Leonora (14 page)

16

THE LION OF BELFORT

I
N FRANCE TELEGRAMS ARRIVE
like little blue paper birds. ‘
Voici votre bleu
,' and the postman who looks like Cheval hands her a folded sheet of blue paper.

‘Come to Paris,' it reads.

‘I must leave immediately,' Leonora tells Alphonsine tremulously.

‘It may well not even have come from him,' Alphonsine grumbles back. ‘If I were you, I'd at least phone him to check.'

‘Max never answers the phone. Help me pack and get to Orange in time to make the direct train.'

Once on board, the night is endless.

As soon as she arrives at the Rue Jacob, Max confirms to her: ‘I am going to separate from Marie-Berthe. I no longer feel in the least bit sorry for her.'

There's no doubt about it, he is an arrogant man.

The shame that Max once reserved for his wife is being directed into his work. The working day lasts for ten uninterrupted hours. Leonora paints too, and writes. On the 17th January 1938, she joins him in working on two paintings –
What Shall We Do Tomorrow, Amelie?
and
The Silent Lover
– for the International Exhibition of Surrealist Art, now on show in Paris and due to travel to Amsterdam.

On entering the gallery, a young man hands each visitor in turn a lantern to illuminate the dark tunnel ahead.

‘Is this an exhibition or a circus act?' asks the patron, Marie Laure de Noailles.

Sixteen mannequins lining both sides of the dark passage represent the Eternal Feminine. The lighting focuses on the erogenous zones of the women. Brilliantly highlighted, they magnetise and dazzle the spectators.

Each Surrealist has been issued with a mannequin and, since Ernst was used to causing a sensation, he has dressed his in black and raised her skirt above her suspender belt, to display her rose pink underwear. He has also inserted a brightly lit spotlight between her thighs. A vagrant with the face of the Lion of Belfort lies on the floor, pinning the newly made widow down by her feet and staring lasciviously upwards. He wears a glove on his right hand and rummages inside the mannequin's knickers. Even Breton exclaims:

‘You have gone too far this time. At the very least, turn out the spotlight.'

Ernst's mannequin is a scandal. The photographers are fighting to get the best picture of it.

‘I live with the Lion of Belfort,' says Leonora, showing off.

Max encourages her to write more. ‘You write splendidly. Your writing saves the two of us.'

Max illustrates
The House of Fear
, which she types out in French: a horse invites her to a party at the house of a woman who appears dressed in a cape of living bats, sewn together by their wings. The lady who owns the House of Fear proposes a competition to her guests, all of whom are horses:

‘You have to count backwards from one hundred to five as fast as you can. At the same time, you have to use your left front hoof to tap out the rhythm of the
Volga Boatmen's Song,
then the
Marseillaise
with the right front hoof, and finally beat out
Where Are You, My Last Rose of Summer?
with your rear hooves. The contest lasts for twenty-five minutes, but …'

Leonora pauses.

‘Is that how it ends? Why do you interrupt the story just at that point?'

‘Because my dream ended the moment I saw the Lady of Fear.'

‘And who is the Lady of Fear?'

‘She is one of my apparitions.'

The Surrealists live in a whirlwind that breaks all the barriers. Is this really freedom? For years, Picasso's private life has caused a scandal. Every time he appears on the street, in a café, at a gallery or the theatre he creates a spectacle. The same women he paints inflate and deflate at his side, and if they don't manage to escape, they thunder like popped balloons, suddenly letting off air. Those who once gave themselves queenly airs and graces suddenly shrivel away. When Baudelaire called them adored tigers and indolent monsters, he cursed and condemned them to martyrdom. Rimbaud is another idol, dead by the time he was thirty-seven years old, a traitor to the cause and Verlaine's lover, an arms trafficker addicted to absinthe and hashish.

Breton composes his manifestos and obliges others to sign them. Others go back on their word, and he throws them out on to the street. To him, Surrealism is a way of life. No Surrealist poet is permitted to sully himself by writing journalism. If he lacks the basic necessities of his subsistence, that is his own private drama which he must experience to the ultimate degree. Philippe Soupault was expelled for both his essays and his poetry, and so was the sociologist Pierre Naville, for being considered doctrinaire. Breton was not bothered by his decision to expel either Marcel Duchamp or the philosopher Georges Bataille, whom he branded an ‘excrementalist'; or André Masson, a follower of Sade, for alleging that all an artist needed to do was to dangle a pen over the page allowing it to make lines from which the best image can be formed; or Francis Picabia for aligning himself with Cubism; or Raymond Queneau, for being overly neo-French. Georges Sadoul and Louis Aragon were kicked out for the crime of choosing to become Communists. Once outside the group the poet Aragon, with his bird-like profile, became the most miserable wretch among men.

Benjamin Péret arrived at the Rue Jacob in order to exhort Max to break with Paul Eluard: the order went out to sabotage his poetry.

‘Breton believes himself to be the great incorruptible, and exercises a reign of terror in the name of Surrealist ethics,' Max announces, clearly angry. ‘Eluard is my brother, I came to France because of him, he bought my first works and I owe him everything. In addition to all that he is a great poet, in sharp contrast to André.'

‘Are you then not going to condemn him?'

‘Most certainly I am not!'

Together with Paul Eluard and Man Ray, Max Ernst writes
The Man who Lost his Skeleton,
a diatribe against the Surrealist leader and his edicts.

Back in his room, Max is spinning the bicycle wheel he has attached to a circular bench. To him, no artist has anything in particular to boast of. At the end of the day, the source of art lies in the unconscious, and who has ever defined that with any degree of certainty? Reserved and ironic, he observes his colleagues furiously debating their ambitions, their nightmares, and their scandals.

The circle of admirers, detractors and collectors gathered around Breton and his followers is magnetic, and the painters are dependent on protectors and sponsors. In the art world, a patron is more important than a lover.

‘I can't stand Paris any more,' Max says in despair, fed up with Breton, with in-fighting, with squabbles and all the surrealists' pettiness.

‘Then we could leave,' Leonora encourages him.

When they arrive at St. Martin, the first thing they do is to hire some bikes. A bicycle is freedom. Pedalling along behind Max matches having an orgasm, for the way the wind fills her face and makes her hair wild. Sometimes Max dumps the bike, pushes Leonora into the trees and there, away from the road, takes her with all his strength. His body burns and sets fire to hers.

Once more they rent the room over Alphonsine's café: ‘This morning I found another spider in your bedroom.'

17

ST. MARTIN D'ARDECHE

L
EONORA AND MAX
find an eighteenth-century farmhouse and set about making their imprint on the stone floor and the stone bed, against stone walls, the heat of the sun inflaming their ardour. Max, who once upon a time used to say: ‘I have only ever experienced joy by rising to a challenge,' is now humbled by such happiness. His sense of intimacy is feline, he adores Leonora like a cat and he explores every millimetre of her body like a spider, licking her, distinguishing her every odour moving from the scent of her hair and her skin, tasting her mouth, tongue and tears.

‘I am so absurdly happy, I am convinced that something horrible is going to happen,' Leonora tells him.

‘So … what if we were to remain here for good?' Max suggests.

Leonora takes in a dog and a pregnant cat who gives birth to six kittens. She looks after them as if they were her own offspring. Max decides to sculpt them in stone, alongside a woman bearing a fish in her arms.

‘My one desire is to live with Leonora for as long as the world permits,' Max writes to his son Jimmy.

The world is that of Marie-Berthe Aurenche, the Surrealists, and the ominous rumour of war.

‘I am just about to set sail for the United States,' Jimmy replies.

In view of the threat of war, a great many young people are preparing to travel on board the
l'Amérique
.

Max goes to the village for cement and clay, speaks with the people there, seducing them as he seduces the friends who come to visit them here. His French is impeccable and the wine-makers assume he comes from Paris.

Leonora asks her mother for money and buys the house surrounded by vines weighed down with bunches of fruit.

‘We can go ahead and make our own wine,' Leonora proposes.

‘Yes, but we would need to grow more vines.' Max is becoming enthused.

Leonora informs Maurie that: ‘An inscription over the door confirms that the house goes back to the eighteenth century.'

The peasants watch in astonishment as a Bentley saloon grandly descends the mountainside and a distinguished-looking woman descends from the car, leaning on the arm of her driver. The man then removes a number of leather suitcases from the boot, and Maurie heads towards the farm's historic front door. Max bows to kiss her hand in greeting. For the next three days they don't go out. Then one afternoon Leonora accompanies her mother into the countryside and points out the vast extent of the surrounding vineyards. Maurie nods in agreement.

On the fourth day she departs once more, driven by her chauffeur, who had been put up in the village inn for three days without being able to satisfy the innkeeper's curiosity, since he doesn't speak a word of French.

Ernst fills the entire house with his immense presence. As a workman, he has fun mixing chalk and sand and sculpting a mermaid and a minotaur on the back-garden wall. Leonora paints a bird-lizard inside the door, and Ernst buys a wooden ladder to climb and construct his concrete sculptures: a faun and a sphinx; another mermaid with wings, her head crowned with a fish; horses with bird faces, gargoyles with crocodile jaws, dragons ensnaring calves. Leonora sculpts a horse's head, on which Max congratulates her.

‘I wish you would sculpt more horses.'

The grand bas-relief on the outside wall depicts Loplop. A mosaic with a bat decorates the floor and is complemented by a sculpted bench. The peasants gather curiously to see what will be the next imaginary creature to emerge from the walls of the lovers' house.

‘What is all this?' enquires Pierre, the grape-picker, at the sight of the sculptures.

Max explains: ‘These are our guardian angels.'

‘But they look more like devils.'

‘Not at all. They are benevolent spirits put there for the protection of St. Martin d'Ardèche! We are beautifying all our walls and doors with our mythical beings!'

Pierre warms to Max. Leonora goes to and from the village shop hardly looking to right or left. She doesn't want to risk breaking the spell and finding out that none of it is true.

She is unaware they call her ‘the Englishwoman'. Thanks to the postman they know where she comes from; he has noted the British stamps on the envelopes he regularly delivers to the farm. They know, too, that Englishwomen are free and easy, that nearly all have a screw loose, and that this one runs around in a state of undress. One midday some local inhabitants come upon them naked on the river bank. As the couple walked beside the river they had stripped off their shirts and trousers, and now, having flung themselves down on the hot pebbles, they say that the water is cold and burst out laughing, running around and splashing each other. They spend all their time in one another's arms, and their laughter echoes through the cobbled streets.

‘They are Romeo and Juliet, and their drama can only end in tears,' says Aphonsine with ill humour, given that they now come to her café less often than before. Once upon a time, they would order red wine by the litre, often one litre apiece, although sometimes they drank as many as three.

‘Ever since the Middle Ages wine has been drunk in St. Martin d'Ardèche,' Max explains. ‘Over in the Loire Valley, the future St. Martin had tied his donkey to a vine, while he made preparations for his journey, and Bourriquet nibbled some of the vine leaves. The following harvest the nibbled vine produced a bigger grape harvest. So from then on the peasants decided to spread the tale and carefully pruned back the vines.'

Leonora glories in the magical animals created by her painter and adds her plaster horse's head to their collection of sculptures.

‘They are our saints, and are there to protect us from spurned wives, hostile fathers and bad-tempered Surrealists,' as Max explains when he meets Fonfon on a trip to the village to buy bread and wine.

They watch the sky at night. Ernst knows the firmament of the stars well, for he had closely followed discoveries of the comets made by his compatriot Tempel. And Leonora always recalls Father O'Connor, her personal astronomer, which amuses him.

To paint together is to make magic together. Leonora begins her painting
Loplop, the Superior Bird
and Max asks her to paint the background to
The Encounter.
In addition to the bas-relief, Max creates cypresses using Oscar Domínguez's technique of decalcomania. He applies black gouache to paper, then presses it hard against the canvas for as long as he feels like before lifting it off. His disciple tells him it looks like a sponge. Then he works on the imprints, using a finely tipped brush and retouching them until the cypresses – or other, still more unexpected – images emerge: perhaps the head of a bird, the right arm of a woman, a human body, or a wing.

‘Look Leonora, take hold of the brush and you'll see how a forest grows for you too.'

‘What is a forest made of?' Leonora asks.

‘A supernatural insect.'

‘What do forests do?'

‘They never go to sleep early.'

‘What does the summer mean to the forests?'

‘It means changing leaves into words.'

Together they create a new type of botany, a green and disturbing microcosm, cerebral and vegetal at one and the same time. He paints
Un peu de calme
and makes a number of versions of
The Fascinating Cypress.
Cypress trees become his obsession. They unite sky and earth, and their roots excavate so deeply into the ground they disinter the origins of psychic concepts. At first Leonora describes them as the guardians of the cemetery, and now Max starts to divide them into solitary, mineral and conjugal types. One cypress may embrace another:

‘According to a Chinese legend, if you rub cypress resin on your heels, you can walk on water without sinking.'

He also recounts how, at the Front during the Great War, he would imagine the forest as people, and that forests that were bombed were sacrificed humans:

‘You can't imagine how sad those landscapes were, Leonora. The tree trunks were left still standing upright but wounded, and not even the weight of winter snow could protect them. A tree destroyed is a soldier killed by human stupidity.'

It makes Leonora realise that the desolate landscape they are painting in unison is a rupture with everything she has ever previously seen.

The cypresses follow her, they proceed together, envelop her in their embrace, she is so slender and refined that they gather her into them. Even if Leonora starts to run, the nearest cypress pulls itself up out of the ground and follows her. Should she pause, the cypress does the same, and its branches tremble as if it were out of breath.

‘Everything I do automatically becomes a forest,' Max tells her.

A new variant of natural history is born on his canvas: moss, lichen, lianas overwhelm it, and it is easy to observe how they heal ailments of the soul, for their leaves bloom inside you. Velvety moss takes up the space like a sickly and tenacious invader that finally becomes a plague.

‘I refuse to submit to discipline,' avers Max.

His spirit of rebellion is so strong, his brushstrokes pour out his rage against militarism as a way of life. Four years spent in the cavalry artillery and he constantly remembers the sergeant major bawling out: ‘No-one can take our goose step away from us!'

Max cradles nature and, when he tires of doing so, emerges to play bowls in the evening with the plumber and the carpenter who await him in the shade of the lime trees. Meanwhile, Leonora sets the table, and opens a bottle of wine so that at dinner time it will have reached the same temperature as her own blood.

Leonora works from morning till night like one possessed. Nothing escapes her. As well as painting together with Max, she poses in the early morning light in the garden for
Leonora dans la lumière du matin,
and when the sun shines in the middle of the sky, they both seek out the shade and she assists her lover in painting
Europe after the Rain
and
Swampangel.
Max can do anything he pleases. She is there as his anchor, the woman he calls
Tannhäuser.
Unwilling to be left behind, she types up her book on the Remington. It is
The Oval Lady
for which Max makes her engravings of
La Débutante, Pigeon Volé, The Fascinating Cypress,
and
The Robing of the Bride.

There is a fire burning in Leonora's belly, and she has never known anything like it before.

‘Is this love?'

Max replies that love is born of the desire for another person, and that Nietzche tells us: ‘When we are in love, we have a tendency to endow the beloved with every perfection.'

‘Then what happens when we come across an imperfection?'

‘That's when falling-out-of-love comes in.'

What has happened to Marie-Berthe will never happen to Leonora.