TESSA EVANS’S ARTICLE on Sax came out; it was fun, well written. She described the artist’s work, his life, his family, his snobbery, his Anglophilia and wound up by justifying him because he is a German Jew who had to flee to England as a child with his parents, who had had to give up a glittering life in Berlin to become foreigners in London.
All the fault of Hitler and the race laws. As if that were not enough, Sax is the grandchild of a scientist who made some very important discoveries. Perhaps this is why he is so egocentric, vain and hooked on success, while looking down on everyone and everything at the same time. He has very little contact with his children and began painting their portraits only recently.
Tessa also told the story of the interview and the abrupt, rude way Sax had left. And then, she added: “Something surreal happened, as soon as Sax had left. I was approached by a stranger who asked me hundreds of questions about my interview with Sax. At the time, my thoughts were elsewhere, and I answered until, just as Sax had suddenly broken off his interview with me, I did the same with him. I have discovered that Sax is not only pursued by masochistic women of the English upper classes, but also by very inquisitive men.” And so, Tessa admitted, the interview had been brilliant, given the interest it had aroused in a stranger. Besides, she asked herself at the end: “Who does one write for, if not for readers one doesn’t know?”
To be considered a great writer, as Sax is considered a great artist, and presuming that I do in fact have a talent, I would have to follow his example: renounce my Italian culture, go to live in London or New York, become English or American, and get myself accepted in the English-speaking literary world. But that world doesn’t exist anymore, great writers and great publishers don’t exist anymore, literary society doesn’t exist anymore, and literature isn’t fashionable anymore; the visual, plastic arts, the world of museums, art galleries, the great auctions, are at the centre of attention and attract large sums of money. This is why Sax is inaccessible. By now, although he has always gone against the flow, flying in the face of fashion, he has become a classic, one of the very few great living painters. Sax fascinates me because he is a part of an extinct race, that of the great personalities. Even in politics there are no more stars like Churchill. The last two legends were Mao and Kennedy. Fidel Castro is still alive, the last solitary survivor.
Frankly, I don’t know why I feel so attracted to another man’s life. I don’t know why I prefer others to myself and find their destinies so extraordinary. I don’t realise what I have. I look at life as if it were a show, a space of time in which what matters is not what you really think, but what you do, what you express, the places you go to, the things you leave behind. My life is like an obstacle course and I am always afraid of making a mistake, of losing, of being excluded. Sax has understood this perfectly, I think; that’s why he works so obsessively on his pictures and drawings, and perhaps that’s why he has had so many illegitimate children. He felt the need to disseminate himself excessively, the need to seduce women of all kinds and not to love any of them.