Blue Ravens: Historical Novel

by Gerald Vizenor

  Marie Vassilieff was prepared to purchase the portrait of the Pont des Arts, but we refused to accept the money. The Pont Neuf portraits were priced at twelve hundred francs, or about sixty dollars at the time, and each of the other portraits were one thousand francs, or about fifty dollars. Aloysius was actually amazed that anyone would pay a thousand francs or fifty dollars for one of his blue raven portraits. My brother was an extraordinary painter, but he worried that the sale of only one portrait was the total average salary for two weeks of labor in Minneapolis, and even more hours of labor in Paris. Aloysius reminisced that night that we had started out hawking the Tomahawk for a few pennies a copy some sixteen years earlier at the Ogema Station on the White Earth Reservation.

  Nathan invited the visitors at the gallery to gather around and honor the cubist painter Marie Vassilieff for her artistic integrity and generosity during the war to a generation of hungry artists in Paris. Aloysius removed the framed portrait from the wall, and most of the visitors signed the back of the Pont des Arts.

  Georges Braque hailed the memorable dinner that Marie had prepared when he returned from the war as a wounded soldier. The artists and others at the gallery saluted the exceptional devotion of Marie Vassilieff who had established La Cantine des Artistes at Le Chemin du Montparnasse.

  Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, Adrienne Monnier, proprietor of La Maison des Amis des Livres, and Gertrude Stein, an avant-garde art collector, attended the exhibition at the Galerie Crémieux. Sylvia told me that she was impressed with the similarities of innovative authors and avant-garde painters, and that words and images had been transformed by the experiences of the war.

  Gertrude Stein studied the scenes of blue ravens in the new École Indienne in France. Naturally, she had cornered the apparent native artist. Olivier Black Elk wore his Boss of the Plains black hat, so she assumed that he was the actual artist. The pretender was pleased, of course, to describe the new school of visionary native artists, and then wisely directed her attention to Aloysius.

  Gertrude was curious about native avant-garde artists and writers, and she was aware of my newspaper stories about the wounded veterans. I instantly resisted her direct, severe, and rather possessive manner, and changed the subject with equivocal comments. My stories were evasive representations, an abstract native practice that was suitable for arrogant inquisitors, and hardly descriptive, punctual, or dramatic. At the time my responses were effective evasions. Gertrude was distracted and looked away, but a few minutes later, as she was leaving the gallery, she asked me if I knew the young writer Ernest Hemingway. No, but she insisted that we should meet.

  Nathan sold nine portrayals that night at the gallery, including the four scenes of the Pont Neuf. He was certain the other portraits would be sold that summer. Nathan earned thirty percent of the sale price of the portraits. Aloysius was ecstatic that so many portrayals had sold at the first formal gallery exhibition. Nathan was in high spirits and invited Marie, Aloysius, Pierre, and me to celebrate the outcome of the exhibition over a late dinner at the Café du Dôme.

  Nathan was acquainted with many poets and writers but he had never actually met Ernest Hemingway. Several waiters explained that the writer had caroused at the café many times with other writers and artists. The waiters looked around the café and confirmed that the writer was not there that night.

  Marie was at my side at the table. We drank white wine and talked about the gallery and the heartfelt reaction of the wounded veterans to the blue raven portraits. She was intrigued by my new stories of the veterans. Georges Braque and Guillaume Apollinaire, she reminded me, were both wounded in the war.

  I was enticed, as usual, by her passion, generous spirit, and sympathetic gestures, and aroused by the motion of hands, the turn of her eyes, and especially the touch of her thigh under the table. My thoughts turned to the image of her reclined and nude in the portrait by Amedeo Modigliani.

  Marie reached out to hold my hand at the end of the dinner, and we walked to her atelier at Chemin du Montparnasse. I was silent, and almost breathless with excitement that night. Marie was radiant in the faint light, and the touch and scent of her lovely body lingered forever in my memory.

  Nathan sold eleven more ravenesque portraits that month, and for that reason and the revolution he was eager to celebrate Bastille Day. Naturally, he was our escort that Saturday, July 14, 1923. First we were present for a traditional military parade in the morning on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The French soldiers wore smart uniforms, tricolor sashes, white plumes, and shiny helmets, and the enthusiasm of the citizens on the streets was marvelous.

  We had not been exposed to military formations or ceremonies since our honorable discharge five years earlier, but that morning the martial music and rhythmic sound of the precision march of soldiers inspired strong emotions and memories. The banners, trumpets, horns, and national music were everywhere. We were excited and ready to become citizens of France.

  Nathan had reserved a table for lunch at a café near the Place de la Bastille, the location of the former prison, and the very site of the start of the revolution. The children wore hats, starched cotton, high white stockings, middy blouses, and danced in the streets. We were inspired and humane natives at the very heart and memory of a great liberty, the commemoration of a brutal war with the aristocratic ancien régime that began on July 14, 1789.

  The French fur trade and the coureurs des bois, tricky outlaw traders, and later the voyageurs, fur traders in canoes, had already declared by stories and songs a premier union with our ancestors the native Anishinaabe near the gichigami, Lake Superior, and at the legendary headwaters of the gichiziibi, the Mississippi River.

  The Colonne de Juillet, July Column, a monument dead center of the square, was created to commemorate the stories of the prison, the visual Storming of the Bastille, and the inevitable war with l’ancien régime. The Génie de la Liberté, the Spirit of Freedom, was a golden statue, a winged spirit, mounted on the crown of the great column at the Place de la Bastille. Together we saluted the golden spirit of the Révolution française and the esprit de corps of liberté in France. Then, of course, we ordered our lunch to avoid the crowds. More than eight thousand citizens were there that morning of the French Revolution in 1789.

  Singular names of the dead, golden statues, and marvelous state monuments were much easier to remember than the abstract cause, excuse, and fury of revolutions. Everyone was prepared for the grand celebration of the insurgence, revolution, and liberty, but no one was ready to remove the partisan shrouds of slaughter, and recount the actual cadavers of sovereignty abandoned in mortuaries and morgues.

  Aloysius outlined an enormous blue raven on the column, and native visionary wings replaced the golden wings of the Génie de la Liberté. No one is prepared for revolution or war, or for the revisions of peace, but only for the celebration of victories and surrender treaties. We were not prepared for war, and we were never prepared to live on federal reservations. We learned to evade dominance with ironic and visionary stories. We became creative artists, a writer and a painter, and conceived of our sense of liberté in Paris. The world of creative art and literature was our revolution, our sense of native presence and sanctuary.

  I was a native literary expatriate, not an exile. My brother was a visionary expatriate painter, not an exile. We created our native sense of presence with imagination and a sense of chance, and not with the sorrow of lost traditions. Yes, we were exiles on a federal reservation but not as soldiers, and we were never exiles in Paris. So, we were expatriates in the City of Light, in the city of avant-garde art and literature. Paris was our sense of presence and liberty.

  Nathan told stories about the revolution over lunch, and then continued that afternoon as we walked along the River Seine. Most of his stories were connected to sites on the river, the actual scenes of the Révolution française. The stories were elusive and ironic, but not obscure, and celebrated the anxious citizens who had end
ured the curse of power.

  Bastille Day continued into the night, and we were ready and grateful to be part of the excitement and celebrations. Nathan had invited Marie and Pierre to a special dinner celebration at the Café du Dôme. The waiter secured one round table and five wicker chairs on the terrace, and we sat close to each other, drank wine, and shouted to be heard over the rush and roar of the celebrants.

  The Boulevard du Montparnasse was packed with several hundred carousers, and the human waves surged from one celebrity café that night directly across the boulevard to the next, from the Café du Dôme to La Rotonde, and to the new Le Jockey. Chinese lanterns decorated the trees on the boulevard, and the busy intersection with Boulevard Raspail. Music, poetry, and song were heard in every direction that night.

  Bastille Day was more than a celebration of the Révolution française, the day was a national rave of the spectacular, not only liberty, but the erotic and cultural excitement of the crowds, the rush of promises, art, literature, music, and sensational adventures of stories, memory, and cultural liberty.

  Nathan ordered seven carafes of wine, and we toasted every memorable poet and novelist we could name. Apollinaire, Pound, James Joyce, of course, and Blaise Cendrars. Herman Melville, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis were my only advantage in the author name game. Everyone at the table named at least a dozen authors, and then we turned to toast artists.

  Nathan raised his glass to honor the marvelous conception of blue ravens by Aloysius. I raised my glass to Marie, of course, and then Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall. Many artists were named and then we toasted the Révolution française. I was tipsy, excited, delighted by the frenzy, and the natural sense of liberty, and yet cautious enough never to abuse the gentle affection of Marie.

  We drank more than we ate, and then we decided to walk on the boulevard with the lively celebrants. Nathan pointed to the other side of the boulevard, so we entered the great waves of carousers, and docked together near La Rotonde. Nathan asked and the waiter reported with a wave of his hand that Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway had been seen at the café that night.

  Gertrude was hardly worth the rush and shoulder of sweaty bodies through the throng of the café, only to tolerate the praise of native pretenders, but the search for the endorsed author became an ironic diversion. There were many authors, poets, and painters gathered around tables at La Rotonde, but we never found Ernest Hemingway. He was not there, and we learned later that the author was at the bullfights in Spain.

  Malcolm Cowley, however, was there that night, and inspired sensational stories about the sudden and unprovoked assault on the proprietor of La Rotonde. Nathan and Marie had heard the name of the young man, and remembered that he was interested in Dada, an ironic and absurd art movement, and the new theories of surrealism by André Breton, but he became famous for his gesture of realism that night.

  Cowley had been drinking, of course, and probably made too many toasts to authors, when a spirited discussion turned to accusations that the proprietor was a mouchard, an informer. More than five hundred celebrants were there, and most of them heard about the encounter that night at La Rotonde. Cowley actually shouted petit mouchard, an insult that the proprietor was small and had informed on the café patrons for the police.

  Cowley rushed forward and struck the proprietor on the jaw, a glancing blow that became a memorable literary story. Cowley was seized by two policemen and marched to a nearby police station. He told the actual story of the assault to André Salmon, the poet and art critic, who must have recounted the occurrence as a cubist portrayal of a revolution against the petit mouchard on Bastille Day.

  › 24 ‹

  MUTILÉS DE GUERRE

  — — — — — — — 1924 — — — — — — —

  Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu was a visionary painter inspired by natural motion and waves of color, by abstract contours, shadows, and that marvelous brush of flight in the original portrayals by native stone, hide, bark, and ledger artists, and by the ethereal succession of blues in scenes by Marc Chagall.

  Painters of this blue arc created evocative curves, muted hues of presence, green rabbis, the ghostly heart of blue ravens, red nudes, magical flight, tender guises, the reverie of native motion on the White Earth Reservation, and trusty portrayals at Vitebsk on the Pale of Settlement. These marvelous scenes were more memorable than the churchy, cultural, and mundane ethnographic duty of naturalism and authenticity.

  Aloysius and Chagall were enlivened by the artistry of natural motion, and they created visionary traces of state exclaves, military outposts, traders, soldiers, shtetls, violinists, green faces, blue statues, bridges, synagogues, passenger trains, hotels, and hospitals, the mighty Dvina River, and headwaters of the Mississippi River. These creative scenes were natural unions of visionary art and community.

  Chagall once lived and painted great visionary scenes in a shabby studio at La Ruche, the legendary colony of expatriate artists at Montparnasse. Aloysius first painted at the actual scenes of his portrayals on the reservation, in the livery stable, at the train station, near the rivers, and then at the front window of our apartment on Rue Pecquay in Le Marais.

  Chagall had endured poverty, bigotry, and the persecution of governments, and yet he was encouraged by the great promises of the Communist Party and the Russian Revolution. Jews would be respected as citizens and granted liberty. He was surely discouraged by the trivial politics and factions of the revolutionary bureaucracy, and returned to the casual wiles and cultural teases of expatriate artists at La Ruche.

  Paris was the magical sleeve of visual memories at the time, painterly scenes of exotic feigns, avian adventure, intrigues, ruses, tribute, and states of melancholy. Chagall was never secure in any country as an artist and a Jew. The colors and contours of faces in his magical paintings were sacred waves of light, the crucial motion of liberty, and the mysterious traces and cues of evolution and family.

  Chagall created brilliant scenes that lingered in my dreams and memory, and these three especially: The Violinist, with a fantastic green face, I and the Village, a magical mutation and elaboration of sentiments and gestures, and later the elegant, sensual, and lasting affection in The Birthday.

  Nathan was mainly moved by three other portrayals by Chagall, Adam and Eve, The Soldier Drinks, To Russia, with Asses and Others, and The Cattle Dealer. Blaise Cendrars, the hasty poet and novelist who lost an arm in the war, provided the title, To Russia, with Asses and Others, a portrayal of a rouge cow, a blue church, a perforated figure with a bucket in the dark, and a detached head afloat. Nathan first saw these paintings before the war at La Ruche. He had visited several artists at the colony, and told stories about Blaise Cendrars and Marc Chagall.

  Cendrars was one of the first artists to visit Chagall in the early years at La Ruche. The poet roared with laughter, and teased his new friend about prostitutes and piety. They gathered at cafés and bars with hundreds of other expatriate artists. La Ruche was indeed the hive of wild, inspired, and visionary painters, poets, and sculptors. Le Bateau-Lavoir was another painterly lair in Montmartre. These two shabby unheated structures actually housed many of the great expatriate painters of the century and stimulated an incredible movement of visionary art and avant-garde art in Paris.

  Amedeo Modigliani created portraits of lovers and more than a dozen poets and painters, such as Moïse Kisling, Pablo Picasso, and the singular oval face, elongated nose, cocked eyes, and narrow jaw of Blaise Cendrars. The poet in turn created a fantastic imagistic poem about Marc Chagall.

  He’s asleep

  He wakes up

  Suddenly, he paints

  He takes a church and paints with a church

  He takes a cow and paints with a cow

  Chagall moved back to paint in Russia, and at the end of the war taught art in his hometown of Vitebsk, and then exhibited his recent paintings in Berlin. He returned to La Ruche nine years later and discovered that hundreds of stored paintings h
ad vanished in his absence. Cendrars, one of his closest friends, was accused of betrayal and blamed for the disappearance of the paintings. Cendrars denied the accusation, but the lingering doubts ended the friendship.

  Nathan told me as many stories about poets and novelists as he recounted about expatriate painters. Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire were the first creative writers to promote the avant-garde artists and styles of cubism, that artistic resistance to romantic scenes and perspectives, and created only outline dimensions similar to the abstract pictures by native artists.

  Nathan related with conviction the prominent resistance to despotic empire politics, colonialism, the savagery of war, and the artistic resistance to the fakery of nationalism and notions of enlightenment. The obvious artistic and literary connections were the radical aspects of cubism, avant-garde, and geometric portrayals. Even so, many expatriate artists served in the military to defend the liberty of the French Third Republic.

  Cendrars, for instance, was born bourgeois in Switzerland, and served in the French Foreign Legion. He lost his right arm early in the First World War at the First Battle of Champagne. He became a citizen of France.

  Apollinaire celebrated the abstract dimensions and mutations of representation in cubist art and poetry. Painters fragmented the forms of perspective, and he changed the stance and stay of words in poetry. He was born Wilhelm Apolinary Kostrowicki in Russia, and changed his Polish name and moved to France. The poet survived shrapnel wounds to his head, and died of influenza shortly before the end of the war. He was honored at death by painters and poets and buried at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

  Apollinaire and Cendrars and many other soldiers were the actual mutilés de guerre in the war movie J’accuse directed by Abel Gance. The narrator in the movie hallucinated dead soldiers revived in the grave, and in motion on the road. André and Henri, the masked mutilés de guerre veterans and shy fishermen at the Quai des Grands-Augustins, were in the very same movie but had not met the two writers during the production of the cemetery scenes. Cendrars was pictured in a ghostly procession with bandages unfurled on the stump of his right arm. Apollinaire was cast in scenes with bandages over the actual wounds on his head.