogh.”

“This visit is one of your holiday choices?”

“Yes. The very first. The University doubted you needed encouragement, and refused to sanction an official journey. You know what these things cost. There’s always trouble over expense.”

Jon Everard nodded. “Then I shan’t make the account any heavier for you by insisting on going for a peek-a-boo at your world. Sounds like the same old world, anyhow. Thanks for calling, Mr. Bernstein.”

Bernstein unhappily felt he was being dismissed. He hesitated.

Everard read his thoughts, and smiled kindly at him. “I’d like to be able to help you, but nothing I could say would be of any practical use to you. It’s such a personal kind of job that everyone’s approach is bound to be different, according to their nature. Experience is the only teacher. So concentrate on developing into the first Bernstein rather than a second Everard. If it’ll increase your confidence, I’ll tell you this: in all my travels I never had a cold welcome . . . What’s the reading on your chronometer?”

Bernstein started, then inspected a dial on his tape recorder.

“Twenty-one minutes, thirty-five seconds.”

“Play safe and set a round twenty-five on your Eraser,” Everard advised.

Bernstein fumbled in his jacket pocket. Then he flushed.

“I really am a fool. I’ve forgotten to bring it. I was so eager to meet you, came away in a rush . . . Now I’ll have to go back and get it.”

“And add another fifteen thousand to the account?”

“Closer to forty thousand these days—that is, in my days,” said Bernstein, gloomily. “The Governors will be mad at me for making a costly boob like this, especially on a privilege trip. Nevertheless, even if they fire me, I shall never regret making this trip.”

“They need never know about it,” smiled Everard. “You can use my Eraser.”

He went across to his chronocabinet. It looked like a telephone booth in the comer. It was meant to look as ordinary as that, to avoid arousing curiosity. For Jon Everard was the first official Visitor, and at this time his reports were on the Restricted List.

He pulled the door open and patted a leather holster fixed to its inner side.

“Here’s one tip, anyhow. Keep your Eraser stowed in the chronocab itself. Then you can’t very well leave it behind.”

“Thanks, I’ll do that, Mr. Everard.”

* * * *

Everard pulled the pistol-shaped Eraser from the holster. The dial in its butt gleamed as it caught the light. He turned a knurled knob to set the pointer.

“Twenty-five minutes.” He handed the instrument to Bernstein.

Bernstein checked. “Right.”

Everard returned to his desk, settled back comfortably in his chair.

“It must be a relief for you to skip the explanation this one time,” he said. “I always find that a tough chore. Sometimes they’re a little afraid in case I’m going to kill them. Make sure you replace that Eraser in my chronocab—don’t stick it in your pocket and take it with you. O.K., I’m relaxed now. Fire when ready.”

He closed his eyes with a kind of deliberate finality.

Bernstein thought: he doesn’t want to see me any more. Maybe he never had a cold welcome, but I’ve had warmer ones than this. Not even a good-by handshake. I tell him he’s my idol—and it doesn’t mean a thing. He’s decent enough, sure—but I thought we’d have such a lot to talk about. Thought I’d be here all day. Twenty-five minutes!”

He walked behind Everard’s chair, pressed the point of the Eraser against the nape of Everard’s neck, thumbed the button.

The force-field of an Eraser sets up a block in the prefrontal area of the brain, eliminating the neuron paths consciously recorded within any set period. The subconscious retains the relevant memories but they can never re-emerge into consciousness: the bridges are down.

There was no visible reaction from Everard, but that was normal. Mental numbness usually persisted for three or four minutes after the shock. An artist, say, would awaken on his studio couch and imagine he’d merely fallen asleep. Whether he had been robbed of a few hours of his working life by sleep or by an Eraser made no odds. His dream life, at any rate, had been enriched, and his work is an embodied dream.

Bernstein pocketed the brochure, then glanced out of the window at the sea in sunlight. He had visualized himself strolling along its margin with his old hero, discussing life and what makes a man great, until those western waters were blood-tinged by the sunset. But sundown was way off, and he must leave Everard and his world to meet him again only on familiar printed pages.

He sighed, taking a farewell look at the calm, still face. Then he went into the comer by the tall bookcase—and disappeared. It was as though he had stepped through an invisible door into another dimension. And, indeed, this was what happened. For an invisible projection of his own chronocabinet was located there.

Five seconds later, he re-appeared, flushed and chagrined. He blundered across to Everard’s solidly visible chronocabinet, and thrust the Eraser back in its holster. Sentimental mooning, destroying my concentration, will lose me this job yet, he chided himself.

A faint, unobserved smile touched Everard’s lips, and was gone.

And then Bernstein, back in his own chronocabinet, was gone also. Everard, waiting for it, had heard the faint rising hum end abruptly with a snap, like a breaking violin string.

* * * *

He opened his eyes, but no amusement lingered in them. They were sad. He ran his fingers through his hair, then rested his elbows on his desk and brooded.

He had boobed over the Eraser, too. Its battery was flat, and he had intended to replace it before his next trip. But, until Bernstein had attempted to use it on him, he’d forgotten that.

Why, then, had he shammed unconsciousness?

Why hadn’t he simply apologized, and replaced the battery?

Pride, covering up that the great Jon Everard, famed as a perfectionist, could make elementary mistakes like a tyro-like Bernstein?

Consideration—to spare the young man further embarrassment?

Opportunism—to make use of foreknowledge?

Egotism—to be able to gloat over his coming election to the Hall of Fame?

No, none of those reasons. They were absurd. For he would be happier minus the memories of the past twenty-five minutes. Fame he desired, and fame would be his—but for the wrong reason. His life-long ambition had been to become a great painter. He had poured his soul into his painting.

But Bernstein had made no mention of Everard, the painter. Neither had the brochure. Therefore, his work could have left no great impression. He had failed and was doomed to fail.

And he hadn’t the guts of Georges Bizet. As he brooded, he gradually began to understand why he had chosen to stay conscious. Bernstein’s visit had succeeded only in imbuing him with a sense of failure and inadequacy. If the Eraser had functioned, it would have left his subconscious mind filled with discouragement, the reverse of what Bernstein had intended. And he would never know why he felt that way.

The instinct for self-preservation had induced him to play possum.

Self-awareness meant that he wasn’t chained in bondage to his subconscious. He still had the power of choice. He must try for Bizet’s kind of courage, and accept the situation as philosophically as the Frenchman did.

And that same self-awareness told him that there was one great difference: nothing had broken inside him.

He must simply learn to adjust. He must learn to exchange the brash for the pen, and become another kind of artist.

He picked up his pen and opened his Journal. He had not yet finished the account of his meeting with Georges Bizet. He wrote: The whole point of life is that we all have to try.

He paused, remembering the words. That brochure was helping him, after all. Yet ... it was fated, too. The future supported the past just as much as the past supported the future. Cause and effect were like two balancing sides of a Gothic arch. It was nonsense to pretend one came “first.”

Yet he still had the power of choice. It made it no less a choice because his future self made that choice.

Time was an edifice, all of a piece, like some vast cathedral, architecturally perfect. Arch beyond arch, myriads of interlocking arches . ..

Soon, he told himself, I must visit an architect Say, Christopher Wren, when the Commissioners for rebuilding London after the Great Fire were doing all they could to thwart his plans for completing St. Paul’s Cathedral...