Underneath, in a white smock, precise as a high priest, the Porter lifts up this architecture, takes it over, jolts it onto his shoulder and goes off.
A white touch, under the yellows of the skin, the scarlets of the meat.
The man carries the animal. The corpse is a sign of life. It’s dramatic and joyous. It makes you want to paint.
Art: when an intuition weds color. Or rather, when an intuition sleeps with an idea on a bed of right colors.
But beware of the hollow dream.
You must dream with the brush in hand.
The flayed flesh bursts onto the canvas.
Underneath, the white apron constructs itself in columns to support the animal.
In the street it is the concealed muscles of the butcher that do this.
* * *
Working with the pear tree at Bigeonnette is to apply to it the notions about space I have collected, so as to seize it.
The branches grasp the sky in fistfuls.
All of it is balanced on a trunk, a handsome cylinder slightly twisted by what it holds up.
* * *
When I think of Poussin’s splendid wash drawings of trees, I can get nothing at all from his method. It doesn’t seize the polyhedric aspect of things so dear to us since Cézanne, or the space the Cubists opened up.
Yet Cézanne and the Cubists don’t satisfy my need for completeness and natural movement. I must question this pear tree. Everything is there.
Its richness is made up of simple but crossed angles, balanced by an internal movement whose unity I can feel but of which I can see only the complexity. For the latter I must invent a means of access, a ladder to climb up on.
Pear tree. Suite of pear trees. Until I grow disgusted at my helplessness and despair at ever succeeding. And now, this morning, a panel cut into the very surface of this despair has perhaps succeeded.
How can I ever be proud of my work, after so many failures, in such a climate of panic? And yet, what euphoria just because of six square inches of paint that sings a little!
I have really learned to swallow my pride since the thirties when I constructed big abstract paintings. The world at that time seemed a safe place; painting meant peaceful, strong harmonies.
But it began to develop cracks and it collapsed in 1940. As for me, I found myself once more at the base of things, the elemental.
Now I work facing the earth and the sky. There is the tree, still vaster and deeper than the image I get from it.
Each confrontation with nature is a rude humiliation for our concepts.
Yet only the concept is transmittable.
The pear tree in my orchard knows everything and says nothing. It must be given a voice; that is, I must get to work on it, start endlessly all over again. I gorge myself on this subject.
Beyond the pleasure of placing contrasting colors, of establishing values, of inventing new rhythms, something which is always on the watch inside us will know how to project the sign, the strong image suddenly seized, into consciousness. That’s that. And you have gone on a little further.
Further on there will be more difficulties. You will stumble, because the solidity of reality escapes all bounds. To imagine that solidity, to profile the shadow of that unknown quantity, to make people feel a little of the richness of the pear tree—that, as I see it, is all my ambition.
Nature is what is most continuous in every direction. Indicate this continuity. A brushstroke, a line, must be laden with fullness as well as emptiness. A simple rhythm has to enliven the canvas, swelling up here, tightening in there, sensitive, down to the leaf which trembles at the edge of the sky.
* * *
Technique
I have spent much time trying to define a durable way of painting. But the ways wear out under the weight of the fingers, of the eyes. It is understanding that must be attained.
Sometimes I amuse myself with patting the light tones together at the top of my palette and then crushing the dark ones together at the bottom. With broad strokes of a flat brush. With the point of a brush as slender as a fencing foil. Games that brighten your work, revive the artist when he’s exhausted, keep the spectator alert. But it is not in them that meaning is to be found.
You can trace an essential symbol with one finger in the dust.
No matter how you go about it, the important thing is to prolong drawing beyond your fingers onto the palette, beyond the palette onto the canvas. And, in the mass shaken by the dance of brushstrokes, to find again, in extremis, the simplicity of the first idea.
Light the picture according to its meaning. Let the light be straightforward, flowing toward the mind and coming from it. The object off which it rebounds gives it form and at the same time constructs the image and the way to read it.
I should very much have liked, this morning, to paint a blue sky, blue roofs, a blue sea. I started to. I had the necessary tubes of paint. But I found no blue in me, this miserable me I am equipped with.
So I made roofs, a sky, and boats, as best I could, with the stormy colors of my being.
But it is of roofs and boats that I wanted to talk to you. If they speak of me, it is unimportant and superfluous.
* * *
In a composition, in this picture which you invent with the usual elements, or which you forge, each detail is a personification of the subject, or rather of the action which the picture unfolds.
The role of the detail is not to act itself, but to construct, to give meaning to that action.
That is the danger, the stumbling block. The detail has to participate in this major action by offering up whatever constitutes it, by putting its own reality at the service of the whole, yet without contradicting itself.
There is submission of the detail to the whole but there is also differentiation.
In a perfect painting, the secondary characters sustain the main character without merging with him. They act in the same way toward each other.
In a less good painting the secondary characters resemble each other. Limpness. Loss of interest.
Carefully prepared, based on careful drawings, long dreamed of and begun on the right day, the picture is going well. Very well. My friends find it excellent; they wish I wouldn’t touch it again.
A certain brilliance in the result—that is the trap.
Avoid it. Smear the painting. Mess it up with an inexorable brush, until nothing remains but a magma in which a spectral image floats.
Then, without regrets and singing as loud as you can, work inside it, with broad, precise strokes, until a real work of art is born, no longer seductive, but with everything enunciated on the highest level of your mind.
And you emerge feeling dead tired but happy.
Art and Literature 1 (March 1964).
PIERRE MARTORY
(1920–1998)
INTRODUCTION TO WASHINGTON SQUARE BY HENRY JAMES
One could scarcely call Washington Square a youthful work or a beginning: In 1881 James was thirty-eight years old; his first novel had appeared five years earlier. In 1879 Daisy Miller had achieved a solid success with the English reading public, while numerous articles in American reviews had already established this scion of one of the Union’s wealthiest families as an informed critic of the European literature of his day. Yet at first glance, there seems nothing in Washington Square that anticipates James’s great novels, the ones best known in France, wherein we discover a genuine temperament, along with an inimitable way of telling a story. These masterworks (which one could recognize from a single sentence, so vastly does his “manner” differ from that of any other writer) have earned James a reputation as a difficult and even boring writer among lazy readers, and, among admirers of literary dexterity, that of a subtle splitter of hairs; in any case, they are real monuments; the fictional donnée always has something imprecise that empowers all the developments, all the feats of composition; the main characters being thus placed in a state of compromised equilibrium which renders plausible their cons
ideration of the several paths of conduct they might follow; these take place in a world where the good and the wicked, while perhaps not clearly depicted as such, nevertheless form opposing parties whose conflict—with all the nuances that good breeding provides—assumes the proportions of tragedy; the intolerable atmosphere in which they unfold is made up of an infinity of small details whose importance appears only in their juxtaposition. They are, as James himself said, like a tapestry whose figures have an imperious tendency to fill up as much as possible the tiny perforations prepared for the needle in the canvas background. One can say of these novels that they pave the way for a whole series of works in a new tone, which will come into being in France and England at the beginning of the century, and in which the very procedures of intense psychological analysis will become essential.
Washington Square, on the other hand, is constructed along the traditional lines of the French or English novel of the mid-nineteenth century; it tells a familiar tale of literary fiction: the opposition between a lovesick daughter and the father who disapproves of her suitor; both for its dramatic situation and the manner in which the subject is conceived, it has sometimes been compared with Eugénie Grandet.
James had a highly informed admiration for Balzac, having studied his work closely. He also had a clear awareness of his own talent, and the thought of remaking Eugénie Grandet in his own manner would have struck him as unworthy. The subject of Washington Square was furnished him by a Mrs. Kemble. In telling James this story, Mrs. Kemble is certainly responsible for having alerted him to its similarities to Eugénie Grandet, but more than the anecdote in itself, it was the suggestions it wakened in him that appealed to the writer. And here the conscientious critic has no choice but to seize the occasion for a comparison between the genius of Balzac and that of James, judging each according to the evidence.
In Balzac, there is a liveliness of the first draft which is lacking in James; in James, a concern for artistic composition and unity that seems to have seldom bothered Balzac. Balzac aims to get beyond circumstances and their psychological prolongations so as to attain the universal. His characters tend to become types. He supplies the reader with a mass of documentation wherein each can make his own choice. James creates a world of less breadth, but which gains in density what it loses in generality. The omnipotent author, having laid out the previous history and the foundations of his story, moves forward unerringly into the logical development implied by his characters’ temperament, up to the moment when the final curtain falls, so to speak, once the drama has ended.
The setting and the secondary characters lack, in Washington Square, the importance which Balzac accords them. While, in order to appreciate the respective relations of Eugénie Grandet and her father, we have to wade through a veritable monograph on the small city of Saumur, James barely suggests what the fact of residing in 1850 in one of New York’s most opulent neighborhoods might mean for Catherine Sloper or the doctor. Whereas old Grandet grabs all the attention and assumes the position of principal character, Dr. Sloper makes an appearance only insofar as he plays a role in the marriage plans of his daughter; beyond that, we know almost nothing of him. Such remarks can illustrate how James, more than Balzac, addresses himself to the intelligence and imagination of his reader; how he confides in him, with a sort of refined politeness. To this trust, the reader must respond with equal goodwill; he must supply a truly active collaboration, unleash his imagination, and lend all his intellect toward helping create the beings that words and phrases have depicted for him.
“A novel,” wrote James, “is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression … The characters, the situation, which strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one most, but the measure of reality is very difficult to fix … Humanity is immense and reality has a myriad forms … It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience … Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.”*
The implementing of relationships which a given situation engenders, the deepening of the protagonists’ reciprocal reactions in a dramatic action, the kind of poetic power the novelist lays claim to, constitute one of the most exciting adventures of the mind. They also entail countless risks, which are sometimes difficult to avoid. One of these consists in wanting to tell everything when it’s a question only of not suppressing the essential. It’s silly to claim that characters force themselves on the novelist and impose their own determination on him. In reality, they derive everything from him, even as he eludes them. Not for an instant does he cease to exert the most rigorous control over their words and deeds. But, like a painter, he must play with light and shade so as to give his creatures the three-dimensionality without which they would be little more than anatomical engravings. He must leave them the sometimes dark, sometimes glittering dazzling aureole that for each of us surrounds the person who confronts us and whose mind we try to penetrate. The author of a novel has to acknowledge that there are aspects of his characters’ personae he is ignorant of, while still not seeming to mute them because of a too-forceful and too-visible concern for artful composition. He must reach the point where these obscurities seem legitimately justified.
The characters in James’s novels are, more than types, cases in point. Their story is conveyed to us in the terms of their inner lives, and this method, in 1881, is highly original.
Children always have two opinions of their parents, one biased, stemming from the restrictions which parental authority has placed on the demands of their youth and character, and another, less often acknowledged by them, more detached from immediate contingencies, which will be the stronger one if they manage to arrive at a degree of independence in their judgment. Catherine Sloper isn’t immune to this rule. One phase of her drama consists precisely in her awareness of the rightness of her father’s reasoning, in remorse for the harm she has caused him. Dr. Sloper, on the other hand, if he exerts a rigorous tyranny over his daughter that stifles the most natural paternal feelings, to the point where we see him as “the perfect incarnation of old New York respectability,” strikes us as less rigid and more explicable. One can’t help but sympathize much more wholeheartedly with him than with old Grandet, for example, since his motives are more noble. The impression that he is the “villain” in the drama weakens if we take into account that his experience of men, the diagnostic art that his profession confers on him, the sense of responsibility toward his daughter—to whom local society would be closed if she were one day to separate from her husband—amply justify his attitude. He is as blinded by his reasons as Catherine is by her love. His humor and irony, which link him to Henry James himself, render him sympathetic at least during the first part of the novel. And if we can believe up to a point that his daughter is his victim, the end of the book amply demonstrates how Catherine, after her father’s death, behaves exactly as he would have wished her to.
Once we have closed the book, however, we have the feeling of not having understood the imperious reasons that have made the characters act as they do. The explanation our mind has supplied in the course of reading isn’t enough for us. It seems that the author hasn’t dared dig too deeply into the hearts of his protagonists, that he has respected their most important secret. Our intelligence and curiosity require that the last veils be lifted. And just as, in a discussion that fascinates us, we have no way to succeed in understanding our interlocutor other than by putting ourselves in his place, so, to stifle the flame of interest kindled in us by the novel
, we force ourselves to reconstitute the entire psychological evolution that has been described for us, adding the resources of our own sensibility and experience to the indications provided by the novelist. “The true inner language,” wrote Edmond Jaloux, precisely in a discussion of a work of James, “is incommunicable.” The novelist’s task consists in transcending the barrier that separates the characters in a novel from each other, and from the author or the reader. His talent can be gauged by the delicacy with which he opens doors, scrapes away varnish, lightens shadows, without depriving the reader of his greatest pleasure, that of reflecting on what he tells us.
It’s here that James excels, and from this vantage point that Washington Square is linked to the great novels on which James’s fame rests. The same year, 1881, will in fact see the publication of a work which many consider his most fully realized, The Portrait of a Lady, in which the ambiguous game between the novelist and his characters, on the one hand, and with his readers on the other, attains a perfection that isn’t gratuitous since it helps to create that “impression of life” which is the raison d’être of every novel. The Portrait of a Lady initiates what has been called James’s second period; Washington Square closes the first. There is no gap between the two. There are no abrupt fractures in James’s career. If, later on, he himself judged Washington Square rather harshly, it’s doubtless because he felt he had transcended whatever that traditional conception of the novel had been able to provide him with. But the work marks a stage, with its references to two currents of literary fiction and the clear trace it bears of the writer’s personality. No one knew better than James what he wished to accomplish and to what public he addressed himself. The great critical prefaces he composed in 1904 for the monumental edition of his principal novels (the New York Edition) reveal him as a meticulous craftsman who leaves nothing to chance. In writing Washington Square he knew what he owed his masters and his models, but he also knew what his own genius contributed to their teaching. Thus the work takes on the charm of the first paintings of a great artist. And if James could never be mistaken for a beginner, if he was never among those writers whose position vis-à-vis their art establishes itself gradually as they create their works, one can see in Washington Square the freshness of his talent at its dawning, one can admire there a realism which James will later abandon somewhat to devote himself only to subtler variations. Reading this novel will help in reading the later ones. The pleasure it provides increases with the aid it offers to understanding the true James, that of The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl, whose place is alongside that of the greatest analysts of the human spirit, such as Proust, Joyce, or Virginia Woolf.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 35