Balthus had gone right on saying he needed a chateau more than a workman needed a loaf of bread. It was a bon mot, of course, but most people thought it in pretty bad taste. Besides, it wasn’t a joke. Alberto, whose style of living remained stoic in the face of good fortune, was outraged. The one who needed the chateau, however, wasn’t Balthus. It was the Count de Rola. The genuine artist was compelled to follow the make-believe nobleman, since they were the same person. Chateaus were a dime a dozen in France in the early fifties. Balthus, however, hadn’t even a dime. His paintings weren’t selling, and he subsisted with difficulty and resentment on the dole provided by a consortium of dealers and collectors. Nonetheless, while his friends smirked and looked askance, he searched the country for a residence at a cut-rate price that would still be imposing enough to house his self-esteem. What he found wasn’t exactly what the nobleman had craved, but the artist also had desires, and the place he chose was very much the sort in which he could hope to satisfy them. Given an inclination to seek romantic parallels in unexpected settings, one could easily have taken the Chateau de Chassy for a Gallic version of Wuthering Heights.
As chateaus go, it didn’t amount to much. Standing on the down slope of a small hill, overlooking a perfectly ordinary little valley on a side road somewhere between Paris and Lyons, it was just a very large house with massive towers at each corner, in quite a mediocre state of repair. There was no garden, no park, not a single fountain or stately vista, and the approach was marred by a vulgar farmyard. The interior was unfurnished and unheated. Breezes whistled under loose-fitting doors. The roof leaked.
There was no telephone. The nearest village was several miles distant. What Chassy had was space in which to look at works of art with an eye free from the constraint of twentieth-century confusions and preconceptions. The grandeur of the Count de Rola’s chateau was very much a state of mind, and for an artist prone to morose reverie and dour hauteur the setting seemed made to order. If it looked like Wuthering Heights, and he like Heathcliff, all that was needed now to bear out the evocation was some girl prepared to play the unhappy part of Cathy. Alberto Giacometti would have seemed the last person in the world likely to procure the right young woman. He not only denounced the pretentions of the bogus count but condemned his obsession with pubescent girls, exclaiming, “We’re sick of Balthus and his little girls! And yet by an exquisite zigzag of irony, it was he who procured for the Count de Rola the first mistress of the Chateau de Chassy.
Léna Leclercq was her name. Her parents had been farmers, though unconventional ones, freethinkers, who refused to kowtow to convention, with the result that their offspring were born out of wedlock. Such intransigent idealism cannot have made them popular in the French provinces prior to the Second World War, and it must have bred lonely, unhappy children. As soon as she was able, Lena set out for Paris, arriving there aged eighteen. She was bright, sensitive, anxious to make a mark in life, and she was pretty. Alberto met her in a cafe. A bit of a friendship developed, and it came out that Lena wanted to make her mark as a poet. The sculptor introduced her to his friends, and she did her best to make a good impression. She succeeded, but she also unfortunately had to make a living. It was just then that Balthus was preparing to set himself up at Chassy, where his station and the size of the house called for servants. But he had little money. Alberto suggested that Lena might do as a housekeeper. Then she could write poetry while Balthus painted pictures. It was an exceptionally bad idea, and everybody concerned thought it grand.
Lena was a little old for Balthus, being at that time around twenty-five. Perhaps Alberto assumed that the housekeeper would never be exposed to the wiles of the finicky count. That was
proof of how naive a man of formidable intuition can be. Alone together in the gloomy chateau, the handsome, haughty artist and the sensitive, idealistic poet seem to have found life quite congenial. The artist in the meantime painted some splendid pictures, one of them one of his finest, an immense canvas called Le Passage du Commerce-Saint-André. The poetess, who also did a bit of cooking and dusting, wrote a collection of verse sadly—because so inappropriately—entitled Unvanquished Poems. Balthus once asked her what historical person she might have liked to be. “Trotsky,” she said. He tartly rejoined, “You might have chosen Lenin. He, at least, succeeded.”
After a while the observant painter noted that the wife of his older brother, Pierre, had a very attractive teenaged daughter from a previous marriage, by name of Frederique, and it seemed to him that she might do beautifully to preside over the Chateau de Chassy. For reasons which only they can pretend to understand, all parties found the plan pleasing. All, that is, except Lena. There were scenes. The count was unconcerned about the opinion of his housekeeper. Frédérique’s girlish gaiety made the place seem less like Wuthering Heights. Maybe that came as a delightful change for the middle-aged artist. The distraught housekeeper made an effort to end her suffering by ending her life. Her initiative was unsuccessful. An ambulance came in time to take her to the hospital in Nevers, and the keen eye of the artist observed with sardonic merriment as the vehicle departed that the name of its proprietor printed on the door was Sepulchre.
Alberto and Annette were summoned from Paris to provide support in the time of crisis. The sculptor may have been mindful that some responsibility for the contretemps could appear to be his. He did what he could. For Balthus it was little, because the artist failed to see that anything needed doing, while the nobleman did not deign to notice. For Lena, on the other hand, there was a good deal. Both Alberto and Annette continually befriended and helped her in years to come, which did not bring much happiness, either personal or professional. She retreated to a small and tumbledown house in remote, mountainous country near the Swiss border. There she wrote poetry, kept bees, planted a garden,
watched the weather. Alberto paid the cost of a new roof for her house, and afterward executed a series of lithographs to illustrate a volume of her verse, entitled Apple Asleep, which never otherwise would have found a publisher.
The Chateau de Chassy brought out the best in Balthus. During his years there—less than ten, unfortunately—he reached the climax of his career and painted many of his finest works. He did numerous portraits of Frédérique, who obligingly remained adolescent till long after her twenty-first birthday. Of the ordinary little valley where the chateau stood, he painted a remarkable series of radiant visions. The public slowly began to realize that an artist of extraordinary powers was hidden away in that nondescript locality. People started buying. The Museum of Modern Art in New York put on a retrospective exhibition in 1956, though Balthus could not be bothered to leave his château in order to attend. Collectors and critics started coming to call. They were greeted by a butler in a white jacket with gold braid who said that the count was in his studio and could under no circumstances be disturbed. Fine furniture filled the rooms and Oriental carpets lay on the floors. Alberto and Annette returned once or twice, but grand airs were not made for Giacometti. In Paris, where he came occasionally, Balthus received his admirers and friends on the premises of an official in the government’s cultural ministry. Then he contrived to have his old crony André Malraux name him director of the French Academy at Rome, housed in the magnificent Villa Medici, one of the noblest landmarks of the Eternal City. Chassy was left behind. In Rome the craving for grandeur got more satisfaction than anybody could have hoped for. Princes and princesses, cardinals, ambassadors dined at the count’s table. The artist did not do so well, because the nobleman had little time for painting. He had himself become a creation commensurate with his ambition to carry on traditions of an erstwhile order. The pictures he produced were increasingly decorative, self-indulgent reminders of the achievements of a simpler time. Balthus had been the most talented of Alberto’s contemporaries and friends. Though never comparable in vision or purpose, yet amid the decline of the School of Paris they had both upheld valuable and profitable
aspects of tradition. Now Giacometti was left alone to do that. When Balthus went to Rome, he went out of Alberto’s life, and in time it seemed that he had lost his old power to create a convincing world for the obsessive inhabitants of his imagination.
Giacometti and Jean Genet had never met. Alberto preferred to see his friends separately, tête-à-tête, if possible. They recognized this preference and respected it. Olivier Larronde had been Genet’s lover before becoming Alberto’s friend, but he had never introduced the two. Sartre, the champion of Genet’s literature, had in 1952 brought out a 573-page treatise entitled St. Genet, Actor and Martyr. But neither had Sartre introduced Genet to Giacometti.
Born in Paris in 1910, Genet was abandoned by his mother at birth to the custody of a state institution. He received her name but never saw her. The identity of his father remained unknown. As a small child he was handed over to a peasant family in a mountainous region of central France. Industrious, pious, he led a life untroubled by any problem save the embarrassing obscurity of his birth until he was ten. Then catastrophe befell him. He was accused of stealing. Though claiming to be innocent, he was sent to an institution for delinquent boys. In the French provinces in the twenties, reform schools were prisons. Punishment was the rule. Love came into the boys’ lives by the furtive or brutal exactions of homosexuality. After six years of this regime, Genet experienced a kind of infernal epiphany. Trapped in the ignominy of his life, he determined to defy it by making it the touchstone of his freedom. Accused of theft, cast among thieves, he would become a thief and make theft a moral imperative. Confirmed in homosexuality by all-male confinement, he would exalt the love of men for one another.
Released from reform school well-studied in lessons of debasement, he drifted for fifteen years through the underworld of pre-war Europe, in and out of prison, living by petty thievery and looking for love in the arms of lonely sailors, fellow crooks, and drifters on the tide of the underworld. It was in the world of the dead that Genet began his life as an artist. In 1939, in the
prison at Saint-Brieuc, a drab industrial town on the north coast of Brittany, he was present when a young assassin aged twenty was taken to the guillotine. None of the millions of deaths so soon to come could ever compare for the poet in terror and pity with that rite in the prison courtyard. Three years later, in another prison, he composed his first literary work, a long poem entitled “The One Condemned to Death,” celebrating the memory of the decapitated youth.
Nothing on earth could have seemed less likely than the transformation of a semi-literate delinquent into a master of language. Lest it be the crucial knowledge that led from prison to poetry. A tragic recognition of life’s impermanence and frailty is the central theme of Genet’s writing. His characters are denizens of the underworld, criminals and traitors, pimps, prostitutes, and perverts, pariahs of contemporary society. The underworld of Genet is as real as the symbolic world above. His writings are addressed as much to the dead as to the living, and he once said that he could conceive of no authentic art that did not express the relation to death.
One day Giacometti came back in a state of considerable excitement to the rue Hippolyte-Maindron. He had seen Jean Genet in a café and been so impressed by his appearance that he was eager to do his portrait. It is not surprising. Genet had gone bald early. Alberto was especially attracted to bald heads, because absence of hair shows the structure of the skull. In Genet’s case it was fine, giving the face a density which concentrated to great effect his tough but gentle gaze. Alberto was an admirer of the writer’s work, and soon arranged to meet him. They proved immediately congenial. Genet agreed to pose. It was not unusual for a kind of romantic intimacy to develop between Alberto and his models, men as well as women, and perhaps with the men more easily if they were prone to love other men. Between Giacometti and Genet the bond quickly grew strong.
Alberto painted two portraits of Genet and made a number of drawings, all of them powerful representations of the confrontation between two extraordinary personalities. Genet at the same time composed a portrait of the portraitist, which he later published,
entitled The Studio of Alberto Giacometti. Intuitive and impressionistic, Genet’s description of Giacometti is of a very different order from the brilliant intellectual postulations of their mutual friend Sartre. The latter is all thought, the former mostly feeling. But the feeling is very thoughtfully expressed, its significance searching and profound. Genet’s text is one of those rare instances in art where the nature of one man’s creativity has successfully become the material of another’s creation. Much was written about Giacometti during his lifetime, but no other text meant more to him than the little book of forty-five small pages by Jean Genet. Picasso, never at a loss where intuition was called for, said that Genet’s book was the best one about an artist that he had ever read. A few quotations selected at random, though to some purpose, will suggest why:
Every work of art, if it is to attain the grandest of dimensions, must with infinite patience, infinite application from the first moments of its development descend throughout the millennia to rejoin if it can the immemorial night peopled by the dead who are to see themselves in that work.
His sculptures give me the feeling that they seek refuge at the last in some secret infirmity which acknowledges their solitude.
Confronted by his sculptures, still another feeling: they are all very beautiful people, yet it seems to me that their sadness and their loneliness are comparable to the sadness and the loneliness of a deformed man suddenly stripped naked, who would see revealed a deformity which at the same time he would offer to the world as evidence of his solitude and his glory.
As for the time being his sculptures are very tall—in brown clay—he stands before them, his fingers rise and fall like those of a gardener grafting or trimming a climbing rose. The fingers play along the length of the sculpture. And the whole studio moves and lives. I have this curious feeling that by his presence the previous sculptures, already completed, change and are transformed without his touching them because he is working at one of their sisters. This studio, moreover, on the ground floor is going to collapse at any moment. It is made of worm-eaten wood, of gray powder, the sculptures are of plaster, showing bits of string, stuffing, or ends of wire, the
canvases, painted gray, have long ago lost the repose of the art supplier’s shop, everything is stained and ready for the dust-j bin, all is precarious, on the verge of disintegration, everything tends to decay and is adrift: well, all of this is possessed as if by an absolute reality. When I have gone away from the studio, when I am outside in the street, then nothing round about me seems real. Shall I say it? In that studio a man is slowly dying, consuming himself, and before our eyes he has by his own hand been made into goddesses.
Giacometti is not working for his contemporaries, nor for the future generations: he is creating statues tat last delight the dead.
The understanding between Genet and Giacometti was so deep that the writer’s grasp of the artist’s purpose had no need of an intellectual structure to support it. The friendship was so close that for a time one of their favorite amusements while sitting in cafés was for the heterosexual to select among the young male passersby those the homosexual found desirable. The choice never failed to be accurate.
The writer decided after a time that he had had enough of posing. He felt that he was being transformed into an object. Alberto said that he found Genet’s attitude very literary, which may suggest that he did not want to understand his friend’s reasons. To say that they were literary was to say that for Genet they were vital.
There was no overt break or misunderstanding. The friendship went untended. Maybe after the years of bitter vagabondage and imprisonment, Genet was not capable of the kind of attachment that took for granted any social underpinning. He believed that betrayal was akin to death in the absolutism of its beauty, and such a credo does not make friendship easy. Alberto lived closer than Genet to a conventional social structure, though never within it. Genet was deeply attached only to the world that had made him what he was, and to the creatures who dwelt there. It was not a realm of easy access. As yet, Giacometti had had no need to suppose that the underworld and the netherworld might be the same place or that their inhabitants might be the same. The supposition would come to him when it had to. Perhaps his
friendship with Genet was good preparation against the need of that hour.
In the early morning of November 1, 1954, All Saints’ Day, armed attacks against local constabulary and settlers broke out in the wild mountains of central Algeria. They marked the start of the Algerian War. Nobody living in France during this period was able to remain unconcerned by the national crisis of conscience. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were among the fiercest critics of national policy. As usual, they did not mince words. “Colonialism is in the process of destroying itself,” Sartre wrote. “Our role is to help it die.”
Giacometti kept his opinions to himself. But they were no less forceful for being private. He knew that his sphere of responsible action was his studio, and that his contribution to the discourse of the era should be made by seeing, not speaking. There were moments when he wearied of the intellectual hairsplitting of friends like Leiris, Sartre, and the Beaver, whose sympathy and understanding were basically theoretical. “What concerns me is to go forward,” he said.
He went forward alone. Sometimes there is a kind of panic in the isolation of genius. Alberto needed no one to talk to about the metaphysical facts of life. For the rest, he was content to laugh with Olivier Larronde and Jean-Pierre Lacloche, whose exotic way of living much intrigued Annette, or to chat about the weather with the bartender at the corner cafe.
One day an old woman of the neighborhood came in and stood at the bar. Noticing Alberto, she said, “Who’s that poor bum? I’ll buy him a cup of coffee.” The bartender told her that this was a well-known artist, no bum, and quite able to pay for his own coffee. The woman was unconvinced. “Hey, you poor old thing,” she called, “you’d be glad to have a cup of coffee, wouldn’t you?” Alberto replied that he would, yes, be very glad and thanked her warmly. She, at least, had seen him for what he was.
The artist’s daily life had now grown into a routine that it would follow till the end. At one or two o’clock in the afternoon,
having slept six or seven hours, he would get out of bed, usually still tired from the work of the previous night. After washing, shaving, and dressing, he would walk to the cafe at the corner of the rue d’Alésia and the rue Didot, five minutes away, drink several cups of coffee, and smoke six or eight cigarettes. Consumption of cigarettes constantly increased as he grew older, and so did the cough that went with them. After breakfast he would go back to his studio to work till six or seven, when he returned again to the cafe for a couple of hard-boiled eggs, a slice of cold ham with bread, a couple of glasses of wine, several more cups of coffee, and a lot of cigarettes. If alone, he would read a paper or review, often making drawings and notes in the margins. If with Annette or friends, he would talk, joke, and lament his inability to draw, paint, or sculpt as he wanted to. Returning again to the studio, he would work until midnight or later, then try to clean himself up a bit and take a taxi to Montparnasse. There, usually at the Coupole and often alone, he would eat a decent meal, afterward going to one of the nearby bars or nightclubs, more often than not Chez Adrien, where he found faces familiar enough to while away an hour or two. The girls knew that he could be counted on for a few drinks and a bit of lecherous banter that need not lead to anything. They even knew that he was good for the occasional loan against a day that was sure to be rainy. Well before dawn, he would take a taxi back to the rue Hippolyte-Maindron—all the taxi drivers of the vicinity knew him and many called him by his first name—and there he would work until daylight.