by W. E. Gutman
In that 100-year period that straddles the late Middle Ages and the early glows of the Renaissance is born, lives and dies an astute observer of human foibles and folly, an artist now recognized as the undisputed patriarch of Surrealism and, if the subtle and perplexing clues that season his eerie paintings are confirmed -- a member of an embryonic lodge of freethinkers, perhaps a forerunner of the Freemasons.
Is he the “notable artist” Jan van den Haag refers to in his letter? Neither Montvert nor Albeniz is ready to tally the allusions their Dutch correspondent offers without soliciting additional clues, however muted or guarded.
The Air France flight from Berlin eases on final approach to Charles de Gaulle Airport. Bone-tired and emotionally drained, Montvert thinks only of one thing: a well deserved, much needed weekend of rest.
He drives home, hidden reserves of energy guiding him mechanically on a course as familiar as it is tedious. Traffic is always heavy and slow. Spontaneous and inexplicable bottlenecks turn the A1 autoroute linking Roissy to Paris into a parking lot teeming with restless, horn-honking maniacs.
He reaches at last the Périphérique, the expressway that encircles Paris and provides principal points of entry into the once-walled City of Light. To his left, serene and timeless, the Sacré Coeur Basilica, its travertine stone domes and turrets glowing white, rises against a pale gray autumn sky.
Fed by memories of his youth, the spectacle never fails to evoke a cocktail of sensory responses.
Montmartre.
Frame by frame, he relives the moment. A cobbled courtyard. Madame Muche, the concierge, ruddy-cheeked, feinting peevishness but susceptible to gallantry, sweeps the entranceway. A blue denim apron girds her opulent rotundity. A vague odor of fried onion wafts from her unshaven armpits.
“Bonjour, Madame Muche.”
“Bonjour, jeune homme. Alors, l’école, ça va?”
“Tout va très bien, merci. And how are things with you?”
“Bof, as you can see, a million chores, little time, only ten fingers.” Josephine Muche props the broom handle against a broad, sallow cleavage and shows him the palms of her hands.
“Just look at them. Have you ever seen anything so pathetic?”
He mumbles words of commiseration and offers her some chocolate. Suchard. She blushes like a schoolgirl then scolds him softly.
“You shouldn’t. I’m on a diet. My liver, you know.” But she takes the offering and devours it all the same and the sugar triggers another burst of irascibility, this time aimed at her husband, Maurice, a burly, jovial Paris gendarme busy smoking a Gauloise.
“Some people have it easy,” Josephine demurs, raising her eyebrows. “He’s off today. You’d think he’d use his big muscles, the lunkhead, and help a little.”
“Pay her no heed, mon petit,” retorts Maurice, grinning. “It’s pure theater. She should have been on stage, the woman. She’s got enough talent for two, n’est-ce-pas?” Maurice spreads his arms, draws two semi-circles in the air and cups his enormous hairy hands on the downward curve as if to enfold an imaginary pair of buttocks. Mortified, Madame Muche bites her lower lip, peers over her glasses and shakes an outraged finger at her husband. But outrage gives way to amusement and she surrenders a good-natured smile.
“Ah, les hommes. Men. They’re all the same.”
“Now, now, mon amour.” Maurice cowers with feigned terror. “Who loves his little Fifine? Her little Momo, non?” Madame Muche melts. They lay down their weapons and embrace. Monsieur Muche grabs Madame’s generous posterior and declares with Gallic showmanship, “if that’s not talent, I don’t know what is....”
“Run for your life,” exhorts Madame Muche. “This man is incorrigible. I’m liable to.... Oh, la la!”
Michel Montvert, then a star student at Paris’s prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts, remembers scaling four flights up a steep, creaking wooden stairway sagging from a century or more of clambering feet. Each narrow landing led to two small apartments with tiny rooms and eccentric plumbing. With each ascent, he embarked on a dizzying voyage up a spiral gullet resonating with discordant sounds and reeking with disparate exhalations, all vying for dominance. The fullness of their vitality haunts him still: He could smell Mademoiselle Vauclair’s Friday fare -- cabbage soup, chicken gizzards and fried leeks. Madame Jabois’ tremulous renditions of Mistinguett’s classic, Mon Homme, (later reprised by Fanny Brice in My Man), echoed as she sloshed twice weekly in her Empire brass tub. Monsieur Vacheron’s stentorian voice thundered like a summer storm as he barked at his eight-year-old daughter, Monique, over some petty infraction. Next door, Sylvie Lefèvre, homely and inhibited, stridently fended off her husband's accusations of infidelity with the butcher’s errand-boy. Eugène Lefèvre knew his wife was incapable of disloyalty but morbid suspicion sharpened his libido and they eventually buried their sham conflict in furious and sonorous sex.
Mornings brought the redolence of croissants, evenings the aroma of freshly baked baguettes. Radios hummed in cacophonous unison, summarizing soccer scores, blasting the latest popular hits or reporting on the turmoil in Katanga (now Congo) or a smoldering conflict in some faraway place like Algeria and Indochina. He could hear the Golaud children repeating their verses in an exhausting drone as the garlic in Madame Morabito’s ailloli and the commingling vapors of hearty wines and pungent beers wafted and settled in mid-air.
In this olfactory and sonic Babel also lived Wanda, her presence foretold by the heavy perfume she wore -- Mitsouko by Guerlain -- and the lugubrious wails she emitted at odd hours of the day and night, compliments of a mercifully discreet assortment of suitors. She had an unpronounceable Polish name so everyone called her “Mademoiselle Vanda” or “l’anglaise,” even though she hailed from Steubenville, Ohio, via Tangiers and a dozen other Byronic locales, all weathered and abandoned in favor of Paris. Wanda was a tall, cadaverous middle-aged expatriate, the living caricature of castaways who squander their youth drifting from sleazy seaport to second-rate island resort in search of themselves. Bedaubed with funereal make-up, she had an incurable American twang and a weakness for gin. Montvert had vainly tried to sharpen his English and often engaged her in conversation about Chicago and gangsters and cowboys and Indians and Hollywood and George Raft and James Cagney and New York’s skyscrapers and Mark Twain’s mighty Mississippi -- pretty much all he knew about America. But “l’anglaise” was either too drunk to contribute useful intelligence or she’d invariably insist on trading sex for the education Montvert longed for. He never took her up on it. A mixture of pity and revulsion made such commerce unlikely.
Only the Bredoux brothers -- Bernard and Bertrand -- veterans of La Grande Guerre, never married and subsisting on their pensions, lived in unsettling silence amid the dissonance and ubiquitous effluvia. They were kind-hearted souls with gentle smiles and simple truths, not given to idle chatter but always ready to comfort or encourage. He could see them now, their tall, lanky frames bent by age, a vague mustiness exuding from their taupe-colored cardigans, as they read the papers by the window. They had been generous with their baskets of green Normandy apples and steaming chestnuts. They had offered Montvert other gifts along the way: a small plaster bust of Hector Berlioz, a composer they described as “bombastic and annoying;” a tortoise shell cigarette case; a gold-nibbed fountain-pen; an illustrated first edition of Jules Verne’s Voyage to the Center of the Earth.
Montvert had protested politely but they had insisted.
“It’ll be that much less to dust,” they had quipped, winking at each other. “You’re doing us a favor.” It was a hint that held, in its subtlety, the promise of some impending finality the young art student did not have the maturity to decipher. He continued to do errands for them on rainy days or when the pain in their joints flared up. They never spoke about the Great War. He never asked. All wars, he surmised, possess a prosaic commonality, a tragic redundancy that make explication quite useless. It is the mark of great soldiers never to reminisce.
&nbs
p; Bernard and Bertrand committed suicide, Montvert later learned, when life, irrelevant and joyless, ceased to be worth living. They were found in bed, their medals and ribbons lying at the bottom of chamber pots in which they had dutifully, and with studied scorn for the military establishment, La République and posterity, taken their last crap. It was a scene straight out of Louis-Ferdinand Céline: blasphemy exalted by contempt.
Above the din and the intermingling scents, tucked away at the top of a narrow wooden corkscrew staircase, was home at last. It was in the nurturing silence of this sparsely furnished maid’s quarters that he withdrew after school. Delivered from the world below, he’d hasten to the dormer, part the chintz curtains and gape at his city the way a boy covets a woman. Down below were the streets. He could read in their cadence like from an open diary and he reveled in the pantomimes they told. In the distance, Paris spread like a tapestry of gilded domes, verdant parks, esplanades, and ancient spires, and he’d marvel at the loveliness, the grace, long after twilight had draped the city in a star-studded mantle of lilac and periwinkle blue.
He’d then turn to his books. In their bosom, he explored the unrevealed nature of things, unearthing strange and wondrous emotions, toying with challenging abstractions. He wanted to conquer everything that is known and, if possible, to understand all that is unknowable. Such quest, he would discover, was as self-defeating as it was all-consuming. Alluring as they were, the voices behind the words (or was it the echo of his own ruminations?) invariably raised more questions than they answered. Curiosity is a long hallway filled with an infinite number of doors. Most never swing open, even at the loudest rap. He would conclude that to seek knowledge is the next best thing to knowing. In prospecting the unknown, he would also later concede, he was not as interested in acquiring new facts -- he was even less impressed with their utility or application -- as in how they played on his imagination, how they kindled heretofore unknown insights and sensations. Once digested, essential knowledge and fresh perspectives opened up a world of intimate feelings into which he withdrew the better to savor the transcendent realms they evoked. He was intent at all cost, and with each newly apprehended truth, to let his subconscious roam free. Knowledge was in vain unless it had the capacity to arouse an even greater thirst for what knowledge did not reveal. Art, to which he would devote his life, had no meaning unless it could beguile, stir, touch a chord, scandalize or stupefy. “Banality, however exquisitely rendered,” he would say, “is the antithesis of art.”
Surrealism, still in vogue in post-war Paris, played a pivotal role in this frenetic self-scrutiny. The eccentric cultural movement might have eluded him altogether had he not heard it stereotyped by opinionated know-it-alls as “intellectual snobbery” and “spiritual degeneracy,” or dismissed as a “hoax perpetrated by petty artists bent on scandalizing the purist mainstream.” Capricious condemnation of an idea, much more than praise, always aroused his curiosity. He often rallied around unpopular concepts or theories, not out of conviction, but contrariety.
Distracting society from its utilitarian yoke and reconciling irrationality with the rigors of conscious thought, a fundamental aim of Surrealism, found immediate favor with the wayward, nonconformist-in-training that Montvert was becoming. The works he read, the avant-garde paintings, sculptures and musical compositions he discovered along the way, produced an immediate and lasting joy, and he would eagerly surrender to their spell.
It was Baudelaire, his mother’s favorite poet -- and one of France’s most revered icons -- who introduced him to literary Surrealism. Aroused, he would acquire an enduring appreciation for the genre. The formidable bard lavished not only the perfect harmony of his verse on a young, hungry mind; his Les Fleurs du Mal also seemed to legitimize and vindicate Montvert’s most visceral inclinations. Trusting neither man nor God, Baudelaire took refuge in primordial chaos, in the flesh, in orgiastic abandon. His verses crawl with monsters and freaks and pitiable bas-monde creatures all too reminiscent of ourselves. To set us at ease, to ensnare and disarm us perhaps, he stripped himself to the bone in a poignant display of self-deprecation. Like the haunting painting of Saint Sebastian by Rubens, Baudelaire flaunted the crimson gashes that scored his naked left breast to arouse not pity but indignation. He then agitated the demons, the ghouls that doze or stir within us, those we can never disavow. Shunned and lonely, the poet found redemption in the anonymity of crowds, among beggars, cripples, harlots, drunkards. In sad or worn faces, he discovered traces of fathomless drama, in ephemeral smiles a twinkling of hope deferred. His was the voice of all who love unrequitedly, suffer inconsolably, savor rare joys with touching intensity and endure the sorrows, the longings and broken dreams that clutter the deepest regions of our being. Unloved, perhaps unlovable, he drowned his wrath and his agony in alcohol and hashish, and he died at the age of 46, waiting for that which he knew would never come.
If Rimbaud and Poe, Baudelaire’s contemporaries and partners-in-rhyme, gave madness a lyrical hue, it was Jean Cocteau, France’s alchemical man, who urged Montvert up the winding stairway of Surrealism, who shepherded him across its portals, and eased him into its strange and wondrous inner sanctum. Cocteau’s fairy tales, opium-induced phantasms and hallucinatory incantations imparted unique life to ambiguity, purpose to paradox.
“I am a lie doomed to always tell the truth.”
Listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and The Firebird, which he found exotic, erotic and delicious, Montvert gamboled and drowsed with Cocteau in fragrant fields of poppy only to awaken, sprinting in place in a relay race with himself. Forever seeking to jolt men out of their torpor as he himself prowled at the edges of delirium and paranoia, Cocteau’s trails are strewn with scorn for the zealot, disdain for the hypocrite, contempt for the unimaginative, pity -- dark, raging, agonizing pity -- for those who feel, who ache, who weep as others pass them by unseeing, uncaring. Transfixed, Montvert often set sail on the wings of Cocteau’s allegories, just to keep in shape. Every time he alit from these fantastic voyages he was reminded that rationality is no match for intuitiveness, that the imponderable can only be hinted at by appealing to the imagination, not common sense. No, Surrealists do not live in an ivory tower; it is their detractors who do, so Surrealists take careful aim instead and, with wit and irreverence, topple the flimsy edifice to the ground. With the dismal debris of their own intolerance now strewn at their feet, the victims of reality no longer recoil from it but acknowledge its ineffable absurdity. Once fathomed, Surrealism encourages its disciples to seek within themselves new dimensions, hidden planes of awareness. Surrealism is the vernacular of nonconformity. To some, it is the idiom of heresy.
Often, perhaps too often (some deemed such predisposition a solitary vice, like masturbation) Montvert turned to Franz Kafka, the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament, for booster shots of melancholy and cynicism, the serums that deliver dreamers from groundless hope, idealists from pointless fancies. He meandered casually and without haste in Joseph K’s Escher-like labyrinths, ready to get lost, to become ensnared in the maddening plot, to merge into it. Kafka would bequeath a lifelong reflex and a healthy lack of forbearance for the meanness, the idiocy, the despotism of officialdom, the odious triviality of bureaucracy, the effrontery and intolerance of the ignorant, the shallow intellect and miserly pre-occupations of the petty bourgeois, the boorishness and vulgarity of the rabble, the sham majesty of upstarts.
Hardened by experience and an ebbing respect for authority, Montvert’s expanding mixture of aversions would be reinforced by Nietzsche’s warnings against mindless precepts and sordid rituals. What Montvert chose to distill from his florid orations is that helping dismember the tentacles of stupidity, dogma and prejudice [Maimonides called them “degenerate practices and senseless beliefs”] is a solemn obligation. Oh, how he struggled with Nietzsche. But he read on and reread Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Anti-Christ and Twilight of the Gods, and he dissected and agonized over every word, every twist o
f phrase, every last maze-like paragraph until Nietzsche’s awesome genius erupted and lit up some heretofore dormant synapse inside his brain.
From Baruch Spinoza, his father’s favorite philosopher (Henri Bergson came a close second) he learned to reject doctrines that don’t make room for speculation or healthy skepticism; to view any truth that owes its existence solely to blind faith as a lie. Shackled to unbending creeds, afflicted with intellectual villainy and sloth, the contemporaries of Spinoza, a Dutch-born Marrano, shunned and rebuked him. The truth, Spinoza argued, can free humanity. He was referring to observable, verifiable and authenticated truth, not fabrications forced down people’s throats.
“Immense pains have been taken to invest religion, whether true of false, with such pomp and ceremony, that it may rise superior to every shock and be always observed with studious reverence by the people.”
Three hundred years later, Albert Einstein, when challenged to divulge his own religious convictions, sided with Spinoza, saying,
“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
Excommunicated by Jews, vilified by Christians, Spinoza was labeled a heretic and a rebel. His was an enviable malediction, Montvert mused, and he remembered vowing to emulate him in some way. It would take a more mature perusal of his work to recognize that he lacked both Spinoza’s formidable intellect and his couth. He would have to settle for a Spinozan readiness to vex sacred cows, to invite hostility.
Voltaire, the freethinker whose moral code hinged on tolerance, generosity and a healthy dose of skepticism, was also required reading in school. Hostile to all metaphysics, Voltaire cautions with satirical ferocity against the perils of immoderation and groundless idealism. A believer in natural religion [based on reason and ordinary experience rather than the supernatural], he condemns the social effects of “revealed” doctrine, calling it “pernicious,” and thus earning the everlasting antipathy of the Church.