The Recognitions Page 11

  Over this grandstand disposal of promise the waiters stared with a distance of glazed indulgence which all collected under it admired, as they admired the rudeness, which they called self-respect; the contempt, which they called innate dignity; the avarice, which they called self-reliance; the tasteless ill-made clothes on the men, lauded as indifference, and the far-spaced posturings of haute couture across the Seine, called inimitable or shik according to one’s stay. Marvelous to wide eyes, pricked ears, and minds of that erectile quality betraying naive qualms of transatlantic origin (alert here under hair imitative long-grown, uncombed, on the male, curtly shorn on the girls) was this spectacle of culture fully realized. They regarded as the height of excellence that nothing remained to be done, no tree to be planted nor building torn down (they had not visited Le Bourget; found the wreckage up behind the Hôtel de Ville picturesque), no tree too low nor building too high (those telescoping lampposts on the Pont du Carrousel), no bud of possibility which had not opened in the permanent bloom of artificial flowers, no room for that growth which is the abiding flower of humility.

  “A mon très aimé frère Lazarus, ce que vous me mandez de Petrus l’apostre de notre doux Jesus . . . ,” wrote Mary Magdalen. “Notre fils Césarion va bien . . . ,” wrote Cleopatra to Julius Caesar. There was a letter from Alexander the Great to Aristotle (“Mon ami . . .”); from Lazarus to Saint Peter (concerning Druids); from Pontius Pilate to Tiberius; Judas’s confession (to Mary Magdalen); a passport signed by Vercingetorix; notes from Alcibiades, Pericles, and a letter to Pascal (on gravitation) from Newton, who was nineteen when Pascal died. But M. Chasles, eminent mathematician of the late nineteenth century, paid 140,000 francs for this collection of autographs, for he believed them genuine: they were, after all, written in French. So the Virgin appeared to Maximin and Mélanie at La Salette, identified Herself by speaking to them in French which they did not understand, broke into their local patois for long enough to put across Her confidences, and then returned to Her native language for farewell: any wonder that transatlantic visitors approached it with qualms? murmured in tones spawned in forests, on the plains in unrestricted liberty, from the immensity of mountains, the cramped measure of their respect, approached in reverence the bier where every shade of the corpse was protected from living profanation by the pallbearers of the Académie Française.

  Before their displacement from nature, baffled by the grandeur of their own culture which they could not define, and so believed did not exist, these transatlantic visitors had learned to admire in this neatly parceled definition of civilization the tyrannous pretension of many founded upon the rebellious efforts of a few, the ostentation of thousands presumed upon the strength of a dozen who had from time to time risen against this vain complacence with the past to which they were soon to contribute, giving, with their harried deaths, grounds for vanity of language, which they had perfected; supercilious posturing of intellect, which they had suffered to understand and deliver, in defiance; insolent arbitration of taste, grown from the efforts of those condemned as having none; contempt for others flourishing from seedlings which they had planted in the rain of contempt for themselves; dogmata of excellence founded upon insulting challenges wrought in impossible hope, and then grasped, for granted, from their hands fallen clenching it as dogma.

  From the intractable perfection of the crepusculous Île de la Cité (seen from the Pont des Arts) to the static depravity of the Grands Boulevards, it was unimpeachable: in superficiating. this perfection, it absorbed the beholder and shut out the creator: no more could it have imitation than a mermaid (though echoes were heard of the Siren of Djibouti).

  —Voici votre Perrier m’sieur. —Mais j’ai dit café au lait, pas d’eau Perrier . . . A small man in a sharkskin suit said, —Son putas, y nada mas. Putas, putas, putas . . . Someone said, —Picasso . . . Someone else said, —Kafka . . . A girl said, —You deliberately try to misunderstand me. Of course I like art. Ask anybody. Nearby, a young man with a beard received compliments on his recent show. It was a group of landscapes in magenta and madder lake. Très amusant, gai, très très original (he was French). It was quite a rage. He said he had walked four kilometers out of Saint Germain en Laye, found he’d forgotten all of his colors but magenta and madder lake, so he went ahead and painted anyhow. He said, —Quelquefois je passe la nuit entière à finir un tableau . . . Someone said that there was a town in Switzerland called Gland. Someone told the joke about Carruthers and his horse.

  On the right bank, a lady said, —You’ll like Venice. It’s so like Fort Lauderdale. At the same table, a man said, —I’m going to look her up. She’s lived here for years, right outside Paris, a place called Banlieu. At another table someone said, —By God, you know, they’re almost as rude to us as they are to each other.

  On Montmartre, someone looked up at the Sacré Coeur and said, —What the hell do you think they call that? The woman with him said, —Why bother to go all the way to the top, I haven’t got my camera. A girl said, —Voulez vous voir le ciné cochon? Deux femmes . . .

  Above, the thing itself towered exotic and uninvited, affording the consolation of the grotesque: that dead white Byzantine-Romanesque surprise which was heaped in bulbiferous pyramids atop the Hill of the Martyrs in the late nineteenth century, soon after the city had finished installing a comprehensive new sewage system. It was a monument (the church) not, as many had it, to the French victory over Prussia, but to the Jesuit victory over France. The birth of Ignatius of Loyola was early understood to have erred only in its location: Spain was origin, but none has ever excelled France in vocational guidance for the ideas of others, and it was obvious (in France) that his Society of Jesus could be best advanced through the medium of the French mind. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Society was having difficulty with the Jansenists, and the contributions of Pascal upset them almost as much as did the Miracle of the Holy Thorn, a relic which cured little Marguerite Périer of fistula lachrymalis: it was a Jansenist miracle. The Society recouped: found its own Marguerite and, with the kindly instruction and encouragement of Père La Colombière, her confessor, she revealed to the world a parade of the marvelous which shocked even those who were compelled to believe, an account which made a cure of fistula lachrymalis, never a pretty thought, pale into organic commonplace. The searing narrative of Marguerite Marie Alacoque passed from hand to hand for some two centuries until at last, in 1864, Pope Pius IX was assailed with a petition asking highest recognition for the Sacred Heart (the afflicted organ). In fact the petition itself participated in the miraculous, bearing as it did twelve million signatures forth from a country whose district records showed three-fourths of its brides and grooms unable to write their names. A bare decade after the beatification, papal decree consecrated the Universal Catholic Church to the Sacred Heart, and the Society has since defended its successful exploit against all comers with the same dexterous swashbuckling that was shown in its achievement: against the Virgin of La Salette, against promoters of the Devotion of the Perpetual Rosary, even against the prodigal (85 liters per minute) Virgin of Lourdes, whose bottled testimonials were soon flowing broadcast when proved not liable to the excise levies and export taxes of the Republic. Amid a crowd equaling the population of Afghanistan, the Sacré Coeur launched its church on the crown of that hill Saint Denis had once approached carrying his head under his arm. The new “public utility,” so it was called, was dedicated by Cardinal Archbishop Guibert, disdaining insular mutterings which insinuated that the Society had plagiarized the Sacred Heart from England’s leading philosophe, William Godwin, who thought of it first. And eventually, the Devotions within the favored land made truce: after all, as Monseigneur Ségur said, the Virgin shows very good taste in choosing France as the theater for her apparitions.

  Near the Bourse, a lady said, —Des touristes, oui, mais des sales anglais, . . . là, regardez ce type là . . . She indicated a figure across the street, not a dirty Englishman, as she noted, but Wyatt, who live
d nearby. With no idea of Paris when he arrived, he had been fortunate enough to find quarters in this neighborhood which maintained anonymity in the world of arts. Few people lived here. Activity centered around the stock exchange. On Sunday it was empty.

  He knew few people, and them he saw infrequently. In three years, he had not written his father; and after a year in Paris he had finished seven pictures, working with a girl named Christiane, a blond model with small figure and features. As she exposed the side of her face, or a fall of cloth from her shoulder, he found there suggestion of the lines he needed, forms which he knew but could not discover in the work without this allusion to completed reality before him. He had by now little money, and so in addition to his own work he did some restoring of old paintings for an antique dealer who paid him regularly and badly. He did not spend time at café tables talking about form, or line, color, composition, trends, materials: he worked on this painting, or did not think about it. He knew no more of surréalisme than he did of the plethora of daubs turned out on Montmartre for tourists, those arbiters of illustration to whom painting was a personalized representation of scenes and creatures they held dear; might not know art but they knew what they liked, hand-painted pictures (originals) for which they paid in the only currency they understood, to painters whose visions had shrunk to the same proportions. He might walk up there occasionally and see them, the alleys infested with them painting the same picture from different angles, the same painting varying from easel to easel as different versions of a misunderstood truth, but the progeny of each single easel identical reproduction, following a precept of Henner who called this the only way of being original. Passing, he showed all the interest for them he might have for men whitewashing walls.

  Still, a dull day in the fall, a day which had lost track of the sun and the importunate rendition of minutes and hours the sun dictates, and that configuration on Montmartre stood out in preternatural whiteness, the ceremonial specter of a peak, an abrupt Alp in the wrong direction. Walking home alone, the cold bearing in a dread weight of anxiety, the sense of something lost, passing people closely he passed them with wonder as though he’d seen no one in years, looking into every face as though hoping to recognize something there. Could the cold differentiate? aside from the change in clothing where the trees and the people reciprocate, the people suddenly came out muffled, and what trees there were stood forth in the mottled dishabille of discolored leaves. But even the streets, and the lights showing along the streets looked different, recalling nakedness in angular displeasure, summoning the fabled argument between the sun and the wind, distending the brief Rue Vivienne into the crowded desolation of Maximilianstrasse, the secure anonymity of childhood recalled by the fall of the year, and a Munich which had known spring and summer only in the irretrievable childhood of the Middle Ages, that hence, forward, there was no direction but down, no color but one darker, no sky but one more empty, no ground but that harder, no air but the cold. —Bitte? . . . Propriety faded, the level decorum of French roofs might break into the fibrous fakery of Italian and French rococo, an occasional tumor of nineteenth-century Renaissance sparked by the Byzantine eye behind the Allerheiligen-Hofkirche’s Romanesque façade. As lonely, or more lonely (so they say one is in a crowd), the buildings in Munich’s modern town stood away from each other in their differences, made up to extremes like guests at a Venetian masquerade, self-conscious perpetrations of assertive adolescence, well-traveled, almost wealthy, déracinés, they had gathered as transcripts of their seducers who were not known in this land, and stood now stricken in erect silence up and down the aisles of the avenues, surprised that those they had known in conglomerate childhood had also traveled, had also been seduced, and that, in this shocked instant, by lovers more beautiful than their own. Like paralyzed barbs of lightning, hooked crosses in the streets had portended holocaust; while alone indigenous, hermaphrodite host and doubly barren, the Frauenkirche disembosomed impartial welcome from twin and towering domes at which the others railed but could not supplant. Empty pavilions colonnaded on a hill across the river witnessed the afternoon pleasure of a child who had been called away, and left this glittering plaything for the wind to tear.

  Now, he painted at night. In the afternoon he worked at restoring old pictures, or in sketching, a half-attended occupation which broke off with twilight, and Christiane went on her way uncurious, uninterested in the litter of papers bearing suggestion of the order of her bones and those arrangements of her features which she left behind, unmenaced by magic, unafraid, she walked toward the Gare Saint-Lazare, unhurried, seldom reached it (for it was no destination) before she was interrupted, and down again, spread again, indifferent to the resurrection which filled her and died; and the Gare Saint-Lazare, a railway station and so a beginning and an end, came forth on the evening vision, erect in testimony, and then (for what became of the man who was raised?) stood witness to a future which, like the past, was liable to no destination, and collected dirt in its fenestrated sores.

  He painted at night, and often broke off in a fever at dawn, when the sun came like the light of recovery to the patient just past the crisis of fatal illness, and time the patient became lax, and stretched fingers of minutes and cold limbs of hours into the convalescent resurrection of the day.

  The streets, when he came out, were filled with people recently washed and dressed, people for whom time was not continuum of disease but relentless repetition of consciousness and unconsciousness, unrelated as day and night, or black and white, evil and good, in independent alternation, like the life and death of insects.

  This can happen: staying awake, the absolutes become confused, time the patient seen at full living length, in exhaustion. One afternoon he went to sleep, woke alone at twilight, believed he had slept the night through, lost it, here was dawn. He went out for coffee. The streets were full, but unevenly. There was a pall on every face, a gathering of remnants in suspicion of the end, a melancholia of things completed. Wyatt, haggard as he was, looked with such wild uncomprehending eyes on a day beginning so, that he attracted the attention of a policeman who stopped him.

  —Où allez-vous donc? —Chez moi. —Vos papiers s’il vous plaît. —Mon passeport? Je ne l’ai sur moi, c’est chez moi. —Où habitez vous? —Vingt-quatre rue de la Bourse. —Qu’est-ce que vous faites? —Je suis peintre. —Où donc? —Chez moi. —Où habitez vous? —Mais . . . —Avez vous des moyens? —Oui . . . Wyatt reached into his pocket, took out what francs he had, showed the money. —Alors, said the policeman, —il faut toujours en avoir sur soi, de l’argent, vous savez . . .

  After a glass of coffee he climbed the stairs to his room. Someone was waiting in the dim light of the hall. As Wyatt approached the figure turned, put out a hand and murmured a greeting. —My name is Crémer, he said. —I met you last week, in the Muette Gallery. May I come in for a moment? He spoke precise English. Wyatt opened the door to his room, ordered and large, blank walls, a spacious north window. —You will be showing some of your pictures next week, I believe?

  —Seven pictures, Wyatt said, making no effort to expose them.

  —I am interested in your work.

  —Oh, you’ve . . . seen it?

  —No, no, hardly. But I see here (motioning toward the straight easel, where a canvas stood barely figured)—that it is interesting. I am writing the art column in La Macule. Crémer’s cigarette, which he had not taken from his lips since he appeared, had gone out at about the length of a thumbnail. He looked rested, assured, hardly a likely visitor at dawn. —I shall probably review your pictures next week, he added after a pause which had left Wyatt smoothing the hair on the back of his head, his face confused.

  —Oh, then, . . . of course, you want to look at them now?

  —Don’t trouble yourself, Crémer said, walking off toward the window. —You are studying in Paris?

  —No. I did in Munich.

  —In Germany. That is too bad. Your style is German, then? German impressionism?
>
  —No, no, not . . . quite different. Not so . . .

  —Modern? German impressionism, modern?

  —No, I mean, the style of the early Flemish . . .

  —Van Eyck . . .

  —But less . . .

  —Less stern? Yes. Roger de la Pasture, perhaps?

  —What?

  —Van der Weyden, if you prefer. Crémer shrugged. He was standing with his back to the window. —In Germany . . .

  —I did one picture in the manner of Memling, very much the manner of Memling. The teacher, the man I studied with, Herr Koppel, Herr Koppel compared it to David, Gheerardt David’s painting The Flaying of the Unjust Judge.

  —Memlinc, alors . . .

  —But I lost it there, but . . . do you want to look at the work I’ve done here?

  —Don’t trouble. But I should like to write a good review for you.

  —I hope you do. It could help me a great deal.

  —Yes. Exactly.

  They stood in silence for almost a minute. —Will you sit down? Wyatt asked finally.

  Crémer showed no sign of hearing him but a slight shrug. He half turned to the window and looked out. —You live in a very . . . clandestine neighborhood, for a painter? he murmured agreeably. In the darkening room the cigarette gone out looked like a sore on his lip.

  —The anonymous atmosphere . . . Wyatt commenced.

  —But of course, Crémer interrupted. There was a book on the floor at his feet, and he moved it with the broad toe of one shoe. —We recall Degas, eh? he went on in the same detached tone of pleasantry, —his remark, that the artist must approach his work in the same frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed. Eh? Yes . . . He approached Wyatt slightly hunched, his hands down in his pockets. —The reviews can make a great difference. He smiled. —All the difference.