Affairs of Art Read online

  The bearded literary type had become a friend, he taught me the lessons to be found in books, after teaching me those in the newspapers. Thanks to his advice I bought my first limited edition, copy number 2092 of an original edition of two thousand two hundred and fifty copies, which made mine a precious “hors commerce.” Gallimard had published Le Peintre à l’étude, by Francis Ponge, in 1946. And in it I found another brother, though nowhere did Ponge note the death of inspiration; on the contrary, he tracked it down by celebrating turmoil and beauty. But on page 112 he had reproduced for me alone this excerpt from a catalogue preface, written reluctantly as a favour for a friend: Consequently, how could I describe a scene, offer criticism of a show or of a work of art? On that I have no opinion, unable as I am even to gain control over the slightest impression that is somewhat just, or complete. And on page 113 he had laid claim for himself, and for me, to the right to our critical output, expression before words or thought.

  And thus, Vitalie, was I born to imposture. Francis Ponge is my master. I am giving you the little unread book, whose pages Ponge was waiting for me to cut, for which Georges Braque engraved the butterfly on the cover, the same colour as my Olivetti. Copy on chestnut wood, it states on the verso, under the rocking-chair logo of the Nouvelle Revue Française. I leave the taste of it to you, you who know to inspire every wood.

  On Barclay Street, my European friend held a salon. I met there a poet whom I’m about to join in death and who would not recognize me even in the harsh light of the Apocalypse, should it bring us face to face as in a Dürer. Michel was a synthesis of what is right and what is unattainable. His family had culture, and knew how to put money into it. Thanks to them, he published his poems in numbered copies, the linen-bound books hand-set in Bodoni and printed on Artemis laid paper, and established printmakers agreed to punctuate the freshness of his struggle against rhyme and resignation. I spent years, even going to vulgar auction sales, looking for these works, which he sold to the rich so he could invent new ones in which to stir up our youth.

  About Quebec, he had just written this line.

  Unique it is, this country strangled by light.

  The uncommon, fatality, violence, agony. I was nothing in his presence, I was the twelfth of twelve obscure individuals clustered around the single armchair in an inadequately heated apartment. I made the coffee along with the girl, a rarity yet the one celebrity among us, for she had long been a star of the television of our childhood. Sarah had become infinitely beautiful, infinitely sad, she dressed in El Greco black with mother-of-pearl buttons that made her garment look something like a mantle of chastity, of which her lover, an elderly writer, would never take unfair advantage. She was studying literature but recited only other people’s poems, with unwavering docility. Our host gave her the signal when the moment had arrived. From it he drew the vengeance of the incapable lover, he wanted to despise her, she transcended all his woes, which were so real next to our semblance of intimate afflictions. I never even brushed against the girl.

  We were starting to take shape, between these two beings who already had a presence: Sarah, so soon deflowered, and Michel, who was unwittingly turning what life remained to him into poems.

  night of broken garrotes

  cold in my veins

  there are other pools I cannot describe

  so much darkness bleeds me to every wind

  I got my chance, like a dancer, the one who wears her hair in a flat chignon and is a wallflower in the company of masters obsessed with their favourite, whom an accident finally removes.

  The sole publication devoted to art assigned Michel’s books to its official critic, because of the high-quality images, drawings or engravings of which the plates were conscientiously scored after printing. When the third book, the costliest, appeared, the renowned scribe believed the time had come to lay claim to one of the fifty copies in exchange for his favourable comments. Michel turned him down, he was a man who could not be bought, he traded in art at the high price it deserved. He knew how to love artists by knowing how to pay them. The magazine’s editors had to find someone else to write the article, some unknown who would not offend the official critic but who knew the subject. I spent days composing a three-page outline that would only reach a thousand readers, but the genuine ones. Some of whom paid two hundred dollars for Michel’s books and perhaps glanced at them before putting them away, flat and forever, in their glass-fronted bookcases.

  Nothing came. A god’s eye lay in the background of the engravings. I knew the artist very slightly, I knew he was commencing his decline because he had just enclosed perfection between onionskin and poem, and henceforth he wanted to be exposed to the open air. On the eve of the deadline I threw out all my outlines, went back to the meaning of Francis Ponge, and wrote my copy as a simple via dolorosa, from plate to plate, concerned only with making my words agree with the form and the colours, concentrating on my own literary expression, I was protected from the eye of God who had held the printmaker’s hand. What’s more, by way of conclusion, I killed him. Beneath the ochre, the blue, the green, the orange, all of which contain the black of the stone wrenched from its forms, a white dot stands out here and there, like an error. Let us close the eyelid of that blind god, art no longer frames itself as the mirror of the soul. That point is nothing, is final.

  The artist I believed I was doing in saw it as the intuitive and discreet expression of his own anguish, the magazine’s editors detected the style of the new French criticism, and the readers, as usual, concentrated mainly on the pictures. I was on my way to ousting the official critic without having given it a thought. It seems to me I remember being vaguely concerned. For astonishment was losing its edge. No article is as alive as the first one. I was beginning to hoard words rather than exhume them, fresh and firm, from what had been my grisaille.

  The people’s university was being born downtown, it was hiring professors at the same rate as clerks. Merely by undertaking to begin doctoral studies, I found myself in turn facing an amphitheatre where another generation of ignoramuses sat in rows. They were more agitated, convinced they were remaking the world, whereas they were just barely tasting its pleasures, because they were finally having sex. Which is no small matter. The boys talked to us as equals, the girls approached us boldly. I stammered out an introductory course in the history of art and another in contemporary aesthetics, terrified in the face of their indifference. In the somewhat brighter apartment I’d rented near Pare Lafontaine to get myself away from Marianne and closer to the new literary sites, I would ruminate over my notes for hours, discover a hundred veins to be mined for theses, read all the new arrivals from Europe, more numerous now, then I’d waken with migraines like steel on the days I lectured, my knowledge wrecked, in shreds, on cards that were as dry as what I had to say.

  An African student saved me. He wore a jacket and tie and kept to himself. At the end of the term he handed in an elegantly constructed paper on the link between the Quebec painter Alfred Pellan and the primitive art of west Africa. To free myself from a portion of the course, I asked him to prepare a brief seminar on his work. They listened. Because he didn’t talk to them about Pellan and the primitives, he recounted legends. He told them as if they were children the story of a barren woman or a cuckolded husband delivered from pain by the power of art. It is not the sorcerer who heals, he said; it is the very object that he uses, which touches the eyes before it reaches the soul. From an impeccable leather briefcase he brought out three stat­uettes. One was blackened by age, a sort of big tooth bound with cords, the root like a mask. The other two could have been carved the day before, a poorly squared couple whose genitals arrested one’s gaze. It is by touching them that the woman’s belly will one day secrete the juices of genuine desire for a child. And that the husband with his callused hands finds his enemy’s vulnerable point, whereby he will take his revenge. Whence the primacy of the object and of the person w
ho carves it over sorcerers and their clients, over the rest of mankind. He barely hinted at that conclusion, adding a remark about Pellan’s use of vivid colours which ran counter to the very sense of the primitive work of art and was a distortion aimed at humans brought up amid sugar and forgiveness.

  They listened. Even asked him questions. About the sculptor’s training, his social status. Or about the symbolic coupling of the fertility figures. Their provenance. About the road he himself had taken. Nothing about Pellan. He evoked at length the suburbs of Abidjan. That afternoon, in a windowless lecture room where the silence finally was lightened, I understood the power of a strange setting, of openly discussing sex, of colourful memories, of testimony true or false, of anecdotes, of the fringes of knowledge. Those who would arrive at the essential wouldn’t need my file cards to guide them. As for the others, I just had to amuse them. To add colour, like Pellan.

  It took me some time to master digression, but I was on the right track. I savoured those slight lies, as if I were giving wine to that thesis of mine which was so austere, yet I was still determined to deny inspiration as the genesis of the work of art. I am not penitent. For it was at the frontier of the lie that I finally encountered the pain of love, the real thing.

  She was my age, she was the dean’s assistant, she was round as a Susannah at Her Bath, she was nearly naked under djellabahs in the summer and sheepskin jackets in the fall, she had seen Vancouver and San Francisco, she had the hair of an angel and eyes from purgatory, I swear they were pink underneath the burnt chestnut. And she was married to the engineer in charge of the university buildings, all temporary and all decrepit, which kept him very busy. She knew nothing about art but she knew all of us, assigning classrooms to some and studios to others, reworking timetables and examination results, at once firm and considerate. I was not a habitue of her office, where so many others would go with their complaints just to see her flush with effort or to imagine themselves her favourites.

  She came alone, one evening before Christmas, to the pitiful department party. And we left together, because I had taken her hand to plough through the crowd of talkers, a hand that I’d guessed in advance would be cool and plump but that was burning. She came to my place without arguing, she really was naked under a woollen sheath, she knew everything, on her back, on her belly, in her mouth. It was the first time I had dared to pour myself into a woman’s throat, I thought myself perverse but she caressed herself contentedly. I dropped her off at her place in the middle of the night, in the shelter of a suburban snowdrift, and the engineer was asleep. It would not always be so.

  How did I hold on to her? Neither through art nor through writing, though she carefully read everything I produced, for she was curious and easy to domesticate. Perhaps I knew how to touch her, how to describe her form and her colour — and how to make her live the lie without exhausting her. Most often I was content with noontimes, with cold meals and hot half-hours. Time incises the pleasure of sex there, the belly registers the seconds, the smile is the smile of a violent separation, soon, again. We wrote to one another about definitive loves. I thought constantly about her engineer, who must assuage his own desires now and then — it was impossible that she would push him away — the two of us were mingled in her sublime body. I was so unhappy and so alive, at last.

  In one year she gave me a single weekend, planned long in advance with her best friend’s complicity. The inn was noisy, the fjord of the Saguenay barely visible from the promontory, the mosquitoes massed in armies, the croissants dry on the breakfast trays we had brought to us in bed. Doubt never crossed my mind. I wanted her also in adversity.

  She was not pregnant, we didn’t wear one another out, we didn’t separate in a final conflagration. It came about one summer in France and Italy, where she couldn’t accompany me. We’d thought we would survive it.

  I had missed France. A number of my colleagues had studied there, were still registered in the Paris universities where they’d experienced May ‘68 on the barricades on which for years they would impale their minds, sniffling into their beer and over their unfinished doc­torates. I kept my own pipe dreams, which were very outdated, to myself. One was indescribable. In it, France tasted of Cézanne’s green countryside, the roughcast of Provençal farmhouses and shacks beneath the most ancient suns, the wine and bread broached in the heart of these lives stilled in beauty on checkered tablecloths. And I clung more darkly to the low-down Paris of Francis Carco. I was sure I knew all the dead ends of Montmartre, the acid morning that had risen over every one of Utrillo’s drunken binges, the luxuriant nights that disguised the pockmarked girls. When I melted into Paris as if I’d always lived there, I would not be shocked by the corruption of what were once the artists’ neigh­bourhoods, by the omnipresence of merchants in the temple, from the Sacré-Coeur to Saint-Sévérin. I enjoyed its cruelty, its vulgarity, the final episode of a universe that, save for a few evenings amid the warmth of cheap restaurants, had been only misery, hard times, episodes of violence, quarrels, consumption, despair. From Carco and this world I took the epigraph for my thesis:

  They drank for the sake of drinking and for Inspiration, which the bourgeois and the theo­reticians have turned into I know not what cold figure of a school, of rhetoric, and only then would Inspiration visit them. Since there are now fewer drunkards, there are fewer poets. And no one can do anything about it.

  Carco had signed this notice of the death of inspiration shortly before the second Great War, while recalling places and creatures from before the first. I had all the time I needed to draw conclusions from it.

  I’d been working on my thesis a little at a time when the sole publication devoted to art asked me to represent it in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, at a symposium on the new criticism, which would take place at the beginning of summer. All expenses paid. My turn had come. I would stay on after the meeting, in an apartment in the old section of Nice that was occupied by a succession of tenants from Quebec. The coast, the sky, nearby Italy — I had it all for two months of golden solitude in which to write sulfurous letters to my lover. Guilty of deserting her, I put infinite care into writing my paper for a workshop at which room had been made for four other promising beginners, all from eccentric countries.

  I arrived in Paris at dawn and experienced twelve hours of rain and two cafés. I took the night train to Nice, as I considered it refined to travel thus across a France that was still imaginary, still fast in its own sleep, like a blind man.

  Saint-Paul-de-Vence had not yet become a shopping mall for herbs and pottery. It was hard to find the road to the Fondation Maeght, its hill buried in foliage. Along the old wall of the village I walked at length in the noonday sun, impervious to the scorching heat, crazed by the truth of Cézanne’s green that blocked the entire horizon, which seemed to descend to the sea, invisible. France is a lost happiness, I resent it for not giving me on that day in June even the illusion that I might touch it. Never, ever would I have a geranium at a window open on the centuries.

  The premises of the Fondation were more familiar. Large ordinary rooms for the art, small ordinary rooms for the symposium, and the dampness that stood in for air-conditioning.

  I worked diligently to justify the journey. The new criticism was European and so it spoke French, believing it would finally regain the ascendancy that the now aging Greenberg had monopolized in postwar New York. I felt the strain of the anti-American tirades, I defined myself as a creature of two worlds, and I was irritated to the point of rudeness when I asked a somewhat impertinent question of our grand master, the great Italian critic Bruno Farinacci-Lepore, who declared inadequate and fearful the nonetheless arrogant judgments laid down by Greenberg and his disciples. Henceforth, he said, the critic must predict the new avenues of creation: then the artists would come there to join him. What was needed was to “dare to be prescient and to impose it,” he said over and over, proud of his formulation.

  By way
of response to my unseemly question, he suggested that I read his latest work, which had just been translated. I was a wisp of straw. From the margin to which he’d consigned me I had ample time to observe rather than listen to him. He had arrived late, didn’t apologize, had crossed the room not quite reeling in his very clean, very faded, very washed jeans. A white shirt open just so on a long aging neck. The beginning of baldness gave him a lean and large-eyed lunar face. He was certainly myopic but he didn’t wear glasses, I’d long been able to spot the vanities of men inclined to their own sex, so numerous in the worlds of art. At mealtime, he picked at his food while reaping tributes, constantly interrupted and glad of it. He had opened the symposium, he would close it the following day, this time without bothering to spend all day there. He appeared around six in the evening, loose white tunic, very high style in the casual mode, and he was brilliant. He knew everything that we had haltingly debated. He was indeed prescient.

  There was a dinner for thirty, in the biggest mezzanine restaurant in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, I remember the copious vin rosé, which was like mass wine to me, ablaze with spices. By midnight, our words were as penetrating as his in the alleys that led to where the buses stop. The paving stones smelled of cat piss and the excessive heaviness of summer. Bruno, whom we could now call by his first name, claimed he was driving directly to Italy in his two-seater convertible that was as white as his smock. I looked at the car, he looked at me, I said something idiotic about the leather or the door­handles, perhaps even about my North where such a delicate mechanism would never survive.

  “Getting in? I’ll drop you in Nice or wherever you want.” I was a wisp of straw who had been chosen. He guessed that I was a tourist, new and starving for every turn in the road, for every landmark in the France of my dreams. He turned off now and then into low sleeping villages, he drove slowly and the wind stayed between us, warm, he described knolls and stars. But France, he said, was not Italy, where the genuine painters’ villages were to be found, across the border to which I must now make my way. The roads became streets, the city was drawing near, there was a promontory where he switched off the lights and let the car glide to the very edge of the escarpment.