29: On Chapel Sands

A book by Laura Cumming

The story of Icarus, like most Greek myths if we're honest, is completely bonkers. Let's recap one version (I'm aware there are variations!):

Master craftsman Daedalus, Icarus's dad, is banished from his homeland, Athens, to the court of Minos, King of Crete, after murdering his nephew in a fit of jealous, saw-related rage. While in Crete, Daedalus constructs a hollow wooden cow for Minos's wife, Pasiphae, so that she can mate with Minos's prize white bull, who Pasiphae is lusting after due to a curse from Poseidon. Unsurprisingly, Minos is a bit miffed when Pasiphae gives birth to the Minotaur—half-man, half-bull, all monstrous—and after forcing Daedalus to construct an inescapable subterranean labyrinth for the Minotaur, Minos imprisons Daedalus and Icarus atop the tallest tower on his island. Daedalus fashions giant wings for him and his son out of bird feathers and candle wax to facilitate their escape. Before setting off, he warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, lest the wax melt and render the wings useless. But Icarus gets carried away by how awesome it is to fly, goes higher and higher, the wax melts, and he falls to his death.

The tale of Icarus is often used as a cautionary tale against over-ambition, over-confidence, and the foolishness of youth. However, there are plenty of other, far more interesting, interpretations.

Take the poem Failing and Flying by the American poet Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) which opens: "Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew," and ends: "I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell / but just coming to the end of his triumph".

For Gilbert, Icarus is not a petulant child, a pitiable fool, or a hubristic thrill-seeker. He is not defined by his fall, but by his flight, for who else has come so close to touching the face of God?

In On Chapel Sands: My mother and other missing persons, Laura Cumming's 2019 memoir investigating her mother's mysterious disappearance as a child in the autumn of 1929, I found another view of the Icarus myth. The ninth chapter of the book—"part-true crime narrative, part-investigation into the subjectivity of memory and part-witness to a vanishing provincial way of life"—is entitled "Icarus", and opens with the detail that "the first image my mother ever owned was [Pieter] Brueghel [the Elder]'s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus". This is that painting:

Can you see Icarus? At first glance probably not, as your eyes are immediately drawn to the ploughman, the shepherd, or the ship. Look closer, though, near the fisherman and the partridge in the bottom-right corner, and there are the flailing limbs of the fallen Icarus. But who noticed him fall? Well, nobody. The world kept spinning, indifferent. The ploughman ploughed, the shepherd shepherded, the angler angled. And in the words of W. H. Auden:"the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

Is that a depressing thought, or an uplifting one? That we are just a splash in the ocean. For Cumming, who earns her corn as The Observer's art critic, Brueghel's painting reflects the way her "mother does not quite notice disaster, or at least does not take it in as others might". And it is because of this trait that it has fallen to Cumming to uncover the mystery of her mother's brief disappearance as a three-year-old.

On Chapel Sands is an impressive display of detective work, as the clues Cumming had to go on to uncover the mystery were not extensive. And the twists and turns of her mother's remarkable, often unsettling, story are enough to keep anyone engaged throughout.

But it is when Cumming has her art critic hat on that the book really crackles. Interpreting imagery is central to the narrative of On Chapel Sands, and Cumming has a better grasp on it than most. A lengthy analysis of a single, Vermeer-like photograph of Veda, her mother's mother, is transcendent; a childhood image of her mother among some tulips is ingeniously mined for new information.

"In life as in art we do not always see what is going on at the edges," Cumming writes late on, "or even in the foreground, do not notice what seems irrelevant or superfluous to our needs and theories." On Chapel Sands is about looking at things differently, looking closer; seeing the flight and the fall, the sheep and the sailors, the person fighting for their life in the corner.