A portrait of Frederich Niextzsche
Oh Darling, not an actor. For God's sake
"Is that what she said?"
"Yes, when I told her it was you."
"Oh dear". he wasn't offended, indeed he could undersand it, the daughter throwing herself away on a feckless actor. But although in this Edenic pre-Google age, he didn't have the fine detail at his fingertips, he knew her parents had been show business royalty; father a famous actor, mother a famous actress a decade or two back. That had been established by actorly gossip on their recent trailing of a production of Twelfth Night around Lake District theatres
He walked along beside her now. He was proud, exultant even, to be with her as the sun glinted on Turnham Green. He had met her outside her parents flat just off the Green. She didn't want him to come in, she was not going to introduce an actor, this man who had put the nail in the coffin of her withering marriage to that Hoooray Henry. Poor chap, Bosco had great sympathy for the now rejected husband. No, wait outside, for her parents she indicated would have been mortified with embarrassment for hadn't they been in the 'business; all their feted lives, and for their daughter to leave her husband of just 18 months for an actor she had met on tour, oh for God's sake. For didn't they know the vagaries of actors from old, and had become so disenchanted by the company of strolling players, they had even hankered a sympathy for the Bards intimation that 'they' be buried in paupers' graves.
An elderly lady with a frisky Border Colly approached as they strode across the Green
"Scuse me, scuse me..." Bosco and Latetia stoped.
"...Are you the girl from, that girl Vivianne...from the television...you are aren't yeh? Can you...can you..' and she fiddled with the dogs lead in that servile way as she sought out a scrap of paper.
Bosco bent down and patted the dog, who seemed as excited as its owner to be in the company of a star for this brief moment. "Take your time...really, it's alright," Latetia assured the flustered woman. The woman then produced a crumpled envelope that looked as if it had the stains of a family breakfast on it "Can you sign, please. It's ever so...ever so nice of yeh." The woman was crooking her knee. Bosco was reminded of his minute part in Twelfth Night fawning, obsequious. What absolute bollocks it all is.
"Of course. Of Course." He heard above as the fuss went on about the autograph.. What was going through Bosco's mind at this point was a kind of raised eyebrow for he been though his own fame, an athlete of international standing who had signed autographs too and given prizes out at schools and received the adulation of attendant minders carrying his bag and putting his coat over his shoulders as if he was some Bourbon prince. It marked one, to a life time of preening.
"Well very monastic that part of your life and now you are making up for it in what might be termed a 'late adolescence'. However his Warhol moment of fame had come about through pugilism, to his continuing shame. The stupidity of it, to be prey to that kind of manipulation. How could he have let them? "Well, it could has been ballet, couldn't it? She chided him, Oh you know, another family, another class."
Yes, yes, her aphorisms would come at it like so many life rafts - that woman of the Adlerian school who had changed him "Still. there is one thing you should most proud of in regard to pugilism."
"What is that?"
"You had the intelligence to give it up, when you were under so much pressure to go on."
"Oh that was the Beatles." He recalled Lennon barrelling down the aisle of the Boeing on the way to New York like some bear looking for a China shop.
"Yes it was fortutious youu going off to film with them, but you would have given it up anyway. You have a good brain."
Of course, yes, I would have, he had told her this formative figure in his life. There! In that house, when they strolled past it once. That one, with the blue
plaque
"Oh where Pissaro used to live." Beyond that she had expressed little interest, for her interests, like us all, were limited. Her famous father had tried, as parents, famous and infamous do, a schooling at the Lycee, that French Institute in South Kensington, followed by a good drama school. He had his doubts she had related, but why not allow one of his children to be permitted to look after the family shop. In return, Latetia's central interest was deifying her father who would return from exotic locations - for he was now a Director, '...oh, you know, when your looks go , darling, you have to move chairs . So he would return from these exotic locations with memoirs, usually detritus; a piece of wood, a twisted metal object
"What is it?"
, "Isn't it beautiful?"
"Eh, yes, dad" and his children would commune around these objects in that, theological way, in many ways as innocent and naive as was his pursuit of boxing, the commonality of both pursuits denying development. For both pursuits pugilism and deifying 'art', one brutal, one so-called aesthetic, were denials of that greatest illusion of all, reality. A self taught auto-didact he would have been able to tell her now, that these objects brought back from foreign climes, are representattons, and representations, are representations of representations and so on ad infinitum, They were refractions, trompe l'oeil,
all that 'art' that was revered by father and daughter, with a reverence that was unknowingly theological and all done, Bosco now thought with a certain outrage, all done without even...without even a nod to Nietzsche, nod even a raised hat, a top of the morning to you Frederich and if you had stopped to talk to him, or interrupted his chattering to horses, he would have deemed those who wished to listen that art aws a surrogate, an intervention a buffer zone to human kinds perennial
question
"Why are we here?. Oh what was the point, she was not interested in 'that' sort of thing. There was only one person in his life interested in that sort of thing, that woman who lived down there in Pissaro's house.
He lifted his head now from this sea of thought and raised himself from the crouched position of patting the slavering dog, without noting how fast the mind machinates.
He stood by her side now and looked at this duo, the adored starlet and the shuffling pensioner. "Oh no, not at all," she was assuring the pensioner," My pleasure" and she strolled off and he cocker spaniel like was by her side.
They walked on in silence towards the fountain at the centre of the Green. It spurting out 'life', the water cascaded down past spattered mosses and as they stood watching it seemed to flatter this gilded pair with spray.
"Come on, I am getting wet."
"Me too."
As a kind of riposte he started to tell her of his recent 'autograph' incident of the taxi driver hollering out at him from his cab as he stalled in the Piccadilly traffic, "Bosc, ow yeh goin me son, looking well."
"That still happening, God, they have long memories," was her disdainful aside.
"Difference though, you are acclaimed for art by would not hurt a fly, bag of bones pensioners and I am recognised,, still, by wide boy taxi drivers."
She did not respond it was one of the reason they would part, enquiries stopped, 0thers in the future might say but you are viewing acclaim from a class perspective, To which he would have replied, yes, that's right...rather an amiable bag of bones pensioner than wide boy rabble. Oh you are such a snob, he could hear that woman chiding him.
"Anywhere I can wash my hands."
"The fountain tap over there. Now we are going to see these friends of mine tonight...you haven't forgotten?"
"No, no, I haven't forgotten."
"Now, if they start asking you about your boxing past don't clam up as usually do,"
"I won't clam up. OK?"
"You know who called me yesterday?"
"Who?"
"The Duke."
"Orsino!" Vincente Moiseralla from Noo Yoik."
"Do you want to hear what he had to say?"
"Of course, 'if music be the food of love, play on.'
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