In “the Garden
of France”
Huismes, Indre-et-Loire, is in Touraine, long called “the garden of France.” Creamy stone punctuates the all-over green fief of ancient kings and modern Americans, two of whom led us to this house not far from friend Sandy (Alexander) Calder. We readied it, saw it fitted up with plumbing; we scraped and plastered and windowed, stairwayed, heated, gardened, and walled. Into this house that we called Le Pin Perdu (it had been Le Pin, but no pine tree was to be seen) came everything we owned. Six thousand miles of land and ocean were traversed by our fantasies and foibles, further swollen by more of the same, found locally.
The nests we have made! That, like birds, we have feathered, floored, furnished. The flea markets we have drawn from, the antique fairs, the sublime junk, not old enough, just too old. Each time believing it was the last and each time moving on, our gear a growing mountain in spite of doleful losses. These pare our history to just this side of amputation.
Letters, photographs, books, objects, even documents, big and little things treasured like breath—impossible to live without them—move with me and the beds and the casseroles from house to house, yet some of them and always the wrong ones inevitably vanish, a diminishment at each upheaval (that photo there, why has it only one eye imitating a windy tunnel?) hinting at loss. A little lost each time, not much, absorbed into the mysterious space to which you willingly confide pieces of your reckless life, your memory deeply troubled and faulty without them. Because even memory can lose its key like that of the last house, and upon what recall then can you depend to enter the next one? After a while I could not remember what I didn’t have anymore.
But why worry about the inanimate? Only life was not trivial, only love could be truly missed, and I had both.
Morning walks in the steamy green of our Touraine garden brought us surprises: the first lilac—so soon!—a peony that would be white, and then one day the toad, lifeless, with his hands chewed off—a feline amusement surely. What a way to die. We had greeted each other every morning. Our toad. Our friend, on hand in the same place, maybe glad to see us. Until that day on our usual round. “Don’t look!” Max said and tried to turn me away. But how can you forget a maimed toad? And why his hands?
Down at the far end of the garden where the sky held a sweep of dominion over a small unshaded territory, we built a greenhouse for the provision of potted flowers to bring in during the long winter spans and for starting (we would beat Monsieur Blondeau, our neighbor, by at least three weeks) early lettuces and tomatoes and basil. In this greenhouse puttered and pottered our dapper old gardener, Monsieur D., beret aslant, clipped mustache, bright pink cheeks proudly framing a magenta nose (the wines of Chinon and Bourgeuil being famously irresistible), who regularly wore clogs and a knitted vest from the busy needles of his invisible Madame D. We never in all the years he was on the place laid eyes on Madame D., and with reason. For coming back unexpectedly, one soft May afternoon from a stay in town and after ringing at the gate a rather long time, we were admitted by a beet-red Yvette, our housekeeper, and glimpsed at the same moment Monsieur D., issuing from our ground-floor bedroom down at the far end of the house, arranging his baggy corduroys. So the knitting needles belonged to Yvette, just as did the gentle May afternoons. And to think we had always called him old Monsieur D.!
For eighteen years this Yvette held our daily life together. Widowed early on, she had raised four daughters from scratch. Scratch because it was hand to mouth, a factory job. Until on a dim day her boss disappeared, with three months’ back salaries. Thus we inherited Yvette. What she did for the following years is a litany that could interest no one anymore. But the armloads of flowers from the garden and her thin voice, so at odds with the solid body, as she answered our compliments, “Oui, on dirait des fausses fleurs” (“Yes, one could mistake them for artificial flowers”). Or telling of her brother who had drawn a dog so lifelike that “on dirait qu’il allait parler” (“you’d think he was about to talk”).
Joining in our occasional foolishness—dinner sometimes saw us all gravely costumed and unrecognizable—she would dive with the rest of us into a wicker trunk of rags and jetsam to come up with the colors of our evening. Decked out in fireman’s casque and black lace knickers, this hardworking Yvette served the ragout, attentive and unperturbed. To see her bouncing down the lane on her mobylette—the wide expanse of her girdled behind forming just one firm imposing cheek miraculously and, you could perfectly see, comfortably resting on the little triangular seat, a long loaf of bread strapped just under it—was a sight to either distress or amuse, depending on who was watching.
It was a stunning event when Yvette won a Solex motorbike in a farm journal contest. The contest: Guess the Correct Age of This Dog (fuzzy photo). I could imagine them leaning together on her oilcloth table cover. Evening. Monsieur D. argues for his guess, then when all agree and it is settled he gives it to her, to his lady, his first guess. Because he sent one too, in his own name. They wait. The farmers of the whole French nation are waiting; every farmer has guessed the age of the dog. Then a telegram for Yvette. Stupefaction! She has won first prize, the Solex. And he, Monsieur D., amazingly, wins the second, a shotgun. After the excitement he asks, would she, Yvette, trade? Would she give up the Solex for the gun? After all, she already has a motorbike. Ah, no!
He was a sort of intellectual or thinking man, this Monsieur D.; he read the Canard Enchaîné but kept his ideas and his opinions to himself. In fact, he was not an ear-bender, or talker, at all. He trundled his wheelbarrow of manure down the nave of our garden path as if it were an offering of lilies to be consecrated at the chancel. On rainy days he stayed in the greenhouse, that hotbed of optimism as redolent of green buzzing life as the shores of a pond. In March it was a moving thing to watch the seedlings push up in their slats, first showing their bent pale necks like tiny wickets and the next day pulling the rest of themselves out of the mysterious dirt. Max wanted nasturtiums, happy flowers, happy to bloom, happy to be eaten in the salad. But all too soon their glassy prison, like so many prisons, went wild and wrong. April, May. By June it would be almost impossible for Monsieur D. to get through the door, so choked it was with rampant verdure grimly waiting to be set outdoors. The chlorophyll was overwhelming. Unwatered pots began to line up around the outside walls like garbage cans, hoping only for invisibility. Compost, he told us, it would all make fine compost. As for the transplanting, it had rained too much. Or it had not rained enough, the ground was hard. You could always count on one or the other. Monsieur D., like the sorcerer’s apprentice, had each year started something he couldn’t finish.
We respected his thinking life; how can you help it, confronted with such dignity, such mystery? It was Yvette who brought it all together, she whose brother had been carted off in 1942, to God knows what concentration camp, along with the rest of the vigorous males of Huismes, resistants all, never to be seen again. Denounced they were, by a slimy local collabo, someone with a “de” to his name, the town’s grand bourgeois. She told it with fatal simplicity. The collabo had stayed up there in his moldy manoir, doing for himself, she emphasized, because certainly no one would work for him. After the Allied victory he was dragged like a rat from his walled garden to the village square to be judged and shot.
Yvette sighs. “But when the time came, eh bien, no one in that crowd would hold the gun. We were all together, maybe a hundred widows and old people. None of us wanted to be the one. So he is still up there in his house. Et il y a même ceux qui lui disent bonjour” (“And there are even those who still speak to him”).
One of the survivors, because he had been only a boy at the time of deportation, was Giles Chauvelin, who, as he grew up, became a master stonecutter and official restorer of national monuments, notably the châteaux of the surrounding countryside: Amboise, Chambord, Chenonceaux, Villandry, Azay-le-Rideau. More and more elements of ancient carvings—a helpless gargoyle, an acanthus leaf—were crashing down in response to the bangs of supersonic planes training for some future war. (Humbler victims included the pile of old stone across the lane from us, a hovel occupied by Madame Pihouée, aged eighty-one, who could sew and read without glasses and whose abode, with herself inside it, simply crumbled one day, fell about her like a dropped petticoat. Miraculously, she was untouched—“like Cologne’s cathedral in the World War II bombing,” said Max—but never seen by us again. We were told she was now “in a home.”) Chauvelin was thus never in want of projects and commissions. As far as we knew, he could count on full employment, keeping up with the damage wrought by the prideful aircraft cruising our luscious countryside of Touraine. Sound-barrier blasts never failed to loosen a stony saint or two from its niche high on some façade. So that, visiting Chauvelin’s cavernous atelier, you saw the heart and soul of medieval architecture still in the making: trefoil and capital; even whole entablatures in creamy pierre de Vilhoneur. And still today, when the supersonic blast rips away another stone dream from the “garden of kings,” I wince a little as if it were my own skin. Now stone returns to stone, transformed as warehouse or garage. Even the guidebook often has nothing to give but absence.
There are certain luxuries which, taken all together, make a modest life big: letting a day or even several go by before answering a letter; saying one isn’t at home; telling the best ideas to the dog; crying for fun. There in Huismes, after Venice and the primo premio, we had become once more dedicated country mice, planting American corn, dealing with molehills, and, on the shiny side, having our old friends the Alexander Calders living near, in Sache. We shared our fun and games. Seeing the tall brown-paper-bag mask moving among the dancers at our party one knew that Sandy Calder was under it.
And in Rome one day we met at his rooms. I had been to the coiffeur. Sandy took it in, especially the two corkscrew curls, a sort of retro hairstyle much seen at the time. “Huh-uh-uh!” Impossible to convey his private laugh, followed by “Too late. The bottles are already opened.” Apparently dozing during most of the restaurant dinner, he would suddenly comment on or correct some remark by the hardy convives—we and Louisa Calder, Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morandi—who all thought he was in dreamland. One glass of wine was enough to put him to sleep or lift him onto an antic plateau of delight hardly known since the innocence of Bacchanalian days. He was, at these times, the very emblem of his sculptures, weightless—and unpredictable.
It may also be said that from this time on, between letters and visits, life in the country was a far cry indeed from the dreamy dawn of Sedona, Arizona. Our Pin Perdu opened its pale blue gate to admit a fairly steady procession of every sort of visitor, from the bosom friend to the merely curious, from the personage in his long car to the postgraduate with backpack, from the collaborator (book, theater piece, exhibition, print) to the bearer of messages from home. Dominique de Menil, our American collector, broke bread with our Swiss carpenter. An orphan housemaid from Paris posed with Man Ray, our American photographer; Georges Bataille, Arp, Roger Caillois, Matta (with wife and baby), to name a few names. Chess was played for two days nonstop with two Duchamps.
One day, to match a moment’s levity, I showed Marcel Duchamp our Mona Lisa, a handpainted copy, actual size, that had been a mock “prize” for Max at a party in Marie Laure’s Hyères retreat. The Mona Lisa. Here she was, a sinewy, all-wrong creature, powerfully painted on a wooden panel, her crooked leer a categorical repudiation not only of Leonardo da Vinci but of all artists. “All she needs is a mustache,” I said, to prolong the fun. Duchamp: “Well, give me two small brushes and a little white and raw umber.” That afternoon our Mona Lisa became a treasure after all, for he painted every hair of mustache and goatee, just as he had on his famous original. Another golden moment.
The next day we drove down to Lascaux to see the cave paintings, a project dear to Teeny Duchamp’s heart and pleasantly shared, though with something like fortitude, by Marcel. Arriving at the little hotel in Montigny, near the caves, the next evening, we sat at dinner (we were the only diners!) and watched Marcel calculate in his notebook the time needed next morning for the caves:
“Let’s see, if we get up at eight, take twenty-five minutes to dress, about twenty-two minutes for breakfast . . . it’s twenty-five minutes from here to the caves, ten minutes probably to stand in line if we get there early, and seven minutes should be enough to spend inside. That’s one hour and twenty-nine minutes altogether.” It worked out pretty much as he said.
I believe he was serious, although one never quite knew. Marcel Duchamp’s sense of humor was his sixth sense and far from the least important. In fact, everything he did was tinged by this treasure; it is no exaggeration to say he allowed it to determine the course of his entire lifework. As William Anastasi has pointed out, he felt close to the French writer Alfred Jarry, a late-nineteenth-century gleeful absurdist, dear to the surrealists—and to me. Proposer of outrageous acts and martyr to his own brand of iconoclasm, Jarry was Marcel’s secret garden, Jarry’s writings his secret bible, Jarry’s humor a model for his own. (All this is still being argued.) In Breton’s surrealism there was not the smallest hint of humor; it was deadly serious, moving in on dada like a rival team at the Olympics. Marcel, on the other hand, collaborated with them both. Indulgent, helpful, and with a bemused kind of affection, he enjoyed, with that sixth sense of his, playing their games.
As for Max Ernst, never was a man so solicited to return “home.” Bitte! Visitors, authors, interviewers, filmmakers. Sometimes, to substitute for conversation, I would get out my camera. “Do you take real pictures? Is there film in the camera?” “Nearly always,” I reply, unwisely. Because one day, on the terrace it was, with a brace of rollicking callers, two directors of something artistic or other who, with guffaws and chortles, had donned flowered straw hats for the photo, a bad moment occurred when I discovered there was no film in the box. My sitters did not hide their disgust when I (oh so stupidly) announced the funny discovery; peevish and sarcastic, they hardly spoke to me when making their farewells.
Droll souvenirs, recited poems (seductive, indeed, those lines from Bürger, Hölderlin, Novalis . . .), rousing school songs. Old cities showered him with new honors accompanied by medals and colored ribbons. They installed a Max Ernst fountain in his hometown of Brühl; they named a school after him. Commemorative coins for his birthdays. A bronze plaque on his birthplace. And, needless to say, retrospective exhibitions.
During my thirty-four-year tenure we traveled to openings of a number of these exhibitions in Germany and beyond. I saw the capitals of the occidental world. I saw their sunny or shiny-wet streets and vacant lots, their cathedrals, castles, canals, their parks (ah those spooky parks! “We have put you in the Park Hotel, very quiet.” And I, who longed for local Life, looked out, instead, on dark trees), monuments, and, naturally, their museums. I wanted to go home. (It must be remembered that these were postwar years and many towns were sad, gray, unrestored. I wandered through some of them, their unlit squares, their blind foreign alleys, thinking, “Here, crime is self-inflicted; for everyone, from the age of five, must be planning their escape.”)
But exhilaration was always the order of the days in the museums, lit, as they were, by adulation, so natural and gratifying to the artist. And to the artist’s wife, naturally. Assiduities I had come wonderingly to accept. Oh, the good people I have tried to communicate with! Their boundless love and admiration for him—and his wife. They coddle her, coo over her. She, caught among the ladies, sits frozen, idiotically demure, as they marvel, “Did you hear? She paints too!” And what comes bobbing to the surface is the fact of the devoted mate, the last—and lasting—in a long line of tryouts for the job. She cares for the warrior who is quiet at last, and needful. Unsung heroine in her mythic devotion, she holds in check an only occasional moment of frustration. She knows that her man is the true immortal and that she is envied by numberless members of her sex who are waiting to replace her should anything go wrong.
February 8, 1959. In the kitchen of Le Pin Perdu, our world, Max opens champagne, a fire is crackling in the big chimney, and nobody cares that outdoors is dark and wet at five o’clock. Monsieur D. has stepped inside in his stocking feet, clogs left by the door. Yvette turns down the gas under her poireaux and comes to take her glass. They both hold the stems delicately, little fingers aloft. We are just four, and we drink to Max, French citizen from this day forward. Stateless for a year, he had gravely accepted when the prime minister said: “France would be honored. . . .” So now at last he has a home.
As for me, I wanted to be glad. But he had been an American. And my country had repudiated him, meaninglessly. So, yes, I was glad, sadly glad. Moreover, I find irresistible an impulse to include here a final document, received five years later:
American Embassy
Paris, France
July 20, 1964
Mr. Max Ernst
19, rue de Lille
Paris, 7e
Dear Max:
As you undoubtedly know, the Supreme Court on May 19 ruled unconstitutional Section 352 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (and similar Sections under previous legislation). Thus, naturalized citizens now have the same rights and privileges as native-born Americans and may reside abroad indefinitely, whether in their country of origin or elsewhere, without endangering their American citizenship.
Furthermore, decisions on loss of citizenship based on that Section are thereby voided. It gives me great pleasure, therefore, to tell you that if you wish to verify your continued United States citizenship, to receive a passport, or to register as an American citizen, I shall be delighted to see you. Please telephone me whenever it is convenient for you, and I shall see to it that you are given prompt attention at any time that you would care to come. I don’t think I need to tell you how happy I am personally to be writing you this letter and I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you and Mrs. Ernst again.
With kindest personal regards,
Sincerely,
Perry Culley
American Consul General
Oh, too late, too late.
To have consciously turned away from his country at an early age after having worn, willy-nilly, its military uniform in the most lethal war the world had yet known and to have recognized its ugly destiny during the slow approach of further madness must have been for him an abiding horror. And then to become again a victim of that same horror along with millions of surprised and helpless human beings—all this must have demanded of him an unshakable faith in art as salvation. His own art, certainly, along with that of the others who did not survive the horde. (That, too, he had painted: La Horde, over and over in those menacing years.)
On the flagstones under the wisteria, sunspots are small and round to match the ones on the table. The soup steams in the shade. A glassy sort of hour, fragmentary talk in German, this rolling language I do not understand. Some small argument, desultory, as blurry as a warm snowy day, the words quick to melt. Oh Max, with your absent ach, so, and your hair blowing over one ear. Now the sun has gone and gusty wind takes over. I bleat a verb from time to time, unexotic. What am I doing here? You look to me for rescue; I say let’s go inside for the coffee and this we all do. The tiny argument has melted, a puddle on the table, left behind along with crumpled napkins. Coffee is sipped in silence because you are all at once a statue, eyes turned to the ceiling; you are a million miles away and you will not come back. For the thousandth time I leap, filling the breach with trusty amenities—smiles, gestures, sign language dredged up out of old habit as you knew they would be. It is nothing to what I would do for you, in truth. Just ask me.
At last they are gone, have waved goodbye. The next hour—spent cleaning up, piling dishes, emptying ashtrays, feeling my way back to myself—passes in that cottony, timeless state known to those emerging from anesthesia.
“Das Leben ist kein Traum”.(“Life is no dream”).
One of them, laughing, had quoted the line from Novalis’s poem. Ah but it was, it was. They had only to remember the next line, “But it can and will become one.” My love was so anchored, so final, that a wisp of regret sometimes swept over it, an odd little cloud: I would never know love’s despair, its changes, its vanities, its hopes, its anguish; love’s pain would not be granted me. It was like the time I had wanted to be mad, not knowing my good fortune.
Max painted my portrait then, in his way. “Hell, I could die now,” I thought, seeing it. But what can I say? I’m glad this did not happen.
Because of language confusion our shape as a pair was not sophisticated. We did not have what is known as repartee. What we shared was, to the casual observer, predominantly emotional, even primitive. But it was richer than that. Three languages, two of them more or less shared; three ways to say the same things, simple, fundamental things. Like tools in the hands they became kindly helpers as the years passed. We had wished so earnestly to make them so. If poor in syntax they made up for it in color—and fun. We found we were able to adopt and adapt current or referent expressions to furnish conversation with everything we needed. We could give adequate well-shaped reasons for acceptance, rejection, admiration, or indifference. Determined to speak and understand French when in France, I chided Max, who always addressed me in English:
“Allons, Max, il faut qu’on parle en Français dorénavant.”
And he: “D’accord.”
But a few minutes later, to my question “A quel heure sont-ils attendus?” he replies, “Eight o’clock.”
A friend explains this to me later: “The language you have used in your first days, first lovemaking, can never be replaced by another.”
We could fight respectably. Of course there were fights. Accusations, reasonable or unreasonable, it never matters. Without the anger, the crumpled hour, the clouds of adrenaline, the floods, the quiet gloom while it is going on—he couldn’t eat, I couldn’t think—our lake would have filled with swamp grass. What oral communication we had was quite good enough for our purposes, and we had so much else. What’s more, accents were a source of delight. My French had enough inadvertent clumsiness to amuse all present. (As an American I would never be able to say truite when ordering trout. With that one word, an enemy would easily unmask me. Treet? Tweet? We must choose.) His English was a treasure of funny words. Bushes and cushions rhymed with Russians. “Ah yes, Dorotaya.”
There hovered, however, a persistent, medium-sized cloud in this great wash of blue, and it hung around to blur our edges and provide a little frustration. In the area of books, only the French ones were shared, and those not always. There was no use pretending I could hear their nuances or savor their styles even though I could read Bouvard et Pécuchet with delight. For what was I to do with the wildly convoluted prose of André Breton? Or Malcolm de Chazal’s so very French maxims? I loved the gentle heart of Marcel Schwob, and the perverse extravagance of Villier’s Axel is still a real peril to my precarious equilibrium. But the others, all the others . . . How little time there is! How could I find enough of it to learn to read the German ones too?
Max lived in an ever-widening pond of books. There was not a day that failed to deliver its book, that did not see a new one float into view: on eddies of mail (American), brought by hand (German), or from the bookstore (French).
My own library was a smaller corner. In it those smoldering former companions, pushed aside like cast-off schoolmates, slouched in the background and assumed the easy poses that only words can claim. They all knew their turn would come. The defiant American paperback with its peppery pinup cover that has nothing to do with the inside. (All you have to do is tear it off.) And the faded hardcovers, how had they managed to stay by, to turn into seasoned travelers, discreet and huddled where you could lay a hand on them?
My shelf, my books: mostly fiction—American and British classics that, very quietly, began to appear, in their translations, among Max’s French books. Jude the Obscure, Ulysses, and Moby-Dick. Typee, too, and Mardi. Hawthorne, Thoreau . . . How, I wondered, would they translate Henry James? Ambrose Bierce, okay; Fitzgerald, okay; Henry Miller, I could see that all right. But Finnegans Wake? Good God. Yet they all slipped, gleeful masqueraders, into that other company and took their places graciously, like expatriates rather proud to be able to give the time of day in a foreign language.
The effect on me was stunning. My book friends were all at once new and naked. He wanted, then, to know what I knew, read what I read. It was a startling thought. I felt oddly nervous and responsible. Random phrases from this or that book surfaced in my mind. How would they sound to him in French? How would he see them? The first real sharing of that part of our lives was taking place at last.
Besides the bookshelf books there were the homemade ones. In the kind of life we led, bookmaking was as necessary a part of it as buttons on a coat. I cannot remember any painter acquaintance who did not at some time engage in collaboration on a book.
Editions were never more than one hundred and twenty copies—they depreciated in value as the numbers rose. Ardent publisher of some of the best of these was short, round, Swiss Monsieur Louis Broder, whose demanding profession left him only time to eat, and it must not be assumed that he did so out of mere hunger. His obsession with le beau livre was juicily matched by his devotion to la grande cuisine. I am sure that in putting together his elegant books he considered himself a kind of superchef.
One day he asked rather casually, “What kind of books do you have in America?”
“Oh, very good books,” said Max.
“But how are they made?” he wanted to know. “Who buys them?”
I explained about how the book is generally hardcover, printed in many thousands, “and after they’re read you put them on the shelf. . . .”
“Oh!” Monsieur Broder did not disguise his scorn. “Oh, you mean they buy reading books!”
Texts often came from poet friends. Or there might be some long-forgotten manuscript to be brought gloriously to light, with Japan paper, elegant handset type, abundant flyleaves, and, most important, lovingly pulled etchings in limpid colors that melted into the petallike paper the way mauve and carmine soak into the sky at sunset.
A well-known master etcher in Paris was Georges Visat. With his virtuoso bag of tricks under control—his scumbles, acids, chemical wonders, coaxed accidents, his waxes, varnishes, sugars, resists, spit, and resins, followed by hours of scrapings, polishings, inking, proofing—all the arduous passionate sweaty process of etching on copper—he brought out glorious deep-diving images in floated spectral colors for which other people got the credit. I suppose that’s the way it should be: artist, artisan. But both words seem obsolete in this context. As the first of the two I experimented with it all; until, that is, it became clear to me that the process was so overwhelming, so fraught, it would be better to drop it instead of going crazy with the possibilities.
Constantly on the prowl for new techniques, Visat one day borrowed a little painting of mine and, by some latest method, made from it an etching. It was perfect. But was it wrong? Was it a fraud? Would a collector find it a cheat? Would Georges Visat, with his special hands, his good-natured genius, his light under a bushel of artists, reap opprobrium for keeping the flame of etching alive? As the years passed it became even harder to consign Visat to the caste of mere craftsmen, for he waded into editing, producing not only etchings but the whole book as well.
An interesting number of these books were fiercely and explicitly erotic, with rich descriptive passages and a wealth of invention. They were written by mild, overrefined men and women whose swollen imaginations doubtless consoled them for grim reality. Even such books were built, like cathedrals, with an inordinate amount of creative fervor and dedication. Erotic or not, emblems so strong in their collaborative ardor were bound to become objects of pure magic.
Such were the books made by Iliadz, another shoestring editor, with his artist and poet friends: bouquets of words, printed with love, to hold in your hands. Artists writing, poets painting. A “free” sort of adventure, serious fun without the dedicated preparation, without the drudgery and without too much concern for what other people might find to say about it. If Artaud or Apollinaire—or Henry Miller or e.e. cummings—decided to draw or even paint, was it only in response to the creative urge? Or might they have wanted a simple change of pace and gesture, as erratic and irresponsible as the capers of birds in air? It was this airy freedom that prevailed in those ateliers where even I made etchings, and wrote poems—in French!—over a period of twenty years.
In May 1958 I traveled—alone—to Turin for an exhibition of my paintings in the Galeria Galatea. De Chirico’s city of arcades looked satisfyingly Chiricoesque to my eyes: severe, melancholy, and sleepy, so contrasted to the roar of Rome or Milan. At my opening everyone seemed to be at least a count or a duke if not a serene somebody. I didn’t mind, for they bought a few little pictures (my pictures at this time were mostly little), and after their initial disappointment at not seeing my husband, they really went to some pains to show me around.
These years—1958 to 1962—are so jumbled in my backward-gazing eyes, so full of eventful sojourns in the rue Mathurin-Regnier and in Huismes, our village home, that their patterns flow together as unpredictably as the swaths of paint on canvas. Upon our losing the Paris pad, as recounted earlier, rooms were found somehow for our work, both of us working daily at the easel or, lacking that, on canvas tacked to the wall. Exhibitions followed, mostly Max’s, already noted earlier here. And two more of my own.
Although country living was what we loved best, and did most, a Paris headquarters could not be forgone. For indeed, what artist could bear to be constantly away from this place of seminal activity, friends, projects, bookmaking ateliers, even the ubiquitous cafes? In late 1962, therefore, our search was brilliantly rewarded by a new Paris address: five rooms in a splendid building at 19, rue de Lille. A friend who knew all about Paris’s past told us its early history, worth repeating here. It was built in 1720 for the comte de Lauraguais, duc de Brancas, enlightened patron of the sciences, law, medicine, and theater and official protector of the actress Sophie Arnoult, who, one day, exasperated by her situation, drove into the courtyard in her coach and there set down on the pavée her gifts from the count: a coffret of jewels and, in a cradle, two babies. The countess adopted them, probably in the spirit of simple pragmatism that must have reigned among countesses at the time—and before and after.
By 1962, when we came there, no signs of former splendor remained. On the contrary, it was the same old transformational optimism that saw us struggle with basics like heating and bathrooms. Later, acquiring another space above it, we were able to relocate me from the miserable pad I had used as a studio up to then. With a big room, north-lit, on the rue de Lille, what more could I ask?
Meanwhile, another one of those Paris days, prismatic. A rendezvous with Max at the Café Flore. Arriving, he says, “There is an idol of yours at the café next door. Oppenheimer.” A stunning announcement that suffuses me with something like embarrassment, the beginning of an impulse to pretend disinterest; oh, with Max I am always on the lookout for irony. But he is not smiling this time as he goes on, “Over there at the Deux Magots. He is sitting with a lady.” Not to do something is for once unthinkable. Quite shamelessly, I want to see. Only to walk past. To glimpse the man from faraway Los Alamos; that place where the fate of the whole human race and everything else on this planet has been forever modified. To see this person who has changed the world and wishes he hadn’t! Oh, I am certain he suffers regret: is baffled and chagrined by what he has made happen—he has said so. Let him stain the whole day, I rhapsodized inwardly. He will be an earthquake, a revolution, a northern lights. Seeing his blue eyes will . . .
He is over at the other café, blending in, just one of the tourists basking in the gentle embrace of this soft May afternoon on the boulevard Saint-Germain where the people, the aproned waiter, the table, marble with brass rim, all create a fabulous hazard that completes its picture with two little apéritifs for him and his companion. What is he thinking behind his prestigious forehead? What awful certainties are perhaps spoiling his Parisian afternoon? Can he even, just for one exotic moment, assuage his thought, forget his terrible burden?
Such are my fevered thoughts as Max, indulgent and perhaps feeling some of the excitement, walks with me through dappled shade and sun, where, as we approach, the man half rises from his chair behind the little table. “Max Ernst,” he says, his beautiful face offered, half gesture, half smile.
It all comes together in one perfect minute. His invitation: “Please—have something with us . . . my wife . . . only a few minutes ago we saw a painting of yours in a gallery, just over there.”
And Max: “In the rue de Rennes?”
By this time more chairs are drawn up and we, too, sit there. They talk. I listen. My awe amounts to anguish. Their easy conversation does not help. Instead my scrambled thoughts plunge on alone. Noticing, perhaps, my disarray, Oppenheimer addresses me: “What is that stone in your ring? It looks familiar.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I disparage my ring. “It’s fake, a bauble, junk. A friend gave it to me.” He looks again.
“But I think you are wrong to call it junk,” he says. “You see, when I was a little boy I collected minerals. And this, if I am not mistaken, is a kunzite. It is mined in southern California around San Diego. Yes, it’s a real stone and even a very good one!”
As my hand writes of that day it wears the ring, the kunzite, and all kinds of reflections shaft out from the pink stone. I am remembering the evening when I first admired it, even the name of the restaurant (l’Escargot), and Hélène, taking it off of her finger and handing it to me—a rare kind of gesture, something like a butterfly alighting on my hand. I protest: “It’s too . . .” And she: “No, no, I insist, you must have it,” neither of us knowing anything about its name, its San Diego, only enjoying the give-and-take moment, the pinkness. So that for Robert Oppenheimer, “Father of the A-bomb” as he was called, to forget for a moment his place in the dreadful present and remember “when I was a little boy,” a pink stone had to sparkle in the sun on the boulevard Saint-Germain.