by Lydia Davis
According to Deirdre Bair’s biography of Samuel Beckett, he saw Joan Mitchell, at least on first acquaintance, as a younger version of his close friend Bram van Velde. To him she expressed the same relentless quest for the void that he found in the older man’s painting. Her manner of speaking was economical, and just as Beckett was unable and unwilling to discuss his writings, she refused to explain or justify her art. She was also, like him, a prodigious drinker. And for a time, according to Klaus Kertess’s study, Joan Mitchell, the two were close friends.
In Kertess’s opinion, however, what Mitchell was seeking was not “the void,” but a reconciliation or perhaps comprehension, in the full sense of the word, of the various dualities or paradoxes in her life: joy and rage, vastness and containment, chaos and order, the furious intimacy of her closest personal relationships and the happiness of her relationship to nature; her place, within her chosen French landscape, in an American tradition “of a somber, nature-bound aloneness”; the urban versus the natural elements in her landscapes; her resilience in the face of severe physical disability and her “inordinate fear of death”; the intense physical invitations of her canvases and her gestures of brutal, self-protective rejection in personal encounters, even with relative strangers—what Kertess calls “preemptive strikes.” Perhaps the prevailing paradox of her work, however, was the fact that although she sought, even to the end, to go beyond the limits of what she had already done as an artist, she remained, during the forty-odd years of her painting life, resolutely within her self-imposed limits as an abstract expressionist painter. With close focus, with single-minded concentration, through periods in which abstract expressionism fell out of favor, through periods when, as Kertess says, “the hand was being withdrawn from action,” Mitchell “continued on her chosen path.”
The question of why one artist will evolve and change within relatively narrow limits while another will move from one expressive form to another is just one of many Kertess raises: paired nouns juxtapose themselves and demand consideration or reconsideration as they figure in Mitchell’s work—order and disorder, mess and clarity; dark paint in a rosy canvas; dark paint and dark mood, black as a joyous color, white as a dark color. And another question that comes up when we look at Mitchell’s life and work: Why, indeed, do some artists and writers need to leave their native lands in order to paint the childhood landscape or write about it (Beckett, Joyce) while others do not (William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Mitchell’s close friend Frank O’Hara)? “I carry my landscape around with me” was something Mitchell said more than once, though not, of course, as any sort of explanation.
* * *
I am not even certain that Mitchell’s Les Bluets (The Cornflowers) was the actual painting I saw on that particular day, but I’m going to say it was. What I saw was a very large white-and-blue painting by Joan Mitchell in her studio more than forty-five years ago, and that is the one I am thinking of.
To get closer to the actual experience of seeing the painting, I first confirm or revise some of my memories of visiting her where she lived at Vétheuil, of her strong personality (I witnessed some of the “preemptive strikes” that Kertess mentions, but witnessed also her generosity and warm welcome), of my life in Paris. Then I remember more, more than I need to, about where I was living, and how I worked at my writing, pushing myself relentlessly to do better and more, with moments of pleasure but often a hounding sense of obligation, a fear that if I did not work terribly hard something would catch up with me—perhaps the possibility that I did not need to be doing this.
I would take the train out of the city, with its closed spaces, its darkness, to the village of Vétheuil, sixty-nine kilometers to the north. A blue gate at street level opened to a climb on foot to the house, to a terrace before the front door. The view from the hilltop, if I turned back before going in, was of a landscape managed and orderly: poplars by the winding river, and a village on the far bank. The grounds, the rooms in the house, and the mealtimes were also orderly, though I did not give much thought, then, to the value of order. Monet had once lived here, though at the base of the hill, in what was now the cook’s and gardener’s cottage. His first wife, Camille, was buried in a cemetery beyond the garden. (Mitchell’s early influences had included Matisse and Van Gogh, but not, she said, Monet.)
On one visit I walked out to Joan Mitchell’s studio to look at a painting. I don’t know if this was the first time I had gone into her studio. I liked the painting very much, in my naive way, and thought there was no problem with the way I looked at it. It was what it was, shapes and colors, white and blue. Then I was told by Joan or someone else that it referred to the landscape here in Vétheuil, specifically to the cornflowers. Whatever I had known or not known about painting before, this was a surprise to me, even a shock. Apparently I had not known before that an abstract painting could contain references to concrete, objective, identifiable subject matter. Two things happened at once: the painting abruptly went beyond itself, lost its isolation, acquired a relationship to fields, to flowers; and it changed from something I understood into something I did not understand, a mystery, a problem.
Later I could try to figure it out: there had to be visual clues in the picture. Were all, or only some, of the elements in it clues? If the lighter, scattered, or broken areas of blue referred to cornflowers, what did the blocks of darker blue refer to, and the opulent white? (Kertess discusses how that color in Mitchell’s paintings functioned in different ways at different times, ranging from “interactive,” to atmospheric, to nurturing, to “perilous,” “deathly,” “smothering,” and finally to “haunting.”) Or were all the elements clues but some of them to private, unknowable subjects? Was this a representation of an emotional response to cornflowers, or to a memory of cornflowers?
I like to understand things and tend to ask questions of myself or another person until there is nothing left that I do not understand. At the time, in the midst of a period when I was training myself so hard in another kind of representation and seeing more and more clearly into the subtler workings of my language, I was confronted with this experience of opacity.
I had had other striking experiences of incomprehension, of opacity, the most extended being the first weeks I spent, at age seven, in an Austrian classroom listening to the German language before I began to understand it. Years later, when translating the French texts of Maurice Blanchot into English, I struggled so hard with the meaning of certain complex sentences that I was sure I felt this struggle physiologically inside my brain—the little currents of electricity sparked, traveled, leaped forward against the problem, fell back, leaped again from a different side, failed. But the experience of incomprehension in front of Joan Mitchell’s painting caught me unprepared, in its novel form—no words, but three panels of blue and white.
Eventually I began to find answers to my questions, but they were not complete answers, and after a time I did not feel the need for complete answers, because I saw that part of the force of the painting was that it continued to elude explanation. I became willing to allow aspects of the painting to remain mysterious, and I became willing to allow aspects of other problems to remain unsolved as well, and it was this new tolerance for, and then satisfaction in, the unexplained and unsolved that marked a change in me.
Even now, just by remaining so mysteriously fixed in my memory, the painting poses a question that, once again, remains even after I have attempted to answer it, and that is not How does the painting work? but How does the memory of the painting work?
1996, 1997, 2017
WRITERS
John Ashbery’s Translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations
Some associations with the name Rimbaud are familiar: the highly romantic photograph of the seventeen-year-old French poet taken a few months after he first settled in Paris, already the resolutely bohemian artist, with his pale eyes, distant gaze, thatch of hair, carelessly rumpled clothes; the startling, much-interpreted declaration Je est un au
tre (“I is another” or “I is someone else”); the fact that he produced a masterly, innovative, and influential body of work while still in his teens; that he stopped writing around age twenty-one and never went back to it; that he engaged thereafter in various, sometimes mysterious commercial and mystical enterprises in far-flung locations, including a period of gunrunning in Africa and, perhaps even stranger, an attempt to enlist in the U.S. Navy. He died of cancer in a Marseilles hospital, still young, having in effect compressed what for others would have been a long lifetime of artistic revolution and exotic adventure into just thirty-seven years.
A deepened and more detailed familiarity with the legend does not disappoint: he is one of those exceptional individuals whose very existence is hard to account for, whose development was meteoric, and whose accomplishments continue to dazzle.
Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 in Charleville, a town in the northeast of France close to the Belgian border, to a sour-tempered, repressively pious mother and a mostly absent army-officer father who disappeared for good when Rimbaud was six. He excelled in school, reading voraciously and retentively, and regularly carried off most of his grade’s year-end prizes in every subject. Early poems were written not just in French but sometimes in Latin and Greek and included a fanciful rendering of a math assignment and a sixty-line ode dedicated (and sent) to the young son of Napoleon III.
At the age of just fifteen, Rimbaud had announced in a letter that he intended to create an entirely new kind of poetry, written in an entirely new language, through a “rational derangement of all the senses,” and when, not yet seventeen, he made his first successful escape to Paris, funded by the older poet Paul Verlaine, he came prepared to change the world, or at least literature. He was immediately a colorful figure: the filthy, lice-infested, intermittently bewitching young rebel with notably large hands and feet, whose mission required scandalizing the conventional-minded and defying moral codes not only through his verse but also through his rude, self-destructive, and anarchical behavior; the brilliantly skillful and versatile poet not only of the occasional sentimental subject (orphans receiving gifts on New Year’s Day) but also of lovely scatological verse; the child-faced innovator whose literary development evolved from poem to poem at lightning speed. (This determined young roué would no doubt be horrified to learn that in his hometown there is now a Rimbaud Museum, housed in an old water mill.)
In Paris, he became close friends and soon lovers—openly gay behavior being very much a part of his project of self-exploration and defiance of society—with Verlaine, whose own poetry Rimbaud had already admired from a distance. He appreciated, among its other qualities, its transgression of traditional formal constraints, such as, shockingly, bridging the caesura in the alexandrine line. Their stormy relationship, which extended into Belgium and England and lasted a surprising length of time, was richly productive literarily on both sides.
It is therefore no surprise that Rimbaud has been the perfect subject, for 150 years now, of sanctification, vilification, multiple rival exegeses, obfuscation, memoirs that rely on often faulty recollection—all of which has generated, of course, many times the few hundred pages left by the poet himself in the form of letters, juvenilia, more than eighty individual poems, including the hundred-line “The Drunken Boat,” written when he was still sixteen, and the nine-section confessional and self-condemnatory prose sequence A Season in Hell, besides what was close to his last work, the sequence of mostly prose poems called Illuminations.
If the dating of all the poems in this last work cannot be verified precisely, neither can their proper order or the circumstances leading to their publication. We are told by the rather unreliable Verlaine that in 1875, upon the latter’s release from prison—he had shot Rimbaud in the arm in a Brussels hotel room—the younger poet handed him a pile of loose pages and asked him to find a publisher for them. After passing through several hands, the sequence appeared in the magazine La Vogue ten years later, in 1886, having been prepared for publication by Félix Fénéon (journalist, publisher, and author of the bizarre collection of police-blotter-generated newspaper fillers published as Novels in Three Lines by New York Review Books in 2007, in a translation by Luc Sante).
When asked many years later, Fénéon could not remember whether the order was his own or whether he had preserved the order in which he received them—though since he did not receive them directly from Rimbaud, that order was not necessarily the author’s. The work was greeted at the time with some laudatory reviews, though not many copies were bought.
Formally, Illuminations—the title may refer to engraved illustrations, to epiphanies or flashes of insight, or to the productions of the poet-seer who has transformed himself into pure light—consists of forty-three poems ranging from a few lines to works of several sections covering two or three pages; some are in large blocks of justified type, some in paragraphs so brief they are virtually two-line stanzas on the page. (In one instance, a single comma, placed at the end of the paragraph, magically turns it into a strophe.) Only three poems have broken lines.
Despite the uncertainty of its dates of composition, Illuminations is quite clearly a work written after Rimbaud’s most defiant and scurrilous phase had passed. It does not contain the explicit playful or lyrical obscenity of earlier times; rather, it has a subtler incandescent or ecstatic range of congruous and incongruous, urban and pastoral imagery, and historical and mythological reference often grounded in near-recognizable autobiographical narrative. A wealth of images—mineral, industrial, theatrical, royal, natural, and of childhood days—develops by leaps of immediate personal association rather than by sequential or narrative logic, employing the techniques of surrealism decades before it existed as a movement. The poems shift in tone and register from the matter-of-fact to the highly rhetorical (“O world!”), the statements from the simple (“the hand of the countryside on my shoulder”) to the more abstruse (“He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer”), while always departing from and returning to a concrete, sensory world. The more narrative poems—faux reminiscences, exhortations, modern fairy tales—are punctuated by verse consisting almost solely of exclamatory lists of sentence fragments, what sound like celebrations of repeated amazement, contributing to create what John Ashbery, in his brief but enlightening preface to the translation, calls “the crystalline jumble of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, like a disordered collection of magic lantern slides, each an ‘intense and rapid dream,’ in his words.”
Ashbery has said that he first read Rimbaud when he was sixteen, and that he took to heart the young poet’s declaration that “you must be absolutely modern”—absolute modernity being, as Ashbery describes it in his preface, “the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second.” When Rimbaud’s mother asked of A Season in Hell, “What does it mean?”—a question that is still asked of his poetry, and is regularly asked of Ashbery’s, too—Rimbaud would not give more of an answer than “It means what it says, literally and in every sense.”
If Rimbaud anticipated the surrealists by decades, Ashbery is said to have gone beyond them and defied even their rules and logic. Yet, though more than 150 years have intervened since Rimbaud’s first declaration of independence, many readers in our own age, too, still prefer a coherence of imagery, a sameness of tone, a readable sequential message, even, ultimately, what amounts to a prose narrative broken into lines. Enough others, however, find the “crystalline jumble” intellectually and emotionally revitalizing and say, Yes, please do interrupt the reverie you have created for us to allow an intrusion of Popeye!
Besides his early absorption of Rimbaud’s work, John Ashbery brings to this translation a long and deep familiarity with French life, language, culture (particularly artistic and literary culture), and the experience of having translated many other French works over the years—by Pierre Reverdy, Raymond Roussel, Max Jacob, Pierre Martory (as
well as at least one detective novel under the re-assorted nom de plume Jonas Berry). These translations are part of a larger body of work of Ashbery’s that has served to offer us—his largely monolingual Anglophone readership—access to poets of another culture, either foreign or earlier in time. (Notable, for instance, is his keenly investigatory, instructive, and engrossing Other Traditions, the six Norton Lectures that open our eyes to the work of John Clare, Laura Riding, and others.)
In his meticulously faithful yet nimbly inventive translation, Ashbery’s approach has been to stay close to the original, following the line of the sentence, retaining the order of ideas and images, reproducing even eccentric or inconsistent punctuation. He shifts away from the closest translation only where necessary, and there is plenty of room within this close adherence for vibrant and less obvious English word choices. One of the pleasures of the translation, for instance, is the concise, mildly archaic Anglo-Saxon vocabulary that he occasionally deploys—“hued” for teinte and “clad” for revêtus, “chattels” for possessions—or a more particular or flavorful English for a more general or blander French: “posh” for riches, “hum of summer” for rumeurs de l’été, “trembling” for mouvante.
Even a simple problem reveals his practiced ease with handling English. In one section of “Childhood,” there occurs the following portrayal of would-be tranquility: “I rest my elbows on the table, the lamp lights up these newspapers that I’m a fool for rereading, these books of no interest.” The two words sans intérêt (“without interest”) allow for surprisingly many solutions, as one can see from a quick sampling of previous translations. Yet these other choices are either less rhythmical than the French—“uninteresting,” “empty of interest”—or do not retain the subtlety of the French: “mediocre,” “boring,” “idiotic.” Ashbery’s “books of no interest” is quietly matter-of-fact and dismissive, like the French; rhythmically satisfying; and placed, liked the original, at the end of the sentence.