I met several passengers who intended to visit war memorial cemeteries, and to honor the remains of immediate relatives, but most of the passengers seemed to be on holiday, and boasted about their rich associations and accomplishments in business and various professions, but not the arts. The tourists were consummate by steady boasts and admissions, but most of the stories seemed to be uncertain poses of some fantastic proficiency. I never heard even one tourist mention melancholy, doubt, fear, or a natural totem in their stories. Such exclusions were sensible, no doubt, because no ordinary worries, moods, or totems would survive the great voyage of revision and conceit. We were afloat with many cocky braggers, a tourist liner of wags, grousers, and jesters.
I listened to the steady boasters and then decided to counter with my own elaborate stories. My actual recounts of experiences were not ornate enough to hold the attention of the tourist posers and gloaters. So, we participated in the liner dinner game to conceive the uncommon and then overstate the obvious. My start that night was to imagine the presence of the trader Odysseus, and to create a tricky story in his memory.
Guillaume Apollinaire became my brother in one elaborate story. The French poet was famous, of course, and died in the First World War. I did not mention influenza as the tragic cause of his death. My brother stole the Mona Lisa was the first overstatement that captured the attention of the audience at dinner. Aloysius, my actual brother, burst into laughter, and contributed an ironic gesture, a finger wag caution not to reveal too much about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Musée du Louvre. The gesture enhanced the intrigue of the story. I remembered the vaudeville comedians and actors and practiced some of the stage gestures that we had observed at the Orpheum Theatre.
Apollinaire was a poet and a fur trader, and a surreal suspect because he was born in Russia, became a citizen of Italy, enlisted as a soldier in the French Army, and lived in Paris. Pablo Picasso was also a suspect because he was a cubist painter and born in Spain. The precious Mona Lisa was rescued by the police and returned unhurt, unsullied, and with a steady, sly smile to the Musée du Louvre.
Apollinaire was a poet and soldier of fortune, and he was actually arrested and jailed for the possession of stolen art and statues from the museum. He wrote poems in the war and in prison, and was wounded as he read Mercure de France, a new literary magazine. Surely the first wound in military history associated with an erudite journal. His presence and wounds were literary events.
I slightly stained a linen napkin with red wine and wrapped it around my head to simulate the wounded poet, and then continued with a recitation of selected crude and erotic scenes of war and prison by Apollinaire. I am naked in my cell, a tomb, with the girls, clowns, and jailers. … I paused over the actual descriptive position of sex with clowns and jailers, smiled, and declared that the poems were an understatement of his fleshy experiences, and the erotic scenes were not exactly by my brother Apollinaire.
Guillaume Apollinaire was my imagined brother, of course, a poetic totem, and always a presence in my stories. I wanted to meet him more than emperors, presidents, or popes. My story that night was the first ironic and public introduction of my brother the poet of war wounds and four days in prison.
The tourist-class meals were served in the Salle à Manger Versailles, and dinners were distinctive courses of chicken, duck, rabbit, quail, turkey, pigeon, veal, kidney, and beef tongue with potatoes, carrots, turnips, leeks, and other vegetables. The Saint Tropez was the name of the other tourist-class salon, and the café was named the Rive Gauche. The service was courteous and indulgent, the complete opposite of our troop ship experiences as infantry soldiers on the Mount Vernon to Brest, France.
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Sinclair Lewis was thirty-five years old when Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott was published in October 1920. We were ten years younger than the author, and on our way to live in Paris. The book was very popular, and the author was from Sauk Centre, Minnesota. My brother bought me a copy of the novel in New York as we waited two days to board the France.
Sauk Centre was Gopher Prairie in the novel, and the main street was similar to every other small town we counted on the Soo Line Railroad between Ogema Station and Minneapolis. Gopher Prairie was probably built with white pine from the White Earth Reservation. Every board and brick of the main street was created with an absence of irony, and the tedious humdrum of manners, hypocrisy, and patriotism was reported as the grand and proper rise of civilization.
Natives had been persecuted in the name of civilization, as everyone knows, and distinct cultures were either terminated or removed to treaty reservations. The prairie, lakes, and woodland were considered vacant and available, and the original native place names were changed to accommodate the eager migrants of a new nation. The primary objective of civilization was to rename the land and cultivate a surplus of handsome corn and wheat.
Sinclair Lewis created a mundane main street of taint and remorse. The Anishinaabe, or Chippewas, were mentioned on the first page, as the minimal mirage of an ancient history. “On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flourmills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis.”
Gopher Prairie was a “frontier camp,” declared the omniscient author. “It was not a place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably.” Main Street would have been easy to close after the first few chapters, but several passengers talked constantly about the book at dinner and in the salons. So, the readable, but privileged and wearisome adventures of Carol Kennicott were worth the literary comments and conversations.
The dinner readers were mostly critical of the mores of main streets, and praised the author of the novel, but had no sense of the irony. The novel delivered the hypocrisy of the small town through light ironic dialogue and descriptions. I had talked many times about literature with my brother, mother, and uncle, of course, but never talked with anyone about a specific novel. So, that was a new literary experience with captive tourists on an ocean liner.
Sinclair Lewis was a brilliant writer, and he created a sense of main street realism in omniscient conversations, rather a tease of realism in a main street town. Native totemic realism and ironic stories were the opposite, but that was hardly appreciated by most readers. Even the mockery of smug national realism competed with native shadows, stories, and a sense of presence. I asserted at dinner that the author was much more than a mere clever critic or gadfly. He was a master ironist of main streets everywhere. Lewis wrote, “Main Street is the climax of civilization.”
Lewis described a country lake as “enameled with sunset.” The tourists at dinner thought the word “enameled” was industrial and not a clear or appropriate metaphor. The sheen of that sunset was material, not natural or romantic. The enameled lake was a material glaze rather than a reflection of nature or a totem. Lewis, the omniscient narrator, created several natural and ironic perceptions of the seasons and weather in Gopher Prairie. Carol Kennicott, once a city librarian, mused that the “snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring prairie beyond, wiped out the town’s pretense of being a shelter. The houses were black specks on a white sheet.”
Aloysius thought about the “black specks on a white sheet,” and in the morning he painted two singular abstract portrayals of blue ravens on the deck of an ocean liner, and blue ravens afloat on huge waves. The horizon lines in both portrayals were muted, the puffy clouds were blue, an abstract scene in reverse, and with an almost imperceptible trace of rouge.
Some sixty blue ravens in the second portrayal were buoyant on the rise and curve of waves, and touched with minimal traces of rouge, brown, and black. The ravens were abstract shapes, various and uneven contours, and with only the slightest lines, curves, or specks of color to suggest the likeness of a beak, claw, a raven eye, or wing. My brother created two magnificent and subtle paintings on our return voyage to F
rance. His new abstract style was original and experimental with abstract shapes and muted colors.
I read five books of The Odyssey that night in the cabin as the ship gently swayed onward to France. One section of book nineteen lingered in my thoughts. Ulysses would have been here long ago, had he not thought better to go from land to land gathering wealth; for there is no man living who is so wily as he is; there is no one can compare with him.
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The France cruised through La Manche, otherwise named the English Channel, and late that morning entered the dreary industrial harbor of Le Havre. A pilot came aboard and directed the steamship through the Bassin de la Manche. The city and enormous international port, once the world market center for coffee, cotton, and many other commodities, had become a gloomy tableau of warehouses, mountains of imported coal, rickety ships, and the ruins of the war industry.
The gray, gloomy harbor was at the mouth of the great River Seine. The same river two years earlier that carried three carved wooden boats, the Odysseus, Misaabe, and Augustus, down four rivers, the Vesle, Aisne, Oise, and Seine, out to La Manche and the Atlantic Ocean. My brother carved the boats and we christened them in combat on the Vesle. Our three boats were at sea, surely on a steady course to Portugal, Spain, or the Caribbean.
Le Havre was covered overnight with light snow, damp and cold. We boarded the passenger boat train with hundreds of other tourists, and about three hours later the train moved slowly through untold shantytowns, past makeshift covered wagons, marooned railroad cars, the shacks of zoniers, displaced workers, veterans and their families, and arrived at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. The station was dreary, and crowded with pushy travelers. Scruffy children roamed with pluck and determination, cut and weaved between the tourists, and with a sleight of hand, the blink of an eye, begged for a few coins, and then retreated to wait for the next train.
The persistent children at the station reminded me of hawking the Tomahawk ten years earlier at the new Ogema Station. We cut and cornered every passenger on the train and sold a few papers, but we were not so desperate or hungry, and had no reason to beg to eat for the day.
Our family was removed to the reservation, an empire civil war, and natives were abandoned by most democratic politicians, but never set adrift as vagrants or refugees near cities. So many young mothers and their children had lost husbands and fathers in this war and thousands of towns, churches, homes, and farms had been totally destroyed by the Germans.
I was moved by the courage of the children at the train station, and compared our experiences on the reservation to the aftermath of the war in France. Honoré, our father, worked as a trapper, hunter, and logger, and our family was poor, partly because natives had been renounced by the federal government, but we were never desolate, abandoned, or starving.
The White Earth Reservation was a familiar landscape, and became a political treaty homeland, and at the same time a place of totemic traces, native traditions, and memories of the fur trade that transcended the contempt of outsiders and federal agents. Yet, most natives on the continent had been removed from familiar landscapes and cultural places, and detained as political prisoners by the federal government in a civil war.
The zoniers could have been our native brothers, descendants of the fur trade, and veterans of the war, but we were distracted with a personal mission to discover and create art and literature in Paris. We had traversed the main streets of chance and poverty in seven distinct worlds apart in thirteen days. Native totems were the stories of the first world on our journey, the second, remains of the fur trade, and the third world was the reservation. We walked for a day down the crowded main streets of the fourth world of destitute immigrants in miserable tenements in New York City. We had arrived two days early and waited near the harbor to board the France. The tourist-class passengers were the fifth world, and the shantytown zoniers the sixth world apart. The cafés, art galleries, and museums were the seventh world in thirteen days.
Lastly, we were haunted by the misery of another world apart, and grieved for the procession of wounded veterans. Young soldiers with shattered, disfigured faces, severed arms, legs, ears, and cast in silent anguish in the waiting room at the train station. Some of the soldiers wore metal masks to disguise hideous facial wounds. We entered the waiting room, saluted the soldiers, and gave our money, only a few hundred francs, to the masked veterans. My heart ached for the wounded veterans. The war was not over in the station, but what else could we do for them that afternoon? We walked in silence to the Paris Métro.
Aloysius could hardly wait to present his new paintings at the Galerie Crémieux. The Métro train was slow, noisy, and crowded with workers, and yet we felt at home. Paris had become our new course of égalité and our natural means and sway of liberté, and more secure because of our reservation experiences. Yes, we were embraced, teased, and honored by our native relatives, by the trader, healer, chef, hotelier, doctor, and others as original artists, but the power and curse of federal agents would never enable art, literature, or native liberty on reservations. The triple prohibition of wine, whiskey, and absinthe on the reservation would be reason enough to avoid the creepy dominion of federal agents.
Aloysius pointed to our reflections in the train window, and declared that we were at last natives of liberty. That was a great moment, and a natural presence, of course, but not without a sense of native chance and trace of irony. The horrors of war had delivered us as eager soldiers to an art gallery in France.
Nathan wrote several months earlier and invited us to stay at the Galerie Crémieux. We arrived before dark and he was waiting at the gallery door. He waved his arms and shouted out his welcome and delight to see us again, entrez, bonjour, je suis très content de vous revoir.
The decision to leave the theater and reservation, the blues of our actual departure, the chance and excitement of the journey, the boasters and stories on the ocean liner came to a memorable close that evening. Only the wounded soldiers and the children at the station remained in my visual memory. Otherwise there was a sense of peace in the great warmth of the gallery. The native objects were a reassurance, and there were two blue ravens framed on the gallery wall. Nathan had decided not to sell the last two paintings, not until my brother painted more. He always wanted at least two blue ravens on display in the gallery. Nathan was a generous and trusted friend, and his care and humor were the very reason that we had dared to imagine our presence as native artists in Paris.
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ÉCOLE INDIENNE
— — — — — — — 1922 — — — — — — —
The River Seine shimmered and curved with an eternal smile, and the natural traces of that disguise were underway on the waves of winter lights. The reflections never slighted tinkers on the stone, wounded veterans, wanderers, and trusty fishermen who steadied the stream that morning.
The waves of plane leaves, swollen beams, and barges of coal creased the slow water under every bridge of honor and tribute. The ancient sources and new catch of the river, and stories of moue and memory ran away overnight to the channel and the sea.
Aloysius had started a new series of portrayals, Blue Ravens and Bridges on the River Seine, on our first weekend in Paris. We walked the entire day on each side of the river from the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris to the Pont de l’Archevêché and Pont Mirabeau. The River Seine curved to the west under the Pont Royal, Pont de la Concorde, Pont de l’Alma, and past the Eiffel Tower.
Guillaume Apollinaire had published “Le Pont Mirabeau” in Alcools seven years earlier. Nathan Crémieux read the poem out loud at dinner and encouraged me to translate the first stanza.
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
The Seine runs under the Pont Mirabeau
Et nos amours
And our love
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
The river must remember me
La joie venait toujours après la peine
Jo
y always came after sorrow
Aloysius made several outline drawings of each bridge in a notebook. He usually painted at the scenes, the actual portrayals of inspiration, but the blue ravens and the bridges were imagined and painted later. The notes were impressions, creative configurations, and pictures of the architecture and the many moods of the river. My brother traced and set the bridges afloat several times but could not decide how to create the scenes of ravens and the river.
Later that week he imagined the blue bridges afloat with mighty ravens on the curve of waves. The bridges were unmoored, and moved with the river and ravens. The memorial bridges were portrayed in natural motion, a tribute to the actual traces, totemic reflections, and impressions overnight in the River Seine.
Nathan was delighted, of course, with the description of the new abstract bridge paintings, and he was eager to schedule an exhibition of the new series. The earlier blue ravens were the first contemporary native art to be presented with traditional, ceremonial and native ledger art at the Galerie Crémieux.
Marie Vassilieff invited us to dinner a few days later at Le Chemin du Montparnasse. Since our first visit three years earlier she had created fantastic terracotta figurines, rough dolls dressed with motley, untidy material, an artistic counteraction of classical images and sculpture. The faces of the figures were handsome, some with huge eyes, more spirited than models of the ordinary. The figurines might have been the ancestors of every culture. Marie was moved when my brother told the story that our grandmother had made similar rough figures decorated with feathers and leather for the children on the White Earth Reservation.
Aloysius was eager to start the stories over dinner with an episode about the nasty federal agent with a nose for the scent of wine, the prohibition of alcohol, and politics of white pine on the reservation. I continued with stories about labor unions and our work as stagehands at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis.
Blue Ravens: Historical Novel Page 26