Thursday, May the 6th, 2004

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The Besmirched and Bonkers Topiary Man : His Hoodoo and Collapse

I will tell you how it happened, in November 1919, in Holland.

His besmirchment. His besmirchment was physical rather than moral, but no less catastrophic for that. He was walking beside a pond, and an evil-eyed tiny one careered towards him on a tricycle. In stepping aside to avoid a collision, he lost his footing and fell into the pond, and the pond was stagnant and brackish and rife with all that slimy green wispy stuff found in stagnant brackish ponds, so when he clambered out on to the path, sopping wet and lugubrious, his clothing was besmirched. He was poor, and had but that one suit of clothes, and so he remained besmirched.

His being bonkers. His parents ran a private asylum, and he grew up in its grounds. His earliest pals were the madcaps, loons and holy innocents who were incarcerated there. Never diagnosed as lunatic himself, he nonetheless exhibited eccentricities and harboured strange casts of thought which led the wider world to view him as a zany, even forty years after his parents perished in the flames which laid waste their asylum.

His topiary. How I wish I could write: “he was the finest topiarist the Netherlands ever produced”, but I cannot, for he was not. In truth, his topiary was inept. More often than not, those few who came to view his work were unable to identify what he had meant to depict. By rifling through newspaper accounts, we know, for example, that when he unveiled his gigantic Belgian hedge entitled Judith Slaying Holofernes, the citizens of Antwerp thought they were looking at a representation of a giant pig. Similarly, the Foliage Portrait of Pope Pius IX was mistaken for a fruitbat.

The hoodoo. This besmirched and bonkers man had the signal misfortune to be placed under a hoodoo by forces both malevolent and uncanny. All attempts to extricate himself from the hoodoo only made it more malign. The actual details are too sickening to recount. But let it be said that, at the last, angels played their pipes and bright wings bore his soul to heaven.

His collapse. It was Thursday. He sat under the shade of a big tree with many branches and countless leaves. He was chewing a brazil nut and reading a paperback copy of A Dictionary of Glues. A chaffinch sang and the sky was blue. His matted hair had been cut the day before, and his boots were freshly repaired. The raucous hobbledehoys whose tauntings ruined his morning had gone off to cause mayhem on the railway tracks. He had been able to afford a pair of swimming trunks, and planned a dip in a nearby canal. He swallowed what was left of the nut, put the book in his satchel, stood up, and began to walk towards the Iron Palace. Halfway across the shimmering lawn, he collapsed. It was the very end of him.