IN 2010, I MADE A QUICK TRIP TO A WONDERFUL untouched bit of paradise in the south of France, overlooking the Mediterranean about half an hour from Saint-Tropez. I had been invited there to visit the eighty-four-year-old Jean-Jacques Pauvert. Pauvert is best known for having published the complete work of the Marquis de Sade and for having written Sade’s biography. The first publisher of The Story of O, he has devoted much of his life to fighting censorship. He was living with about ten thousand books, all of which he had read at least once, and was one of the most erudite, literate, and astute people I have ever encountered.
The meeting was arranged by Brigitte Lozorec’h, a woman some fifteen years Pauvert’s junior. Having been his mistress for many years, she was at the time still a dear friend, and had become his regular companion in his bucolic paradise of decrepit buildings—his old house was falling apart, its foundation stones propped by wooden supports—and overgrown trees and shrubbery. Wonderfully, he would ask her to marry him a couple of years after my visit, and by the time he died in Toulon in 2014, they were husband and wife, with her bringing remarkable grace to the end of his days.
Jean-Jacques had written me a nice letter about my book on Balthus, which Brigitte had given him, and had told her he wanted to meet me. Although I had had no plan to discuss Freud and Signorelli with this distinguished writer and editor, when, following lunch, he showed me his incredible library in a former garage and pointed to his hundred of volumes of erotica, I decided to show him two Signorelli reproductions—both of details of The Damned.
Jean-Jacques Pauvert studied the fresco scenes carefully. For him, there was no question: This was a homosexual vision. He pointed out the lust with which one man, clothed, eyes another who is naked. He also observed Signorelli’s inability to make women really female, for all of the artist’s impeccable rendering of male nudity. The great authority on Sade said it was indisputable that in Signorelli’s art violent strength is used to endow men with an eroticism particularly appealing to other men. The allure of these extraordinary paintings was as a revelation of male attraction to other men, and their success was in their ability to excite those feelings openly.
THE DAY AFTER MY MEETING WITH JEAN-JACQUES PAUVERT, I visited Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence. Katharine and I had been there together thirty years earlier, and I thought it would be nice to go back, although I feared it would have lost its authenticity and become a tourist trap. To my delight, it was as I remembered it: a real working space with the actual objects one knows from so many masterful, mysterious paintings. I could still feel the earthiness and solid truthfulness central to Cézanne’s art, much as I had on the previous visit. In little time, I had tears in my eyes.
This, I thought, is what it means to be a serious painter and to love seeing. I looked at the table used for The Card Players, the bowls that reappear in the still lifes, the apples and oranges, the skulls, the statue of Cupid, the side chairs—all old friends to a fan of Cézanne’s work. Then, through my tears, I saw something I had certainly not noticed when Katharine and I were there three decades before.
In the middle of the wall to the west of the wall of glass that floods the space with daylight and faces toward Mount Sainte-Victoire, there is a faded print of a study of two naked men that Luca Signorelli made in preparation for the Orvieto frescoes. One of these men, seen from behind, is straddled by the other. It looks as if the standing one is carrying the second man on his shoulders, but, to those of us who know Orvieto, the man on top is, in fact, about to pull the guy beneath him up toward the fires of hell. What mattered to Cézanne, however, was, I imagine, not so much the event being illustrated as the power of the form and the splendid rendering of the male body. It became apparent to me that Cézanne used Signorelli as a model for his own male bathers.
In this, I think, there is no sexuality. For Cézanne, Signorelli had made the perfect prototype of the male body; there was no better example of the rear view of a naked man. This was about reality: the same truthfulness that exists in apples, rocks, and in simple wooden furniture. Eroticism is absent. The issues are weight, mass, musculature: the fundamentals of human physicality, the marvels of standing and holding.
Is this, then, what overwhelmed Freud: the miracle of life, which Luca Signorelli captured with such fidelity and bravura? Was Jean-Jacques Pauvert overreading in his certitude about the homoeroticism? Maybe the reason for Freud’s memory loss was entirely his conflict at having checked into a mountain inn, registering his wife’s younger sister as if she were his wife. Perhaps it was the impossibility of understanding the amorphous territory where male narcissism and homoeroticism interact, where the maleness one admires in other men is the maleness one enjoys and cultivates in one’s self, and where, if you throw in the added issues of one’s sense of one’s father, and whether Jewish men can be tough enough, one is way beyond the possibility of being able to parcel out what has come in through the eyes, especially when the visual impetus is a knockout. How does one ascertain the truth? And isn’t the only truth the reality that there are no precise explanations for anything? To know that, and accept it, and exalt in the beauty in life, and know that “the heart has no reasons,” and maybe the mind does not, either, strikes me as the only possibility. The journey toward comprehension is wonderful, as long as somewhere along the way one realizes that one never reaches the destination, because it does not exist.