The Death of Picasso

by Guy Davenport

  20 GERMINAL

  His 75 years of meditation on a still life: this is like a sonnet cycle, the progression of Montaigne’s essays, Rembrandt’s and Van Gogh’s self-portraits. A natural rhythm, as all the variations of fish and leaf make a coherent harmony. A fish is a leaf.

  Wine, bread, table: his Catholic childhood. Perhaps his Catholic life. Lute, guitar, mandolin: the Spanish ear, which abides life as a terrible dream made tolerable by music.

  Spain and Holland. Felipe’s expulsion of farmers and bankers, whom he saw with fanatic eyes as Muslims and Jews, shifted the counting houses to Holland. Spain dreamed on in its pageant of men dressed in black and women in shawls, surrounded by agonies they kept as symbols to validate, as ritual, the cruelty they claimed as their piety: the lynching of ecstatics, heretics, and humanists, the slaughtering of bulls, the sending of navies and armies against all other cultures of the Mediterranean.

  Silver to the east, pepper to the west, silver and pepper, wool and cloves, gold and wheat, cannon and Titians. And on this theme the old man ended, with a vision of sworded gallants idiotic in the cruelty of their pride, women as a separate species, available by property deeds, a blade through a gut, a trunk of coins, a point of honor precluding reason or forgiveness.

  His study of Velazquez parallels the researches of Braudel; his intuition of a deeper past rivals the century’s classical studies, the prehistorians, the anthropologists.

  21 GERMINAL

  Een herinnering: Paris 1947. A glimpse, a mere passing sight of Picasso inside the Deux Magots, before a bottle of Perrier at a table, his hair combed across his bald head in a last desperate coiffure, already grey. But there he was. Bruno has seen Max Ernst walking his poodle on the Avenue Foch.

  Sander begins a notebook of our island’s natural history, climbs trees to include our neighbor islands in his map, exercises like an acrobat. How smoothly he is beginning to forget I dare not guess.

  22 GERMINAL

  We row over for newspapers and mail, a cold and blustery voyage, and wet. Water and wind are a havoc of power. We are colonists who can make an excursion back to Europe, shopping list in hand.

  A blind old Minotaur pulls his household goods along in a cart, washpot, skillet, quilts, mangle, bust of Lillie Langtry, framed lithograph of Napoleon, rotary eggbeater, bread board, Raspail’s Home Medical Practitioner, a felt hat from Milan, a map of Corsica, a sack of roasted chicory, the key to a barn, tongs, a reading lamp mounted on a porcelain parrot, bulbs of garlic, a tobacco tin containing fishhooks, brass centimes from the Occupation, buttons, a bullet, a feather from the tail of an owl.

  Sander says he discovers that shopping can be fun, and I try to penetrate his meaning. Is it that the ordinary becomes known only as the unusual? It is the convenient we are giving up, what he agreed to, with diffidence, when I offered him the stint on the island.

  23 GERMINAL

  O well, says Sander, O well. He organizes himself at various times of day by turning in circles, batting the air with his hands. An inventory of energies. He glances at the pages of this journal, briefly, as if to register that writing is a thing I do, like reading, walking. I keep thinking that he is a median between Bruno and Itard’s Victor, between urban sophistication and benign savagery. He has a penchant for botany and zoology. That is, those subjects caught his fancy. Spells badly. Found all the sociological courses meaningless and history is still so much hash.

  24 GERMINAL

  Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, De l’Education d’un homme sauvage, ou des premiers developpemens physiques et moraux du jeune sauvage de l’Aveyron, Vendémiaire an X.

  The pathos is one all teachers feel, all parents. Repeated now by the American psychologists training chimpanzees to sign with deaf-and-dumb hand language. Itard’s Victor had had his attention fixed by his own strategies for survival in a forest. So are all attentions fixed. His skills were animal and they were successful. Eat, scutter to safety, hide from enemies, sleep, forage. He was unfamiliar with fire, with warmth, and loved in Paris to roll naked in the snow.

  De Gaulle remarked, from under that nose, that we raise our own Vandals. What is the grief I feel when I admit the truth of that? I also deny it.

  25 GERMINAL

  The feeling again yesterday afternoon that the hour belonged to a previous, perhaps future, time, but was decidedly not now. I was looking out of the window, at afternoon light on bushes, in an elation of melancholy, savoring one truth and another without fear or anxiety, at peace with myself. Then this deliciously strange feeling that time is nothing, or is my friend rather than my enemy.

  Time, like the sea, is layered into nekton, plankton, and benthos.

  Long deep rhythms like the turning of the planets and the drift of the stars, the decay of matter, the old-turtle creep of continents around the globe. Evolution. Over which lie the adagio rhythms of history, the play of fire over burning sticks.

  Picasso at the last was gazing at the immediate pressures of Renaissance Spain on the France of Georges Pompidou: moth flicker of individual sensibilities around a flame of money, cherished proprieties, romance, a dreaming life with no notion of what it is to be awake, the sleep of reason. He felt the tension between the Netherlands and Madrid, north and south, prudence and passion. Titian and Rembrandt, and yet his heart was with those foragers who suffered the violence of making sense of these extremes, Van Gogh and Rimbaud, Rousseau le Douanier.

  His genius was satisfied with two forms only: still life and tableau. He stepped over the moment of Cézanne, Manet, Courbet like a giant negligently striding over a garden whose order and brilliance were none of his concern. All of his tenderness is like a Minotaur gazing at a cow. There was sweetness in the regard, submerged in a primal animality. He was like a grandee from the Spanish courts trying to behave himself among people with polished manners, books, philosophy, graciousness. He played their game, assumed French liberalism, pledged brotherhood with Marxist babblers, commanded charm enough to make friends with civilized people like Gertrude Stein and Cocteau, Apollinaire and Braque. Barcelona stood him in good stead.

  26 GERMINAL

  Roads, paths, and rivers in XIXth Century painting. And windows. Corridors was their theme, and corridors for the eye. Picasso sidestepped this brilliant understanding of the world, and returned to the theatrical, the Spanish room that is not properly a room but a cell, a dark place. The Spanish have no love for or understanding of roads. They are perilous in Quijote, bandit-ridden in Spanish history. Suspicious stay-at-homes, the Spanish. A public place is still vulgar, one’s dignity can be exposed to the affront of a stare. A morbid pride, which Goya saw as insanity.

  How lovely Paris must have seemed to the young Picasso, with its guileless Max Jacob, laughing Apollinaire, rich Americans who were affable, friendly, and intelligent: Miss Stein, Miss Toklas, the sisters Cone, John Quinn, people who knew nothing of the dark anguish of the Spanish mind.

  Sander making a list, with characteristics, of our birds. We cannot identify the half of them.

  Hò siokómos skaphiókouros orchídionon monózonos.

  Corelli sarabandes, good talk by the fire, the wind in a huffle after sunset making a humpenscrump of the waves and trees.

  27 GERMINAL

  De dageraad met rooskleurige vingeren. Coffee, journal in a seat on the rocks, warm enough for shorts and visnet jersey. Fine iodine kelpy green smell of the sea. No fog at all, a sharp sight of all the islands around us. Yachts. The life! crowed Sander naked.

  Itard failed with Victor (assuming that Victor was not an idiot, which no evidence indicates) because he was trying to teach him manners.

  He should have allowed himself to be taught by Victor, as the cat teaches us the rules of a companionship, as Griaule learned from the Dogon.

  Teacher as student, an inside-out idea. Useful where applicable.

  Art is bad when it is poor in news, dull, and has no rich uncle to boast of. Culture abhors a plenum and has its finest moments hunting on a lean day
.

  Philosophy is the husband of art: the civility they beget is not a hostage to fortune but our fortune itself.

  Nature has no destiny for us: our boat is upon her ocean and in her winds, but she has expended as much ingenuity designing the flea as she has expended on us, and is perfectly indifferent to Hooke’s conversation at Garroway’s Coffee House. We, however, perish the instant we take our eyes off nature.

  28 GERMINAL

  One of the things Hooke said at Garroway’s was that he suspected insects of being the husbands of flowers. Fourier was capable of believing that as fact.

  Schets: Quaggas at noon under mimosa green and gold, graceful and grey like mules by Gaudier-Brzeska, with boughs of silver silk, stripeless zebras, gazelles with heft.

  Does Fourier’s uncluttered imagination belong to philosophy or art? I see him surviving in the verve and color of Roger de la Fresnaye, Delaunay, Lurçat. Was he a philosopher at all? Braque is the better epistemologist.

  Something of a serious talk with Sander. I tell him that he can go back to Amsterdam anytime he wants, but to Dokter Tomas. The terms and happenstance of the custody, which is entirely informal and fortuitous.

  I suggest that we are on a voyage, the island our ship, that we are Crusoe and Friday, two characters out of Rousseau living civilizedly as savages.

  29 GERMINAL

  We learn on the radio that Picasso was painting a picture when he died.

  Water and land. When they found the first dinosaur track in America, a three-toed footprint in old red sandstone, the predikant (top hat, frock coat, buttoned leggings) said it was the voetspoor of Noah’s raven. Grey troubled waters everywhere, and the raven’s cry the only sound over their tumult.

  A red cry. And next the dove, olive sprig, and ground. The rivers went back to their beds, the sky to blue, a rainbow spanning the shining mud. Out onto which ventured goose and gander, hen and cock, quagga, mastodon, dik-dik, ostrich, tarpan, opossum, elk, baboon.

  Sander notes that already we have our schapewei around the island, our movements preferring a path. I have not mentioned routine except to insist that beds be made, dishes and cookware washed, the lime turned and renewed in the outhouse, clothes hung up, and so on. Surprised that he likes sweeping a floor.

  30 GERMINAL

  Vreemheid en tovermiddel! A shore of gulls, quarreling and milling in a clutter of white. Quark! they squawk in Joyce, giving physicists a name for a hypothetical particle that has the hypothetical quality charm. Clustered and clinging to the nucleus of an atom, they congregate as hadrons, or if paired with an antiquark, a kaon, which is perhaps a charmed meson, or disintegration of light into matter, a process in which some quarks display strangeness, some display charm, with so ready an affinity that kaons and mesons exchange the one quality for the other as a firefly flicks off and on. It is thought that strange quarks prefer to couple with charmed quarks, electric bees quick for the rich of the nectar.

  Tributes to Picasso on the radio: Malraux, Pompidou, Miró, Chagall, some functionary of the Spanish government in exile. He was not, it turns out, painting when he died. He had dined as usual, with Jacqueline and some friends, excused himself to go to his studio, painted a last canvas, presumably one of the courtcard cavaliers or duennas, and went to bed. He died in his sleep. Eighty-five years of drawing, painting, sculpting!

  Sander comments that he finds chastity interesting, that word, interesting. Moedernaakt, waarachtig, met een starende blik op zijn penis.

  I tell him, with coffee after supper on the shingle, the sea changing from its silver and rose of day’s end to the flint and gleaming greys of dusk, about Ludwig Hänsel’s Die Jugend und die leibliche Liebe that Wittgenstein found so strangely moving and Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter. The phrase sexual purity of boys got me a sideways glance of comic surmise. Why don’t they know, he asks, after all this time? Mentioned Marcuse’s perception of tolerance as repression, and bandied ideas about. Thought is enhanced by the tumble of waves, the sound of rain. I remark that so much forbidding sweetened the value of the forbidden. Man has always savored the irony of having to believe an idea and its opposite. All these furry old doctors, Sander says. Even so, I’ve had it with too much.

  Innocence is regenerative, he is teaching me.

  1 FLOREAL

  Window washing, painting the trim outside, a swim, a run in the boat. We become brown.

  Through the chryselectric green with goatstep, ramshorns curled, sharp of eye, satyrs. Their musk precedes them, armpit and honeysuckle. Quince flower descant upon a rackle of billy pizzle. Tuscan tan and with the visages of Italic gods, their pentathletic torsos flow with bestial grace into dappled haunches. Stag tails frisking up from the holybone wag above the flat of narrow butts.

  One munches an apple, one buzzes his lips like a hornet, the third twiddles the radical of his stegocephalic posthon. Their knowledge of the gods is intuitive, fretful, dark. Of Zeus they know but the suddenness of the lightning and the thunder’s hackling of its neck, hateful winds, snow, and rain. Artemis they know as the Mother of the Bears. Hera they do not know. Their Lord of the Dance is not Apollo but Pan, whom they call Humper. Asklepios is Snake, Demeter the apple, pear, and plum, Persephatta the poppy and the wren.

  Their language is inhuman. They can chatter with the squirrels, using squirrel words among themselves to bound their peripatesis. For time they use the vocabulary of the grey wolf, for elegy and boast the nicker and whinny of the horse, for familiar discourse a patois of birdsong, fox bark, goat bleat, and the siffle and mump of their cousins the deer.

  Hesiod first mentions them, the race of satyrs about which nothing can be done. In Sicily they are called Tityrs. Silenos the friend of Dionysos was one of them, prophet and drunkard. I see Asia in this detail, a transference onto the leafgod Dushara through whom the dead speak of some shaman whose trance came from wine.

  The true satyrs were shy woods creatures whose only boldness was in mounting hamadryads, fauns, maelids, sheep and their snubnosed shepherd, goats and their darkeyed goatherd, country girls out berrying, pious wives at the spring, anything with penetrable pterygomata into which their impudent saunia might squeeze, poke, slide, prod, or slurp. Neither voluptuaries nor lovers, they never thought to mention in their talk of weather and time with the wolves that the day had seen them chase and hump a nimble wench and her cow, a brace of oreads whom they found in each other’s arms, a pastureful of horses, and an hysterical swan.

  Coffee and notebook on the heart. A fire of sticks and fircones feels good in the evening. A domestic animal, fire.

  2 FLOREAL

  Writing in our seat on the big rock, the day sweet and gentle, Sander beside me just out of the sea, out of wholly unconscious habit, scritched Sander’s tummy along the mesial, nudged the lens of water from his navel, and was tracing absentminded patterns when he said with singsong parody that Dokter Tomas had vetted me as gentleman, scholar, and man of letters whose beschaafde manieren were supposed to be a model and an inspiration to a teenager with fried nerves and staring at the wall. Three weeks of carpentry had cured that, together with fresh air, the sea, and the company of a philosopher. Niettegenstande dat, he said, see the willful nosecone volunteer to join in.

  3 FLOREAL

  Scumble sienna over bronzen green, the ruddle gold. The wax is vermillion, to pick up the vert Louis XV of the bottle on the other end of the diagonal. With a charcoal stub he put in the lines of the drawing board. Two corners would be out of the picture, as in Degas, as Hokusai would want it, as the perspective frame indicated.

  He will eat the onions, but first he will eat them with his eyes. He put two of them on the white plate, the third beside the plate. Two quick rectangles with the charcoal: letter and book. A fourth onion on the book, on Raspail. Box of matches.

  Bottle in the lower left corner, both in and out of the frame, something for the eye to move over. A jug of olive oil beyond the drawing board, contrast and balance. Shag tobacco in its paper, o
pen. His pipe.

  The onion on Raspail’s book begins the meaning. Then candle, lit, immediately above. Theo’s letter with a burnt match laid against it. Stilleven met uien, tabak, pijp, kaars, een brief.

  The still life is the painter’s sonnet, the painter’s essay. Did he dare to put in an allusion to Ricord as well? No, for Raspail was Ricord enough.

  He had tried to make himself clear about Ricord in a letter to Theo soon after he cut off his ear, was it two weeks ago already? Three? It was in his reply to the letter with the fifty francs that he was putting in the still life. He had been oblique, comparing Raspail and Ricord. If Theo understood, he did not say. Delacroix and after him Seurat had sorted out the colors into their components, like ancient men sorting out the notes of the scale, the Goncourts were sorting out the emotions, and Ricord had distinguished between the two dread diseases caught through the genitals. One never went away, but moved through the system until it reached the spine and the brain. It caused madness. The other was a disease that could be cured, though never with complete certainty. He did now know which he had. But one could hope.

  And one could make a vow, with the help of the Christus, to remain chaste and pure. The doctor had seemed to think that his madness was dietary, and that Raspail could bring him around to health, of body and mind, again. How the rich doctors and professors tried to suppress the Annuaire de la santé! No country other than France had such a book, a medical guide for the home, with all the science known about disease in clear prose that even the most simple could understand.