Sylvia was surprised, as most people were, that natives had established newspapers on reservations, and she ordered copies of French Returns: The New Fur Trade, published by the Tomahawk. She was certain that many readers would be interested in my stories of the war and the White Earth Reservation. She had accepted me as an author, a new experience for me in a bookstore, and my only fear at the time was that she might have expected me to comment on the poetry of John Milton, or the plays of William Shakespeare.
I could have told stories about Mark Twain, Jack London, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and Oscar Wilde in America, but instead related my appreciation for the poetic innovations and the cubist originality of Guillaume Apollinaire and the images of Ezra Pound. My declared passion for certain poets was partly to disguise my ignorance about most literature. She was truly moved by my intuitive story about the apparition and spirits at the station entrance, the “blue petals on a wet, black bough” at the Métro Place de la Concorde.
Sylvia was eager to talk about the chance situations, symbolic scenes, and magical adventures of Ishmael in Moby-Dick. She had recently suggested the novel to Adrienne Monnier. Augustus came to mind that afternoon in the bookstore, of course, because he had teased me many times to become a writer, and had introduced me to the books of many authors, including The Call of the Wild by Jack London, and Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.
The conversations turned to scenes in literature, and the poetic spirit of language, and were enlivened by her gentle and affectionate personal stories about the many authors who had borrowed books, and authors who had read their work at the bookstore. She sang the praises of modernist poets over the steady metronome lectures of heroic or romantic poetry. Sylvia was natural, graceful, independent, and humane, and with a perfect touch of sympathetic gestures and stories. I was enchanted by her spirit, sense of humor, and personal manner. There were many, many good reasons never to leave the bookstore that afternoon in the cold rain.
Sylvia invited me to celebrate the publication of Ulysses, an extraordinary, ingenious, and epic novel by James Joyce, and the fortieth birthday of the author, later that Thursday, February 2, 1922, at Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia had paid the entire production cost for a thousand copies of the novel. She told me the novel, more than seven hundred pages, was printed by Maurice Darantière in Dijon, France. Selected chapters had been published earlier in The Little Review, so the production of the entire novel was a very significant literary event, and more than a hundred copies had been sold in advance to subscribers and customers of the bookstore.
The Dijon printer sent the first two copies of the novel by train to the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Sylvia met the train that early morning, she told me later, and collected the first two copies of the novel. She delivered copies of Ulysses to James Joyce at 9 Rue de l’Université on his birthday. The author was mystical about finances, numbers, and memorial dates. The creative order of his wordy world was restored on his birthday with the delivery of the first edition of Ulysses.
Sylvia was very generous and appreciated the significance of that sacred union of publications and birthdays. I was moved by the gesture and became a wholehearted subscriber and active member of the lending library of Shakespeare and Company.
The coterie that gathered a few days later at the bookstore to celebrate the publication of Ulysses included the grand authors and painters of Paris. I was shied at first by the presence of so many great authors, André Gide, the novelist, Paul Valéry, the poet, Ernest Hemingway, the flamboyant journalist and short story writer, Gertrude Stein, the art collector and littérateur, André Breton, the poet and mastermind of surrealism and inspiration of the review journal Littérature, and many curators, painters, and musicians. We mingled with the artists and collectors but never encountered Gide, Breton, or Hemingway.
James Joyce was seated at the back of the store, almost hidden in the shelves of books. He was surrounded by admirers, mostly women, and by other eager subscribers to the publication of Ulysses. He crossed his long spider legs, right to left, and his white hands drooped over the arm of the wooden chair, the secure manner of a domestic animal.
Aloysius moved closer with the crowd and tried to greet the author. Joyce was distracted by the constant murmur of voices, the smack and smiles, and the wave of lights, and turned away. The author seemed to be in creative flight. He was not prompted or stage ready to acknowledge anyone in the crowd that night. Not me, and not the shirttail relations of modern literature.
I wanted to chat with the author about The Odyssey, and about our good friend the trader Odysseus. Joyce would surely have appreciated the story of the name, at least, but my comments apparently were lost in the literary rush and murmurs at the back of the bookstore. I move closer to the author, and leaned to his right ear, a native maneuver in the presence of hesitance and timidity, and whispered two lines of his new novel. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. I paused but the author was not moved by my gesture of respect. Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon houses. Finally he turned with caution, and caught me in a distant gaze. His eyes were far away, only the slightest dance of communion under the thick spectacles. I leaned close once more and recounted my visual memory of selected images and scenes in the first few chapters of the novel. Ulysses was displayed in the window of Shakespeare and Company.
James Joyce carried the scent of wax, raw soap, the sweat of blue funk, creases of weary muscles, and marrow in the lung. His bones were decorous, reedy, weak, and obvious, almost transparent, and a glorious blush moved over his cheeks, the sunrise of his ancestors in a lazy smile. Joyce and his bones were cautious, and the ordinary slant and reach of a hand revealed a blue rise of heartbeats, the tender return of precious blood to his heart. My gratitude for the literary was unsteady that night, but the sound of rock doves and tinkers on the river stones evoked a sense of natural presence and native liberty.
Nathan introduced me to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the prominent art collector and owner of the Galerie Simon at Rue d’Astorg. He was formal, serious, and precise. He paused near the entrance to the bookstore, and with only slight gestures explained that his first art gallery was established thirteen years earlier at Rue de Vignon on the Right Bank. Parisians observed street names, the quartier, or distinct area, the arrondissement or districts of the city, and Rive Droite or Rive Gauche, to denote social status on the Right Bank or Left Bank of the River Seine. The most successful art galleries were on the Rive Droite. The Galerie Crémieux on Rue de la Bûcherie was historic and an exception to the riverbank class and culture.
Kahnweiler told me in a casual conversation about his first gallery and the cubist paintings the French police had seized at the end of the First World War. The police sold the entire collection of art, more than a thousand cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Maurice de Vlaminck, at public auctions over several years.
The Galerie Kahnweiler was a German name, and that was enough cause for the police to declare war reparations. I was amazed that he was not embittered by the outright political thievery. He seemed to be more concerned that the value of the cubist art would be diminished at public auctions.
Moïse Kisling, the painter, was intense, straightforward, and resolute about his art and stories. Naturally, we talked about our evocative dreams and memories of the First World War. He was a wounded veteran of the French Foreign Legion. Nathan translated parts of our conversation, and a few days later we visited his studio and viewed some of his paintings. Aloysius was drawn to the blues, of course, and slowly moved his hands in a natural flow over the sensuous shapes of the nudes in the portraits.
Moïse had lived at Le Bateau-Lavoir, a commune with many other artists and authors in Montmartre, and later he moved to Montparnasse. The stories he told about the famous “boat laundry” residence of artists were similar to the ironic spirit of stories told by natives on the White Earth Reservation.
Moïse
was born in Kraków, Poland. Nathan mentioned that he had studied art and was inspired by impressionism. An art teacher encouraged him to study in Paris. The style of his painting was original, of course, but the erotic shapes of nudes were similar to the portraits by Amedeo Modigliani, and the character and colors were similar to the scenes of Marc Chagall. The landscapes were natural scenes in motion, waves of color, bright and spirited. The faces of nudes and other portraits were oval, calm, and weary.
My comments about art and literature in the presence of the artist or author were descriptive but never comparative. I learned to study and respect individuality, and at the same time conceded that the best stories told on the reservation were inspired and improved by many other stories. Published stories were similar to the mutable native oral stories. No author or storier could have invented the entire structure and use of language, but only the original, elusive images, and ironic scenes of characters. Painters likewise created innovative scenes and portraits with curious motions, semblance, and color, but not the actual composition of the paint.
Moïse became a citizen for his military service and wounds, and he was proud to be French. He aimed his pipe at several artists around the store, those who had not served to defend the liberty of France. Nathan translated the stories we told about our experiences of the war, and later he urged me to write the very same stories for publication. That was the first time that he had ever mentioned the translation and publication of my stories into French. The enticement was revealed at the very heart of my chat with the Moïse Kisling.
Moïse had never encountered natives, but he understood that the enemy was haunted by the fear of being scalped. The Polish, he declared without hesitation, would have been native compatriots, not the enemy, and never scared away by the Indien. He pointed in the direction of his stories and seemed to know everyone in the world of art, including the impressionists, cubists, fauvists, and surreal artists, and many art gallery owners, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Nathan Crémieux. Moïse remembered with tears of pleasure the great heart and generosity of Marie Vassilieff and La Cantine des Artistes.
Nathan reminded me later that he certainly had decided to translate and publish a selection of my new stories and some stories published in French Returns by the Tomahawk. Nathan had never published an author, but he was impressed with the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce. Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company had published several books in the past, and the most significant was Ulysses. Galerie Crémieux would be my publisher. Nathan paused and decided then and there the title of my stories, École Indienne by Basile Hudon Beaulieu.
Nathan surprised me that night. I was excited, naturally, that he would translate and publish my descriptive and ironic stories. Aloysius had already thought about the cover art. To celebrate the event we invited Nathan to dinner at the Goldenberg Delicatessen in Le Marais. We had no idea, at the time, that he knew the owner and was a regular customer at the restaurant. Jo Goldenberg greeted Nathan at the door, and teased him about crazy art and artists. Our association with the famous gallery owner was always remembered at the restaurant.
Nathan ordered gefilte fish with carrots and horseradish, his favorite, and told stories about several artists and gallery owners before the First World War. Pablo Picasso had envisioned cubism and painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon fifteen years earlier at Le Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. That radical cubist portrayal of nudes, two with masks, in a brothel, was a decadent torment to some, and a mockery of the fascination with constitution, manner, representation, and poise of brush and color.
Nathan continued the stories about Le Bateau-Lavoir, the commune of artists located near the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur. Max Jacob, the painter, created the nickname Le Bateau-Lavoir, an ironic description of a rickety laundry boat. The commune was nothing more than a ramshackle building divided into tiny inexpensive art studios. Most of the artists who lived and painted there were poor, migrant, innovative, and influenced the new movements in cubist and surrealist art.
Le Bateau-Lavoir was in ruins, without heat or electricity, and yet the artists created radical visions and conversions of portraiture and landscape that became a signature of modern art. Picasso, Jacob, Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani, André Salmon, Georges Braque, Henri Matissse, and the great poet Guillaume Apollinaire lived and worked at times at the laundry boat.
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had established his first art gallery at 28 Rue Vignon in 1907, the very same year that Picasso painted the sensational Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Kahnweiler was a regular visitor at the shabby Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre.
Nathan pushed his chair back, posed at the side of the tiny table with one hand on his chin, and waved his other hand as he continued the stories. The dramatic gestures were persuasive as he mocked the manner of Kahnweiler. Tease and gentle mockery were common practices in the new world of art dealers and gallery owners, and in that sense the galleries could have been located on the White Earth Reservation.
Picasso was slouched in a corner chair. The studio was dark, and stank of wine, sex, tobacco, and kerosene. Kahnweiler studied the five angular images of women in a brothel. Nathan touched his cheek and ear with one finger, cocked his head and moved closer to the table, pointed at the imagined easel in the story, and proclaimed with a slight accent that Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was extraordinary, admirable, and indefinable. The word “crazy” might have been heard later in a sotto voce comment. The primitive gaze, shards of angular bodies, and the ironic bunch of fruit, were not native visions or creative scenes. Cubism was in a mighty transition on the right side of the huge canvas of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. There, two figures wore ceremonial masks, and the women in the painting were much taller on the canvas than Picasso, Nathan, or Kahnweiler.
Jo Goldenberg was delighted to hear another version of the famous painter and art dealer stories, and then he teased us that native ceremonial art had never been a movement of prostitutes or brothels in brick, blocks, and cubes. Yes, but inspired native artists had created many colored horses and visionary memories on ledger paper.
Guillaume Apollinaire, Amedeo Modigliani, and many other artists moved from Le Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre to La Ruche at Passage de Dantzig, west of the Cimetière du Montparnasse and the graves of Charles Baudelaire, the poet, and the statesman Adolphe Crémieux.
Marc Chagall had already lived and worked for several years at La Ruche, the octagonal beehive studios, with other migrant artists from Belarus and Russia. Chagall and many other artists spoke more Yiddish and Russian than French. He had returned recently from the Vitebsk Arts College in Soviet Belarus. The artists in the hive forever groused about the stink of the nearby slaughterhouses.
The Pont Royal, one of the oldest bridges over the River Seine, connects with the Jardin des Tuileries and Pavillon de Flore on the Rive Droite, and on the Rive Gauche, with Rue du Bac and the fantastic Beaux-Arts Gare d’Orsay. The electric train station was completed for the Paris Exposition Universelle, or World Fair, in 1900.
Aloysius sketched outlines of the Pont Royal and the flow of the River Seine. We walked across the bridge several times that afternoon and studied the curves and weathered stone, down one side of the bridge and returned on the other. We walked along the Quai des Tuileries, the Quai Voltaire, and Quai Anatole France near the Gare d’Orsay.
Aloysius created several rough outlines of ravens perched over the tiers of four stone buttresses between the five elegantly curved arches of the bridge. Then my brother decided to paint blue ravens at the train station. There, near the Hôtel de la Gare d’Orsay, we encountered the mighty James Joyce. He lived a few blocks away and walked along the river once a day, in the late afternoon. Aloysius reminded him of our presence at the book event at Shakespeare and Company.
Joyce smiled and leaned to the side on his cane, but we doubted at the time that he recognized our faces from the bookstore. He was a spirited roamer in the literary world, and steadied the sentiments of love and death with his cane. Sy
lvia Beach once told me a story about the time she first met the author, and that became my approach near the hotel. My inquiry was the same, Is this the great James Joyce? Yes, James Joyce, the author said firmly and then reached out to shake my hand that afternoon, as he had done with Sylvia Beach. She told me his hand was limp, a boneless hand, and he wore a heavy ring on his left middle finger. Yes, his right hand moved with casual grace, but an ordinary gesture was miscarried in the hesitant reach of manners.
Joyce recognized my voice, however, and my poetic recitation of two sentences from his novel Ulysses. He was gracious, and much more pleasant on the Quai Anatole France than he was seated in a crowd of literary admirers at Shakespeare and Company.
Aloysius declared that James Augustine Aloysius Joyce shared his given name. The White Earth Reservation was envisioned in the names of three saints, Saint Aloysius Gonzaga an Italian Jesuit, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, and Saint Augustine the Blessed. Augustus Hudon Beaulieu was our uncle and publisher of the Tomahawk, Ignatius Vizenor was our cousin, and Father Aloysius was the name of the priest at Saint Benedict’s Mission.
Joyce raised a single white finger to his cheek and explained that the name Auguste was French, Augustin was Irish, and he was named in the spirit of two saints, Aloysius and Augustine. The Irish endured in the names of saints, and in poetry. Pray there are more saints in my names by heart and history, and so he counted out the most obvious given names, James the Just, James the Less, James the Deacon, and Saint-James, a commune in Manche, France. The Epistle of James, and the surname Joyce, or Josse and Goce, in Ireland, were joyous compositions of deceit and irony in literature. James of Irony, a saint to honor, and he turned to continue his walk across the Pont de la Concorde.
Blue Ravens: Historical Novel Page 28