OF ALL the stories I’ve written this is perhaps the most singular. It was expressly written for Fernand Léger, to accompany a series of forty illustrations on clowns and circuses.*
It took me months, after I had accepted Léger’s invitation to do the text, to even begin. Though I was given complete liberty, I felt inhibited. Never before had I written a story to order, as it were.
Almost obsessively my mind kept revolving about these names: Rouault, Miro, Chagall, Max Jacob, Seurat. I almost wished I had been asked to do the illustrations instead of the text. In the past I had made a few watercolors of clowns, one of them called “Cirque Medrano.” At least one of these clowns resembles strongly Marc Chagall, I am told, though I have never met Chagall nor had I even seen a photograph of him.
While struggling to get started, there fell into my hands a little book by Wallace Fowlie* in which there is a poignant essay on the clowns of Rouault. Meditating on Rouault’s life and work, which influenced me strongly, I got to thinking of the clown which I am, which I have always been. I thought of my passion for the circus, especially the cirque intime, and how all these experiences as spectator and silent participator must lie buried deep in my consciousness. I remembered how, when I was graduating from High School, they had asked me what I intended to be and I had said—“a clown!” I recalled how many of my old friends were like clowns in their behavior—and they were the ones I loved most. And later on I discovered to my surprise that my most intimate friends looked upon me as a clown.
And then suddenly I realized what an impact the title of Wallace Fowlie’s book (the first of his I read) had made upon me: Clowns and Angels. Balzac had spoken to me of the angels (in Louis Lambert) and, through Fowlie’s numerous divagations on the clown, I had gained new insight into the role of the clown. Clowns and angels are so divinely suited to one another.
Moreover, had I not myself written somewhere about August Angst and Guy le Crêvecœur? Who were they, these two anguished, frustrated, desperate souls, if not myself?
And then another thing … the most successful painting I ever did was the head of a clown to whom I had given two mouths, one for joy and one for sorrow. The joyous mouth was in high vermilion—it was a singing mouth. (Recalling this, I realized that I no longer sang!)
Between times I received a few maquettes from Léger. One of them featured the head of a horse. I put these away in a drawer, forgot about them, and began to write. I never realized until I had finished the story where I got the horse. The ladder, of course, was a gift from Miro, and the moon too, most likely. (Dog Barking at the Moon was the first Miro I ever saw.)
I began then with myself, with the firm conviction that I had in me all there was to know about clowns and circuses. I wrote from line to line, blindly, not knowing what would come next. I had myself; the ladder and the horse I had unconsciously filched. Keeping me company were the poets and painters I adored—Rouault, Miro, Chagall, Max Jacob, Seurat. Curiously, all these artists are poet and painter both. With each one of them I had deep associations.
A clown is a poet in action. He is the story which he enacts. It is the same story over and over—adoration, devotion, crucifixion. “A Rosy Crucifixion,” bien entendu.
The only part of my narrative which gave me difficulty were the last few pages, which I rewrote several times. “There is a light which kills,” I believe Balzac said somewhere. I wanted my protagonist, Auguste, to go out like a light. But not in death! I wanted his death to illumine the way. I saw it not as an end but as a beginning. When Auguste becomes himself life begins—and not just for Auguste but for all mankind.
Let no one think that I thought the story out! I have told it only as I felt it, only as it revealed itself to me piece by piece. It is mine and it is not mine. Undoubtedly it is the strangest story I have yet written. It is not a Surrealistic document, not the least. The process of writing it may have been Surrealistic, but that is only to say that the Surrealists recaptured the true method of creation. No, more even than all the stories which I based on fact and experience is this one truth. My whole aim in writing has been to tell the truth, as I know it. Heretofore all my characters have been real, taken from life, my own life. Auguste is unique in that he came from the blue. But what is this blue which surrounds and envelopes us if not reality itself? We invent nothing, truly. We borrow and recreate. We uncover and discover. All has been given, as the mystics say. We have only to open our eyes and hearts, to become one with that which is.
The clown appeals to me deeply, though I did not always know it, precisely because he is separated from the world by laughter. His is never a Homeric laughter. It is a silent, what we call a mirthless, laughter. The clown teaches us to laugh at ourselves. And this laughter of ours is born of tears.
Joy is like a river: it flows ceaselessly. It seems to me that this is the message which the clown is trying to convey to us, that we should participate through ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to reflect, compare, analyze, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the clown makes it symbolically. It is for us to make it real.
At no time in the history of man has the world been so full of pain and anguish. Here and there, however, we meet with individuals who are untouched, unsullied, by the common grief. They are not heartless individuals, far from it! They are emancipated beings. For them the world is not what it seems to us. They see with other eyes. We say of them that they have died to the world. They live in the moment, fully, and the radiance which emanates from them is a perpetual song of joy.
The circus is a tiny closed off arena of forgetfulness. For a space it enables us to lose ourselves, to dissolve in wonder and bliss, to be transported by mystery. We come out of it in a daze, saddened and horrified by the everyday face of the world. But the old everyday world, the world with which we imagine ourselves to be only too familiar, is the only world, and it is a world of magic, of magic inexhaustible. Like the clown, we go through the motions, forever simulating, forever postponing the grand event. We die struggling to get born. We never were, never are. We are always in process of becoming, always separate and detached. Forever outside.
This is the picture of August Angst, alias Guy le Crêvecœur—or the everyday face of the world, with two mouths. Auguste is of another breed. Perhaps I have not limned his portrait too clearly. But he exists, if only for the reason that I imagined him to be. He came from the blue and he returns to the blue. He has not perished, he is not lost. Neither will he be forgotten. Only the other day I was speaking to a painter I know about the figures left us by Seurat. I said that they were rooted there where he gave them being—eternally. How grateful I am to have lived with these figures of Seurat—on the Grande Jatte, at the Medrano, and elsewhere in the mind! There is nothing in the least illusory about these creations of his. Their reality is imperishable. They dwell in sunlight, in a harmony of form and rhythm which is sheer melody. And so with the clowns of Rouault, the angels of Chagall, the ladder and the moon of Miro, his whole menagerie, in fact. So with Max Jacob, who never ceased to be a clown, even after he had found God. In word, in image, in act, all these blessed souls who kept me company have testified to the eternal reality of their vision. Their everyday world will one day become ours. It is ours now, in fact, only we are too impoverished to claim it for our own.
* Léger was obliged to reject my text as unsuitable and subsequently wrote one himself for his handsome book called Le Cirque.
* Jacob’s Night, by Wallace Fowlie: Sheed & Ward, N.Y. 1947.