Charles Rennie Mackintosh (June 7, 1968 to December 10, 1928) was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He flourished as an architect, designer, water colourist and artist, becoming known as one of the most highly lauded designers in the post-impressionist movement and the main representative of Art Nouveau in the U.K., influencing European design and leaving behind a legacy of formal, rectilinear work that is echoed in furniture, commercial spaces and apartment blocks even today.
The creative imagination of novelist Esther Freud has taken this dry character summation and brought it to life in her new book, Mr Mac And Me , in which Mackintosh becomes a kind of mentor to a local lad, changing his life and the community that was then home to the artist and his wife. The story serves to humanise a man whose work could have coloured public perception of his personality — he was not as stern, rigid and linear as his designs, but he did have the soaring imagination and ability to inspire that his work did.
It is 1914 on the Suffolk coast. Thomas Maggs is 13, a lad with a twisted foot that has not managed to stop him wandering the area. He is astonishingly creative, with a talent for drawing. One day he meets a Scottish man called Mac — who is recovering from a long illness and a downswing in his career as an architect and painter —in the village of Walberswick with his artist-wife Margaret. Tom’s father is an alcoholic who abuses his wife and family. In contrast, Mac and his wife are a loving couple, sharing their affection unstintingly with Tom. They foster him as an artist even as he repays their generosity by becoming their mail delivery boy, taking their letters to the post office but he steams them open and reads them carefully before actually sending them off.
Then the Great War begins. Soldiers use the town as a conduit in their journey to Belgium. The beaches are fortified, the town is lined with sandbags and assorted defences. New laws are imposed on the townsfolk and nobody is beyond suspicion, Tom with his awkward gait and skittish ways most of all. The year passes slowly, as Tom’s joy in his new ‘family’ is balanced by the fear of the time. Then, Mac is arrested. The local police believe that he is spying for the enemy because he is still in touch with German friends, uses German art supplies and has a ‘German’ accent that is really Glaswegian. And Tom is hard hit. Every aspect of the land he knows so well reminds him of his mentor, from a pebble that has memories of Mackintosh’s heart motif to the moment when the artist shared his binoculars with the youngster, showing him flowers clinging to the rocks. Mac is released a week later and Tom finds some peace, but the nightmare lingers.
The relationship between Mac and his wife is almost poetically described: “You first, and then my work,” Mac writes in a letter that any woman would yearn to be written for her. There are details that root the story in a sense of the writer actually having been there, seen that. There is a languid feeling to the whole story and the way it is told, as if it was all happening under water, wafting along with a blurry softness. Somewhere along the way this gets tiresome in a world where action and drama tend to rule fiction but with time, quiet and a little persistence, this one is a keeper!
Mr Mac and Me; Esther Freud, Bloomsbury, Rs.499.
