The good, the bad and the ugly
R
The Last Supper is similarly hard not to take personally - that is part of the point of life-writing, after all, especially within Cusk's area of focus, self-expression in the heart of the family - and Cusk may expect some more personal opprobrium, particularly from Bristolians. "Man, woman and child, they found sensitivity intolerable." Bristol is the city on which Cusk's dissatisfaction with the relentless round of domestic life is writ parodically large; its "primitive" inhabitants keep Cusk awake at night with their "demoniacal groaning . . . from a region that outlay human identity", spurring her to sell up and, with her husband and two young daughters, take off for a three-month interregnum of sun, sand and art in Italy. The operatic treatment of this adventure, and the intensity of its focus on the family unit, can be indicated by the comparison of Cusk's helpful mother-in-law, making breakfast before the early-morning ferry to France, to "a part-time mythical functionary, a night worker, or one of those people in Shakespeare who appear only in the first and last scenes".
As they begin the drive south, spirits lift, the temperature gauge rises, and Cusk's eye follows the changing landscape with her inimitable dispassionate intensity. Whether considering language, food or national habits, she has an amazing ability to strike to the heart of things, to look afresh and not to overlook, which is suited to this journey into otherness. Once escaped from the house they rent in expatland near Umbria, she writes brilliantly about the architecture and animating spirit of Florence and Rome, Naples and Pompeii. Yet the book is scarred throughout by a tendency to sneer at almost every traveller who dares to cross their path, from the "torpid, expressionless" family on the ferry to the "grey, narrow, pinched-looking couple" they are forced to dine with at a B&B, the idiotic herds of tourists on the art trail ("Do they not want to be passionate themselves, and sublime?") and the subhuman pilgrims at Assisi ("polyps on the ocean bed"). This, combined with early passages that abandon her own voice to conform to the clichés of travelese, and a tendency to magnify her own doings - an entire chapter on playing tennis, on a court that, naturally enough, "reminds me of the sacred spaces of the ancient world" - tries the reader's patience. There is a bathetic mismatch between event and epiphany: the sneaky tennis opponent who prompts the realisation that "people are by nature exploitative", or the badly planted roundabout that makes her wonder "what became of the human instinct for beauty, why it vanished so abruptly and utterly".
Yet Cusk's sections on art, as she follows the Piero della Francesca trail or explores the museums of Florence and Naples, are lively, ardent and suffused with generous empathy; they read more like family therapy than art criticism as she applies a psychoanalytic reading to Raphael or St Francis of Assisi ("like Jesus, a misfit who has become an orthodoxy"), constantly privileging human reality over the divine and putting forward the theory that the "psychic health" of the Renaissance artists stemmed from unusually supportive fathers. Cusk worries throughout the book about distinguishing between "the good and the bad"; sometimes this feels to her like art's highest function, sometimes like mere indecision, as when she considers the anxiety of choice over the "artist's palette" of the gelateria. How can one "choose without transgressing the truth of one's own fundamental ambivalence"? She ruefully admits that "some people are more easily made unhappy than others, that much is clear. Often I do not eat a gelato. I sit at a table while the others choose, and think about something else."
Travel can be a passive state - hence Cusk's contempt for tourists; she smartly distinguishes between the foreigner, "isolated, observant, displaced", and the tourist, who "feels at home when he is not" - but it is also an endless, exhausting string of decisions, an artistic process of distinguishing between the good and the bad. At home, with career, partner and primary school-age children in place, it can seem that all the choices have been made: it is this that Cusk found stultifying. But the trip, of course, resists Cusk's guiding artistry; a ferry strike prevents them describing an elegant loop around Capri before turning north again, the Vatican museums are closed (possibly a good thing, as the crush in the Sistine chapel might have induced apoplexy), and the adventure peters out in campsites and dingy holiday parks. Were they to settle in Italy, the family of four - so gloriously self-sufficient and free at a seaside campsite with nothing but a tiny tent and a second-hand volume of Shakespeare - would send out the same "ripples of effect" that anchor us wherever we stop.
There is a tension in the book between the wider experience of the psychic weather Cusk explores - boredom, restlessness, the separation between children and parents as they trundle along the separate grooves of school and work, the desire for desire itself - and her fierce insistence on her own "single nature". Her self-distancing from more of those vile Bristolians, as she watches orange-skinned homecoming tourists pour in through the arrivals gate at Bristol airport and go "whooping out" into the night, is grating even before she muses unconvincingly that "In a way I envied them. I have never been able to evade the issue so . . ." Is her own more considered sojourn any less of an evasion? Doesn't everyone locate their dearest selves in dreams of escape from the everyday? Cusk's spotlight on her personal journey is so bright, so tightly trained, that the rest of humanity can fade to grey.
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