Apocalyptic journey through a dark night of the soul

DARK Night follows the mysterious trail of tormented New Zealand artist Colin McCahon, who went missing for a night in Sydney in 1984.

Colin McCahon

COLIN McCahon (1919-87) became, by the latter part of his career, the most celebrated artist produced by New Zealand.

In the course of his painting life he evolved from simplified, seemingly naive views of his native landscape, schematised into silent but memorable form, to increasingly stark monochrome pictures, covered with fragments of biblical text and evoking a tense, doubt-ridden, religious sensibility.

Like apocalyptic visions, these later pictures hint at the end of the temporal world: the whole domain of life and nature reduced to ashes, to a darkness filled with enigmatic proclamations of doom and cries of guilt.

McCahon was even more complex, or at least tormented, than these pictures suggest. Having grown up in a grimly Calvinist family he was later apparently drawn to the Catholic church, but its comparatively sunny Mediterranean spirituality, leavened by the humanism assimilated from antiquity and adorned with the ceremonial rhetoric of the baroque, proved incompatible with his nature. He reverted to a religiosity grounded in anguished questions about God's presence in a fallen world, the possibility of grace, the conundrum of predestination and damnation.

To make matters worse, he was something of a misanthrope, bore terrible grudges and succumbed increasingly to alcoholism. By around 1980, as his physical and mental health declined, he stopped working. In April 1984 he travelled to Sydney for a retrospective at the Art Gallery of NSW. On the morning of April 11, he visited the Botanic Gardens with his wife, Anne, and a curator friend. They were going to have a cup of tea at the kiosk but McCahon went into the public toilets, and then disappeared. The police found him the next day, wandering in Centennial Park.

This strange and unexplained absence, a mysterious lacuna disconcerting to contemplate even in the life of another, is the subject of Martin Edmond's Dark Night. What did McCahon do during those long hours of the afternoon and the night? His path can be putatively reconstructed, assuming a relatively direct route, between the Botanic Gardens and Centennial Park, but what was he thinking, if anything? In what mental state did the confused artist wander through the inner city?

Perhaps he was as dazed, drunk or semi-conscious as some of the street people he encountered on the way, but Edmond chooses to imagine the long walk in an allegorical mode, as an unconscious rehearsal of the Stations of the Cross, the last stages of the Passion in which Christ carries his cross to Golgotha, is crucified, dies and is taken down and buried. McCahon's walk through a lost day and night become the symbol of his own final decline and figurative death.

To flesh out this poetic intuition, Edmond conceives the idea of retracing McCahon's footsteps, to see if each of the Stations can in fact be matched with a particular place on the route. He even decides to spend a night alone in the park to experience the presumed dark night of the soul that McCahon may have endured there.

When he is explaining at some length the origin of this allegorical conceit and his reasons for undertaking the re-enactment, the reader may feel he is drawing a rather long bow. But like James Joyce, who based a day in the life of Leopold Bloom on the Odyssey, Edmond is borrowing a mythical structure to give shape and order to what can seem, and perhaps really was, a collapse into utter dereliction.

In the end, after the slightly awkward establishment of the premise, the book reads fluently and even compellingly. It is even more absorbing if you happen to know the relevant parts of Sydney well. McCahon's modern via crucis takes us through Woolloomooloo, to William Street, up the stairs to Forbes Street, past the Christian Science building and the National Art School, to the Church of the Sacred Heart, on to Oxford Street, and past the succession of churches encountered before the gates of Centennial Park.

At each site along the way the author uncovers stories of historical or social significance that correspond both to the underlying myth and to aspects of McCahon's personal drama: it is a constant three-way balancing act which demands the reader's willing suspension of scepticism, but rewards, as literature should, with the revelation of unexpected meaning and pathos.

Dark Night is inevitably a kind of autobiography, not only because Edmond recounts his experience of walking in the footsteps of McCahon, but especially because he has to call on his own memories to give life to the places he visits, and more deeply still to achieve a sympathetic and imaginative evocation of his subject's ordeal. If the Stations of the Cross offer the symbolic key to McCahon's dark night, the artist's nocturnal journey becomes a guiding myth, in its turn, for the author.

Dark Night: Walking with McCahon
By Martin Edmond
Auckland University Press, 180pp, $34.95

Christopher Allen is The Australian's national art critic.