His fine hands, one quizzically posed beneath his chin, chin decorated with a little quirky beard, beard worn as a self-amused form of punctuation, the other hand delicately worrying the carved arm of the ornate wooden armchair in which he was seated, also occupy the foreground of the earlier, and only other portrait, by Émile Deroy. This youthful likeness, which his friend Asselineau described as hanging in the poet’s apartment during his early period of luxury at the Hotel Pimodan, followed him through the long itinerancy of rented rooms that Baudelaire struggled to wear lightly in his later years. Deroy had made the painting over three nights, in lamplight, in Baudelaire’s salon, in the company of the poet Théodore de Banville, who later described the scene in his memoirs, the Guadeloupian Creole journalist Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, and the Lyonais socialist songwriter Pierre Dupont, the five young men, inseparable then, smoking and talking about Delacroix and the tensions between colour and line, verse and girls.
But for now I want to return to the story of Courbet, who was to show his own portrait of Baudelaire in 1855 along with forty other of his own works in a rented hangar-like wooden building, as part of a flamboyantly rebellious exhibition of his own devising called The Pavilion of Realism. Though the artist had previously enjoyed considerable success with his portraits, his monumental painting The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life was rejected by the jury of the Exposition Universelle. He responded to this rejection with enthusiasm, borrowing money from a collector to fund a temporary exhibition hall of his own. Initially imagined in his correspondence as a circus tent, it stood next to the exhibition hall of the prestigious and well-visited Exposition Universelle. The Pavilion of Realism was a large-scale work of hubristic publicity. Courbet converted the long exterior wall of the building into a billboard advertising his name; you paid a nominal entrance fee, the first time such fees had been charged to exhibition visitors in France, and you also paid to leave your umbrella or walking stick with an attendant, to purchase a souvenir photographic image of the rejected tableau, or to take an exhibition catalogue, within which was printed Courbet’s own text ‘The Manifesto of Realism.’ ‘I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality,’ he wrote, defending the painting as a depiction of the present as a synthetic vision of the people he saw and dealt with daily in the city, people of various social classes and fortunes. He had been influenced by Baudelaire who, in his Salon of 1846, had first addressed the topic of the necessary relationship of art to urban modernity. Beauty, Baudelaire wrote in his Salon, was the beauty of the present only, and was necessarily composed of elements both absolute and quotidian, whose association caused the sensation of marvellousness, which is modern. Each age, each milieu, has its own beauty, as it has its fashions, elegance, debaucheries, and vileness. Each age has its own violence and injustice. All of this flickering together is what the new artist must represent. Beauty was only ever modern, in modernity’s costumes, said Baudelaire. It would not be dressed in classical robes and attitudes; the new beauty would be found in the daily life of the city, in its real mixtures and extremes. Already we live amidst beauty but we do not recognize it, he said. In his allegorical studio, Courbet had depicted the poet half-seated on a wooden table in the lower right-hand corner, bent over a large open book whose pages provide one of the few instances of intense light in a painting modelled according to a profound, almost baroque chiaroscuro.
Influenced by his interpretation of Baudelairean realism, Courbet depicted himself in the centre of his crowded studio, painting a scenic landscape at his easel. Behind him, a naked white woman, plump, half-turned from the viewer, holds up some drapery to cover her breast, and watches the painter work. Her pale pink garments lie crumpled at their feet in the foreground, like an oversweet dessert. She is his model, but not for this image. On the left of the artist, in the darkest shadow, is a motley grouping of people from all parts of life: actors, a money lender, a clothier, a lactating Irish peasant woman with infant, musicians, an acrobat, a priest, a Christ figure, a radical, a farmer, and a standing boy, respectfully watching him paint. To Courbet’s right is a second group, his peers: intellectuals, critics, politicians, gallerists and their wives, all of them fashionably clothed – the men in dark suits, the woman closest to us in an opulently embroidered shawl. A child plays with a cat at the feet of the adults; he is drawing his own picture on a large sheet of paper laid flat on the floor. The figures in this modern allegory all float across the thickly painted darkness as if projected in a film. The artist, in the centre, is the hero of his drama or diorama. Baudelaire’s figure is set apart from the others; he is absorbed in his reading, apparently alone.
When I arrived in Paris, my own experience of the life of an artist’s studio was limited to a memory of my grandmother’s paint-scented spare room, in her little postwar house in North Toronto, where she left her easel set up at the foot of the tidily made bed. Her diminutive canvases – ‘oils,’ as she called them – depicted the abandoned farmhouses and ruined barns and silos of Southern Ontario, in her tastefully muted palette of greyed-down greens and silvery taupes. Thus the colonial remnants of Kantian sublimity came to perch on an old lady’s easel in my grandmother’s spare room of a modest bungalow in suburban Toronto in 1971. I adored this room, its scent and mysterious equipment. I learned there that when I stood in front of paintings, I could feel an inner vibration. It entered flatly through the entire surface of my body if I let myself go blank. In my adolescent movements from my grandmother’s guest room to provincial art museums, I came to think of the mute mineral affinity that accompanied my blankness as a psychic life of pigment. In front of paintings, my body had autonomous gifts, useful only to my own inner experience. This pigment-sense didn’t have anything to do with representation or style, yet it was dependent on the proportions and specificities of mixture. I think my feeling for painting is a deferred material telepathy, an elemental magnetism. I was noticing a mineral sympathy of my body’s iron and copper and calcium towards paint. I learned to still myself to make room for this strange reception. In the spare room, I first came to the recognition that I could be changed by these little documents of admixture, through the simple attention of a slowed, non-linguistic perceiving. The change had to do with the deepening sensation of interior space by means of immaterial correspondences. Pigment striates the subject. Mineral affinities act within and across bodies and across times. We are paintings.
It is evident that the image of Baudelaire in Courbet’s studio allegory has been transposed from the earlier portrait: the oblique light, the studious posture, the curve of the stooped shoulder link the two representations. In The Artist’s Studio, the entire crowded and mysterious image, so inclusive in its social cosmology, seems to radiate out and across the canvas from the dark lower-corner figure of Baudelaire bent over his books. One book is open; on another closed volume rests the poet’s nervous hand. The energy inaugurated in the earlier portrait by the placement of that tentative and nervous hand leads us to believe that at any instant Baudelaire will pause in his reading in order to reach for the splendid quill.
When I began to write I trembled with an almost immediately disappointed ambition, but I liked paper and I liked ink. This much has remained constant or at least recurrent. The ambition had to do with a hoped-for intimacy between sentences and sensation. I believed that my future was located in the flagrant interstices of this relation, that an architecture capable of welcoming my essential nudity would reveal itself on the threshold of the page. I had no worldly knowledge and no aspirations towards anything that might be termed a literary society. I did not then suspect that such a society existed in the present; if it did, I was ignorant of any access to it. I needed to write in order to make a site for my body. There would be no other way to uncover my unwieldy desire. I was learning that the social fiasco of sex was not a reliable method. So many bludg
eoning projections, such petty incompetence and scorn, so many mythological charades worked to lessen the mere possibility of sensual amplitude. I would never understand sex. I could not be that thing and learn to appear to myself. Sadness always undermined the pleasure. So I decided to understand sentences. There would be detours. My own allegorical studio then contained only my typewriter, the diaries, some books, and the figures I found in them. But I was always beginning to write. On every page of the heavy marbled journal I began, heavy with stupidity. The grand tradition had dissolved and the new one hadn’t yet been made. How girlish his hand. How fresh the feather looked.
Here in the story I would go to kiss in a park all afternoon because that was the luxury I preferred, to kiss a nameless boy near fountains, then return alone to my bare hotel. It was a critical act, it was studied and researched and questioned, and it was personal. Also, delicious. I imagined that I was a part of a fête galante by Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera for example, my adventures all overhung by sensuous masses of foliage. I had not yet been exposed to the fashion that would later become so attractive to me, the craze for transforming each experience into a concept. I had just my existence and my will and something like a calling, and this didn’t trouble me, and it didn’t burden my critique. I was a girl, and my body was time. I believed in description. I would build new, ornate knowledge on the basis of this lived proposition. I mean that my shy, gawky, lusting body was constrained to undertake the ancient representation, to groom and flirt and refract as every contemporary girl seemed so constrained, to signify bounty and frailty, passivity and fate, but also at this time there was the fact that I loosely accepted the constraint. It taught me something about discipline and a lot about a history of form. Form meant my mutable body. Form could even weep. My own interpretation of the form of life of girlhood would rakishly embellish a margin of moody nonchalance, much as a pianist, whilst perched on a diminutive stool, hums a little during their slowed-down interpretation of Bach.
To visit those fountains, I preferred to wear outmoded garments that fit poorly, garments mended or taken in with large stitches or barely hidden safety pins, or lacking a sewing kit, perchance paperclips, and I liked lugubrious coats with ample hems and the wrong cut of shoulder, the fastidiously dated lapel, the cheaply glittering brooch, the long string of chipped green glass beads. I would be the girl of my notion of literature, or rather my invention of literature, since, still lacking any concept, I could only invent. My outfits and their compositions were experiments in syntax and diction. So, much as later, in a different life, I would submit my poems to collective tables and risk embarrassed exposure, with defiant awkwardness I would take my sartorial representations to the parks and boulevards, and I would kiss, then back in my room I would write little essays, such as:
ESSAY ON THE IMAGINATION
In the green shade the bird is green.
Every night has a goat in it, and a peacock and a dove.
No, that is morning.
While a man in a hotel is in a crematorium, or in the negative image of a church (I refer here to Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer’s melancholic theorizations), a girl in her hotel is free. I want to claim this word free for myself and I intend to use it wrongly very often. Here by free I mean that nothing is meant for her. She is outside history, outside poetry, outside theology, outside thought, outside money. Therefore she should claim anything: this was the fundamental recognition of my youthful travels. Freedom must be wrongly performed or it will be irrelevant. So I went to my hotel as Descartes withdrew to his Dutch chamber, in order to begin thought wrongly, to throw everything away because I wanted to begin.
You may wonder how I financed this endeavour. I gathered a sum of money working in Normandy as domestic companion to an elderly Huguenot widow of the Algerian War, a distant descendant of Baron Haussmann. Jeune fille compagne was the term. I knew very little history and certainly nothing of the Algerian War, which had not been mentioned in my mediocre education, a so-called education that had simply omitted any mention of the colonialism of the recent past. Many wars and even countries simply did not exist for me then. I was from a class that persisted in imagining that its own complacency was natural.
The widow, convalescing from hip surgery, and so requiring paid companionship, continued to wear her silver Berber bracelets, as she had since 1962, and they rattled when she gestured with her cane. This was Madame’s summer house, the place where she entertained the nearby Protestant bourgeoisie, genteel families whose fortunes were long ago founded on wine, perfume, banking, and silk. All the women wore the gold cross of Malta on delicate chains, and these crosses would often become entangled with the chubby pearls that were the second component of their symbolic accessorization, the third being the perfume of Guerlain, the great nineteenth-century house. Each of these three feminine insignia was received as a gift and assumed at puberty. In this high-society pastoral, I cooked and sewed and weeded the mixed borders, but did not have to iron, since a sturdy middle-aged woman from the village came twice weekly to perform this rite, seemingly the hot core of household stability. We discussed the day’s menus at the breakfast table, and sometimes Madame recounted stories of nighttime spiritual visions of white light. Evenings I politely served her guests. At these dinners, for obscure doctrinal reasons, I was forbidden to wear black or red, which presented me with a wardrobe conundrum, and so Madame gave me a length of cloying pink cotton piqué from which to sew my own uniform: a modest gathered skirt and matching blouse. Lapsed Toronto Protestant that I am, I executed the command obediently using a Vogue designer sewing pattern by Calvin Klein, then wore this docile costume to change the plates between courses. Seeing that I had a knack for textiles, she instructed me next to line her walnut armoires with cheerful printed cottons from the south. Beneath the hazelnut tree, as Madame embroidered bassinet skirts for her coming grandchild’s layette – ‘il faut que je finisse ce berceau … il faut que je finisse ce berceau …’ – or indoors in front of the televised Roland-Garros tennis championships, applauding Yannick Noah to the muted rhythm of thwacking balls and hushed applause, I received lessons in language, needlework, and domestic comportment. After several months of these textile instructions, my frustration mounting as I tried to type poems in rooms inevitably shared with visiting grandchildren, the summer ended, and, carrying a thick envelope of paper money and a copy of Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux I had procured in Dieppe, I left.
How did I next live my freedom, beyond the mock-pastoral kissing? Looking back to that time is like the experience of glimpsing the incipient or dissolving activity at the borders of a room when you pass into it, an image dear to Pierre Bonnard, who painted the formal decadence of domesticity. ‘I’m trying to do what I have never done,’ said the painter of those homely, askew, and yet shimmering compositions, ‘give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing.’ But where Bonnard’s thresholds are quivering with the dissolution of pattern, always about to be crossed by their spectral, colourfully dressed occupants, much as I, paid domestic companion, had bustled from task to task, a sort of thin, vigorously animated overpainting, what I entered now in my hotel was an annulment of arbitrary conduct and designation. Here I sensed the absence of the previous occupants, all of them strangers, and so featureless, and the absence functioned as a kind of invitation to the tedium of my own interior life, a tedium akin to the boredom or spacious featurelessness of the tidy yet dusty room. Featurelessness was what I craved. This room’s spiritual flatness was a matrix. I did not share Benjamin’s longing for the macabre bourgeois house, with its glossy large-leafed plants, its funereal slipcovers and curtains and carpets, all aired and cleaned and repaired twice annually, with its collections of porcelain, crowds of good family furniture, and scent of wax. It seemed to me that what Benjamin really pined for was the grotesque invisibility of the female work that maintained this mirage, whether purchased or married. I had fled that co
ntract. The places I stayed in were not very clean, and that was fine. They did not pertain to the recognizably female narrative of domesticity I despised. The open question of my future, of what I was to become, felt smooth and shadowy, liberated by these rooms into a textile-like anonymity, patterned with light strokes of pigment and splashes of unaccountable shade.
The cool threshold vibrated with sparseness. Then the hotel’s enclosed scent opened like a grove. I, a girl, exultant, crossed into the room of sentences. This room was suddenly ornate with the written vestiges of silence. No judgment, no need, no contract, no seduction: just the free promiscuity of a disrobed mind.
The room is everything that is the case. The room is everything that is time. It is entirely unexceptional. Each time, the room, this room. I fell upon it unexceptionally. I had been testing the limits exercised by the world upon my girlishness. In the world that deemed me girl, what could I do with pleasure? What could I do for pleasure? I could kiss, I could go to the library, I could study garments. I could explore the possible relationships among these three things. Several of the possible relationships or combinations were more or less interesting, for a while. In the room, though, there was a fourth thing, and a fifth. Entirely outside servitude, I could read and I could think, finally understanding the unexceptional character of these acts. Free of all personal particularity, I read and I thought. I will call it thought, though when I placed it beside the thought of the philosophers, which I unfolded improprietously from within the creased paperbacks, there was no likeness, no identity. I was not bothered. What I felt as thought was at least my own, I believed. The room was not the world, the world that deemed me thing, the world against which I continually bumped and scraped my awkward body as I attempted to move with guessed-at elegance. It was the other world. It is the case that I fell upon this other world of the room accidentally, as falls go. The room demanded no grace. It wanted nothing from me. I fell and then I dallied. The accident of this fall, which is to say, the sudden revelation of the unexceptional character of my soul, when otherwise I had been constrained to sense myself as feminine and so exceptional, and had churlishly accepted the worldly constraint, now introduced me to a more exacting constraint, the constraint of the basic and unexceptional realization of the neutrality, the indifference, the essentially dandiacal aspect of my soul.
The Baudelaire Fractal Page 3