IT IS TOUSSAINT, or All Saints’ Day, a holy day of obligation for Catholics and a national holiday in which the custom is to visit cemeteries and venerate the dead with flowers, so I sought out James Lord at Montparnasse Cemetery. In France, chrysanthemums are the flower associated with death and therefore not brought into the home. Searching for James in that garden of death, I struck up a conversation with a gravedigger from Dublin who seemed eager to speak English. He was thin and spoke with a cigarette between his lips. His eyes seemed large inside his head, like in a Cocteau drawing. He was pushing a wheelbarrow around the cemetery but volunteered to escort me down a long, dusty path between the forgotten tombstones of Division 6 to James’s grave. The gravedigger lay a potted chrysanthemum on the pink marble sepulcher, and when I shook his hand in gratitude, I could feel the dry soil of Paris, the same soil that Baudelaire was able to transform into rhapsodic poetry.
MY FRIENDSHIP WITH JAMES helped keep me warm during a long, damp winter in Paris. This is what writers do—we keep each other warm—during periods of solitude when we are writing. After James died—at home, of a heart attack, at eighty-six—a letter came, saying, “You give real, true flowers, for which I am grateful as a friend can be. I, alas, can offer only the make-believe variety.” Included was a small, Matisse-like drawing made with ballpoint scratches at 4 AM, when he was sitting, sleepless, on the edge of his bed.
In the only picture I have of him he is a ghostly figure sitting on the little white sofa in his studio at 19, rue de Lille, the same address at which Max Ernst lived with his wife, the surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning. Looking at the photograph now, I am reminded of what James wrote about “the very difficult, almost oppressive” portrait Giacometti made of him: “When in solitude I did look at it . . . I recognized that this was a portrait of extraordinary power and intensity, a work which clearly appeared to have been devised for eternity, uncannily reminiscent of the purpose and effect of the Egyptian art which Giacometti admired more than any other, thus an image over which hovered the adumbration and presentiment of death. . . .”
JAMES DID NOT THINK there were any first-rate living painters—at least, not any of Picasso’s stature. When I asked him about Francis Bacon, he said he was a stylist, “not first-rate, though a nice man.” About the second-generation abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell, who often smeared paint with her fingers and who wanted her paintings “to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower” and “coy young girls,” he said that they had been friends until her heavy drinking had caused a break. After he sold the painting he owned by her at Sotheby’s, he received an inquiry about the provenance of the work, and the buyer turned out to be Mitchell herself. James said he owned no first-rate paintings. He believed a drawing could be a masterpiece and that the ability to recognize a masterpiece was innate, but that an appreciation of art could be cultivated. The same is true for poetry, of course.
STROLLING ON THE RUE DE SEINE, I was approached by a woman who pretended to find a large gold ring on the pavement right at my feet. She held it up before me with a surprised look, hoping I would naïvely pay her for it. I was on my way to visit James, and when I recounted the incident for him, he laughed out loud, saying, “My dear, that is the oldest trick in the book.”
At the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, I often watch, with a different sort of naïveté, a small, grainy video of a unicorn. Neither male nor female, the mythological unicorn represents purity, and it lives somewhere between heaven and earth. The museum also has unicorn droppings on display. I think a sense of wonder is good for the poet, but a little of this goes a long way. I confess that I still feel childlike amazement before the brutality of the world, but also before its beauty. Call me an unrealist, but maybe I am in fact an ultra-realist.
IN 1952 James helped save from destruction Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence. Local authorities wanted to tear it down and build a high-rise, so he raised money from wealthy Americans to preserve the pilgrimage site. On the day I visited the atelier, the northern gray sky mirrored its neutral walls. A large crucifix was hanging prominently. French country chairs with straw seats, baskets of onions, dusty bottles, and human skulls were arranged in a curator’s idea of Cézanne’s still lifes. Tapestries were draped across the easel. Withered fruit and flowers reminded visitors that Cézanne spent weeks, even months, finishing his paintings. Two prints—one by Poussin and another by Delacroix—were displayed above a high shelf. The Delacroix, a triangular composition that recalled Cézanne’s views of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, was a romantic depiction of a lion devouring a horse, whereas the Poussin, a landscape of shepherds in Arcadia, was more meditative. Cézanne, we were to understand, married the virtues of these two artists and made something of his own. A dense thicket pressed against the atelier’s garret-style windows. Hidden in the corner was a tall door, only about a foot wide, through which Cézanne removed his large canvases of bathers. In the atelier there was a solitude bordering on somberness. Eating a fig from a large tree beside the entrance, I remembered a letter Cézanne wrote to his son, in which he said, “As for me, I must remain alone, the meanness of people is such that I should never be able to get away from it.”
MY LANDLADY IN PARIS says that her grandfather knew Cézanne, and that there exists a French expression—Jamais saint n’a fait miracle dans son pays—that translates as “A saint never performs miracles in his own country.” This describes the city of Aix’s coolness toward Cézanne, its native son, during his lifetime. Perhaps the same was true in the early careers of writers such as Seamus Heaney, in Northern Ireland; Joseph Brodsky, in the Soviet Union; Derek Walcott, in colonial Saint Lucia; and Wisława Szymborska, in Iron Curtain Poland—because they were poets whose poems were definite and self-sufficient, rather than incomplete, hanging in space, or lost. Pierre-Auguste Renoir said Cézanne was “a lone wolf ” and a “real person.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY for James Lord called him “an intimate of Picasso and Giacometti,” and it reported that he is survived by “his longtime companion and adopted son.” When I knew James, he was working steadily on a new memoir about his experiences as a gay man during World War II, about which he said, “I’m not holding back, though I could never go as far as you do!” When he said this, it took me a moment to understand that he meant it as praise. He often apologized for talking so much about himself, though I encouraged him to do so.
Thinking about his expatriate life, I remember an episode in the book Six Exceptional Women in which he recounts a visit with Alice B. Toklas during her final years—this was in the sixties, before James had settled permanently in Paris. We forget that Toklas lived for twenty years after Gertrude Stein died. James describes “a small apartment in an ugly modern building,” somewhere on the outskirts of the city. He finds a woman living “with regret and desolation,” but not because of the ugly circumstances in which she finds herself. He writes:
I sat on a chair by her bedside. . . . Alice asked me questions about myself, about my life in America. She said that she thought I had been wise to go back there to live. She felt that she herself had been fortunate to live away from America before it became the most powerful country in the world, because she thought it would be difficult for anyone to live abroad and find fulfillment there if he were leaving behind the most powerful country in the world. I am naturally not so sure as she was about that. I asked whether Miss Stein had felt likewise, and Alice said, “Gertrude never left home in the same way I did. She was always at home through the language, but I was at home only through her.”
