Children do not much care for gooseberries. As a child I thought them an inferior fruit. In part this was because of their colour: pale green; I thought that a berry ought to be red. Also they were extremely sour: so sour, indeed, that-as the Germans say-they draw the holes in your socks together. For some reason I cannot recall, I conceived the idea early in my life that it was weak and ignoble to sweeten fruit with sugar. Even now I experience a vague feeling of guilt on doing so. If God created gooseberries sour, it was because He wanted them eaten sour.
Gooseberries were always served, in the England of my childhood, with custard, a yellow concoction with lumps in it and a skin that sent shivers down your spine. Meals in England in those days were treated as an ordeal which had to be gone through; now, thanks to greater awareness of the health implications of nutrition, they are more like medical procedures.
I spent a surprising amount of energy in my childhood evading not just gooseberries but gooseberry bushes. Our garden was terraced, with luxuriant bushes on one of its levels. My brother and I pushed each other into them; he was older and stronger, so he was more successful. I came to associate gooseberries with scratches and indignity.
During my adolescence and early adulthood, I forgot about gooseberries until I read the short story of that name by Chekhov. Written in 1898, it is not one of his great works, but it had a deep effect on me because it resonated so strongly with my own life. Gooseberries is the story of a minor civil servant, Nikolai Ivanich, who spends his bureaucratic career dreaming of a country estate where he will live the life of a landowner and drink soup made from home-grown cabbages. Essential to his dream are gooseberry bushes: "He could picture no manor house, no country idyll, without gooseberry bushes."
His salary is small, and he becomes a miser. To save money for the estate, he dresses in rags and deprives himself of proper food. He marries an old and unattractive widow for her money, which he transfers to his own account, and he allows her none of the comforts to which she is accustomed. Before long, she dies, and eventually he accumulates enough cash to buy his estate. There is no gooseberry patch on the estate, and so he plants 20 bushes. The story's climax-if that is quite the word for a Chekhovian denouement-is the first harvest of gooseberries from these bushes: "Nikolai chuckled, and contemplated the gooseberries silently and tearfully for a minute-his feelings too deep for words. Then, putting a single gooseberry in his mouth, he looked at me [the narrator] with the glee of a child who has at last been given a longed for toy. 'Delicious.'"
The point of Gooseberries is the ironic contrast between Nikolai Ivanich's mean-spirited pursuit of his goal and the smug satisfaction to which its attainment gives rise. For the sake of his triumphal but petty enjoyment of a few gooseberries-sour and unripe, according to the narrator-he has inflicted suffering not only upon himself but upon others. Having sacrificed enjoyment of the present for a worthless vision of the future, he has become so desiccated and devoid of human feeling that the pleasure he takes is as appalling as the cruelties he has inflicted.
If life imitates art, its mimesis is imperfect. My father was not Nikolai Ivanich, yet there were enough parallels for Gooseberries to mean more to me than to most readers. For years, my father ran a business which hovered in that large area between success and failure. Money did not interest him much: what he wanted more than anything was the power to dominate and humiliate the small circle of people around him. Heaven only knows what early wound meant that the tyrannical discomfiture of others should have been balm to his soul, for he rarely spoke of his early life. But his conduct in his office was abominable.
He could never admit an error. Once, he gave the handwritten draft of a letter to his secretary and she returned it to him with a word typed differently from how he had written it. She stood by her correction and he ordered her to look it up in the dictionary. She was proved right. "Get another dictionary!" he ordered, and she was despatched to buy one.
There was always an undercurrent of violence when he was in the office. And his insults were always uttered in public. Two men in particular, Mr K and Mr B, were the objects of his wrath. Mr K was slightly deaf, and protected himself against my father's rage by turning off his hearing aid. Mr B had no such means of protection, but bore my father's insults with patient humility. I did not find Mr K or Mr B as contemptible as my father found them. In fact, I much preferred them to him. Sometimes I would walk in Regent's Park with Mr B during his lunch hour. He was a slow, stolid man with a furled umbrella and shoes you could see your face in. He had one remarkable talent, which was to look at a page of figures and add them up in his mind much faster than they could be entered into the adding machines of that era.
He had always been good at figures, he said, which was why the army had employed him to count the bodies on the ground after the Battle of El Alamein. He also told me that once he had shot a German soldier dead, just (he thought) as the man was about to surrender, and his conscience had troubled him about it ever since. I learnt from Mr B that a humdrum exterior does not necessarily preclude interesting memories. And since I suspected that my father had avoided military service during the war from cowardice, I found his bullying of Mr B all the more reprehensible.
But there was another aspect of my father's character which I found as puzzling as his violent outbursts: he would spend many hours in the garden, tending his plants in absolute solitude. He said that one day he would retire to the country, there to devote himself to gardening and cultivating fruit and vegetables. He wouldn't miss London a bit-nor, apparently, the terrorisation of his staff. I didn't believe him.
One day, however, he was offered enough for his business so that he never had to work again-and he did retire to the country, on his own. His domineering behaviour ensured that he had few visitors, and that those few he had left as soon as possible. He seemed to be under a compulsion always to say something wounding or derisive; he never praised anyone or anything unequivocally, as if it might detract from his own intelligence or the perfection of his judgement. He thus spent the last 25 years of his life cultivating a garden whose beauty was for his eyes only.
Among his cultivations were fruit, and among his fruit were gooseberries. Like Nikolai Ivanich, my father found his gooseberries delicious, quite unlike anyone else. But his harvest was always much greater than he could consume, and there were few people to accept his gifts of the fruit, which consequently went to waste. Thus the end product of all those years of temper tantrums amounted to countless bowls of picked gooseberries destined to be thrown away.
My father died, and so I thought no more of gooseberries. Then, one day this year, I opened the newspaper and there, in colour, was a reproduction of a still-life painting of gooseberries. It was by a late 17th century Dutch painter, Adriaen Coorte, who specialised in depicting this fruit (as well as strawberries, asparagus and sea shells). His picture was on display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I resolved to go.
Coorte was not a great artist; great artists do not limit their subject matter so strictly. He was not even admitted to the guild of artists which would have allowed him to sell his pictures in the town of Middelburg (he was once fined for trying to do so). Yet his little picture of gooseberries on a stone ledge (now permanently on display at the Cleveland Museum) has a strange power to move.
In this, it partakes of the power of the entire genre. It is curious how the minute and loving depiction of humble, everyday objects should so strongly arrest us. I remember the effect that a still life by Juan Sanchez Cotan had upon visitors at the entrance to an exhibition in London of Spanish still lifes. It was as if they had been struck physically. A young Japanese woman actually gasped. Sanchez Cotan had painted a quince, a cabbage, a melon and a cucumber in a parabola framed by a cold gray stone window: that was all. But I have never seen a picture have so strong an immediate effect upon those who saw it.
I was not surprised to learn that Sanchez Cotan was a religious man; or indeed that he joined a lay brotherhood later in life. For his depiction of these humble products of the earth is clearly reverential (in a way perhaps only possible in an age of scarcity). He teaches us to see all heaven in a grain of sand, and to be thankful for the gift of life. Even someone completely without religious sentiment-such as me-feels it stirring in the presence of such works of art.
The Dutch no less than the Spanish still-life painters were reverential towards the everyday objects of their people's sustenance. The picture of a beaker of beer, a roll, a knife, and a salt herring on a pewter plate, by Pieter Claesz, is painted not only with brilliant technical accomplishment, but also with the deepest respect for the world about him: a respect alike for products of nature and for those of man. Indeed, the contrast between the intensity of the depiction and the quotidian nature of the depicted is what gives the picture its power. It makes us see the world anew.
There couldn't be a starker contrast between the outlook of the still-life painter and that of people who take our modern material abundance for granted. The latter find nothing remarkable in the everyday, and are therefore driven by their lack of powers of contemplation to seek brute sensation. Since the sensational itself soon becomes quotidian, ever-greater sensation must be sought if boredom is to be kept at bay. This tendency is all too clear in Amsterdam itself, among the most liberal (and not coincidentally the most violent) cities in Europe, where there is a self-defeating search for new taboos to break and shibboleths to utter. And lest anyone should refuse to accept the contrast between the culture that produced the Dutch still lifes of the 17th century and the Dutch culture of today, it is worth remembering that Dutch still-life painting was not an elite but a popular art: if it had been as popular in the US today as it was then in the Low Countries, American professional artists would have painted approximately 175m still-life paintings this century.
Coorte's gooseberries are not, therefore, a trivial subject matter for art. The sprig of the bush on which they grow teaches us to observe the play of light upon the foliage, to take delight in the shades of green to be seen in the various leaves-even in a single leaf. As for the translucency of the berries themselves, so miraculously beautiful, and captured so tenderly by the artist, one feels like exclaiming, as TH Huxley did on reading On the Origin of Species: "How stupid of me not to have thought of that!" How stupid of me-I felt like exclaiming in front of Coorte's tiny painting-not to have noticed that! Gooseberries were not more translucent in his day than in mine; and yet I had not seen this translucency-or if I had seen it, I had not noticed its beauty.
So now I am thoroughly reconciled to gooseberries as a fruit, and will never again think of them as sour and distasteful. They are, after all, an instance of the beauty of the world. And yet honesty compels me to admit that other thoughts connected to gooseberries rise unbidden to my mind. Like Nikolai Ivanich, I dream of country retirement. I have had enough of my inner-city medical practice, and long for peace and quiet to live in a cultured atmosphere in which people do not destroy themselves by evil habits and vile conduct to stave off their existential ennui. Unlike Nikolai Ivanich, I have no desire to grow my own gooseberries. But couldn't my longing for la France profonde, for Umbria or Andaluc?-a, just as well be another metaphorical plate of home-grown gooseberries?
A further gooseberry metaphor occurs to me. To be a gooseberry means to be left awkwardly at the margin of a social event, such as a dance or a party. A gooseberry is de trop. And when I look around me at the culture of modern Britain, I feel increasingly that I am a gooseberry. Is it my age, or is it true this time that civilisation is really coming to an end?
