This was the climate he created and to which
Lillian responded, the yieldingness of the body, relaxed gestures, yielding to
flow, seeking pleasure and being nourished with it, giving it to others. When
something threatened his pleasure, how skillful he was at evasion. He had
created something which on the surface seemed untainted by the anxiety of his
time, yet Lillian felt there was a flaw in it. She did not know what it was.
The flaw she was to discover was that his world
was like a child’s world, depending on others’ care, others’ devotions, others’
taking on the burdens.
He received a letter from his first wife,
telling him about his daughter now fourteen years old, and showing exceptional
gifts for painting. At first Jay wept: “I cannot help her.” He remembered
saying to her when she was five years old: “Now remember, I am your brother,
not your father.” The idea of fatherhood repulsed him. It threatened his desire
for everlasting freedom and youthfulness.
“Let her come and share our life,” said
Lillian.
“No,” said Jay. “I want to be free. I have too
much work to do. I have to take the frames off my paintings. I want them to
become a part of the wall, a continuous frieze. My colors are about to fly off
the edge, and I don’t want restraint. Let them fly!”
While Lillian cooked dinner in the small
kitchen off the studio, he fell asleep. When he awakened he had forgotten his
daughter and his guilt. “Is dinner ready? Is the wine good?”
How I wish his indifference were contagious,
thought Lillian. He can forget his daughter, and I cannot forget my children.
Every night I leave Jay’s side to go and say goodnight to my children across
the ocean. I have to give Jay the same kind of love I gave my children. As if I
knew no other expression of love outside of care and devotion.
She spent all her time consoling the friends he
had misused, paying his debts, preventing him from paying too high a price for
his rebellions.
When they first met he was proofreading in a
newspaper office. His paintings were not selling yet. The work irritated his
eyes. He would come to his room and the first thing he would do was to wash his
inflamed eyelids. Lillian watched him, watched the red-rimmed eyes, usually
laughing, and now withered by fatigue, and watering. These eyes which he needed
for his work, wasted on proofreading under weak lights on greyish paper. These
eyes he needed to drink in the world and all its profusion of images.
“Jay,” said Lillian, extending a glass of red
wine. “Drink to the end of your job at the paper. You will never have to do it
again. I earn enough for both of us when I play every night.”
He had at times the air of a gnome, a satyr, or
at other times the air of a serious scholar. His body appeared fragile in
proportion to his exuberance. His appetite for life was enormous. His parents
had given him money to go to college. He had put it in his pocket and gone to
wander all over America, taking any job that came along, and sometimes none,
traveling with hoboes, as a hitchhiker, a fruit picker, a dishwasher, seeking
adventure, enriching his experience. He did not see his parents again for many
years. In one blow, he had severed himself from his childhood, his adolescence,
from all his past.
What richness, Lillian felt, what a torrent. In
a world chilled by the mind, his work poured out like a volcano and raised the
surrounding temperature.
“Lillian, let’s drink to my
Pissoir
Period. I have been painting the joys of urinating. It’s wonderful to urinate
while looking up at the
Sacre
Coeur and thinking of
Robinson Crusoe. Even better still in the
urinoir
of
the
Jardin
des
Plantes
, while
listening to the roar of the lions, and while the monkeys, high up in the
trees, watch the performance and sometimes imitate me. Everything in nature is
good.”
He loved the boiling streets. While he walked
the streets he was happy. He learned their names amorously as if they were the
names of women. He knew them intimately, noted those which disappeared and
those which were born. He took Lillian to the Rue
d’Ulm
which sounded like a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, to the Rue
Feuillantine
which sounded like a souffle of leaves, to the Quai de
Valmy
where the barges waited patiently in the locks for a change of level while the
wives hung their laundry on the decks, watered their flower pots and ironed
their lace curtains to make the barges seem more like cottages in the country.
Rue de la Fourche, like the trident of Neptune or of the devil, Rue
Dolent
with its mournful wall encircling the prison.
Impasse du Mont
Tonnerre
! How he loved the Impasse du
Mont
Tonnerre
. It was guarded at the entrance by a
small cafe, three round tables on the sidewalk. A rusted iron gate which once
opened to the entrance of carriages, now left open. A hotel filled with
Algerians who worked in a factory
neaby
. Rusty
Algerian voices, monotone songs, shouts, spice smells, fatal quarrels, knife
wounds.
Once having walked past the iron gate, over the
uneven cobblestones, they entered the Middle Ages. Dogs were eating garbage,
women were going to market in their bedroom slippers. An old concierge stared
through half-closed shutters, her skin the color of a mummy, a shriveled mouth
munching words he could not hear. “Who do you want to see?” The classical words
of concierges. Jay answered: “Marat, Voltaire,
Mallarme
,
Rimbaud.”
“Every time I see one of those concierges,”
said Jay, “I am reminded of how in the Middle Ages they believed that a cat
must be buried in the walls of a newly built house; it would bring luck. I feel
that these are the cats come back to avenge themselves by losing your mail and
misleading visitors.”
Through an entrance as black and as narrow as
the entrance to Mayan tombs, they entered gentle courtyards, with humble flower
pots in bloom, a cracked window one expected to be opened by
Ninon
de
L’Enclos
. The smallness
of the window, the
askewness
of the frame, the hood
of the grey pointed slate roof overhanging it had been painted so many times on
canvas that it receded into the past, fixed, eternal, like the sea-shell
colored clouds suspended in time which could not be blown away by a change of
wind.
Jay was sitting at the small coffee-stained
table like a hunter on the watch for adventure. Lillian said: “The painters and
the writers heightened these places and those people so well that they seem
more alive than today’s houses, today’s people. I can remember the words spoken
by Leon Paul
Fargue
more than the words I hear today.
I can hear the very sound of his restless cane on the pavement better than I
can hear my own footsteps. Was their life as rich, as intense? Was it the
artist who touched it up?”
Time and art had done for Suzanne Valadon, the
mother of Utrillo, what Jay would never do for Sabina. Flavor by accretion,
poetry by decantation. The artists of that time had placed their subject in a
light which would forever entrance us, their love re-infected us. By the opposite
process which he did not understand, but which he shared with many other
artists of his time, he was conveying
his
inability to love. It was
his
hatred he was painting.
Jay once said: “I arrived by the same boat that
takes the prisoners to Devil’s Island. And I was thinking how strange it would
be if I sailed back with them as a murderer. It was in Marseilles. I had picked
up two girls in a cafe, and we were returning by taxi after a night of night
clubs. One of the girls kept after me not to let myself get cheated. When we
arrived at the hotel the taxi driver asked me for a ridiculously high sum. I
argued with him. I was very angry, and yet during that moment I was conscious
that I was looking at his face with terrific intensity, as if I were going to
kill him, but it was not that; my hatred was like a magnifying glass, taking in
all the details, his porous meaty face, his moles with hair growing out of
them, his soggy hair falling over his forehead, his cloudy eyes the color of
Pernod
. Finally we came to an agreement. That night I
dreamed that I strangled him. The next day I painted him as I saw him in my
dream. It was as if I had done it in reality. People will hate this painting.”
“No, they will probably love it,” said Lillian.
“Djuna says that the criminal relieves others of their wish to commit murder.
He acts out the crimes of the world. In your painting you depict the desire of
thousands. In your erotic drawings you do the same. They will love your
freedom.”
At dawn they stood on the Place du
Tertre
, among houses which seemed about to crumble, to
slide away, having been for so long the facades of Utrillo’s houses.
Three policemen were strolling, watching. A
street telephone rang hysterically in the vaporous dawn. The policemen began to
run towards it.
“Someone committed your murder,” said Lillian.
Two waiters and a woman began to run after the
policemen.
The loud ringing continued. One of the
policemen picked up the telephone and to a question put to him he answered:
“No, not at all, not at all. Don’t worry. Everything is absolutely calm. A very
calm night.”
Lillian and Jay had sat on the curb and
laughed.
But whatever Jay’s secret of freedom was, it
could not be imparted to Lillian. She could not gain it by contagion. All she
could feel were Jay’s secret needs: “Lillian, I need you. Lillian, be my
guardian angel. Lillian, I need peace in which to work.” Love, faithfulness,
attentiveness, devotion, always created the same barriers around Lillian, the
same limitations, the same taboos.
Jay avoided the moments of beauty in human
beings. He stressed their analogies with animals. He added inert flesh, warts,
oil to the hair, claws to the nails. He was suspicious of beauty. It was like a
puritan’s suspicion of make-up, a crowd’s suspicion of prestidigitators. He had
divorced nature from beauty. Nature was neglect, unbuttoned clothes, uncombed
hair, homeliness.
Lillian was bewildered by the enormous
discrepancy which existed between Jay’s models and what he painted. Together
they would walk along the same Seine river, she would see it silky grey,
sinuous and glittering, he would draw it opaque with fermented mud, and a shoal
of wine bottle corks and weeds caught in the stagnant edges.
He had discovered a woman hobo who slept every
night in exactly the same place, in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of the
Pantheon. She had found a subway ventilator from which a little heat arose and
sometimes a pale grey smoke, so that she seemed to be burning. She lay in a
tidy way, her head resting on her market bag packed with her few belongings,
her brown dress pulled over her ankles, her shawl neatly tied under her chin.
She slept calm and dignified as if she were in her own bed.
Jay had painted her soiled and scratched feet,
the corns on her toes, the black nails. But he overlooked the story Lillian
loved and remembered of her, that when they tried to remove her to an old
woman’s home she had refused saying: “I prefer to stay here where all the great
men of France are buried. They keep me company. They watch over me.”
Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words: “We
do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
Lillian would become so confused by Jay’s
chaotic living, his
dadaism
, his contradictions, that
she submitted to Djuna’s clarifications. Jay’s “realism,” his need to expose,
debunk, as he said, his need for reality, did not seem as real as Djuna’s
intuitive interpretations of their acts.
Lillian had no confidence in herself as a
woman. She thought that it was because her father had wanted her to be a boy.
She did not see herself as beautiful, and as a girl loved to put on her
brother’s clothes at first to please her father, and later because it gave her
a feeling of strength to take flights from the problems of being a woman. In
her brother’s jeans, with short hair, with a heavy sweater and tennis shoes,
she took on some of her brother’s assurance, and reached the conviction that
men determined their own destiny and women did not. She chose a man’s costume
as the primitives chose masks to frighten away the enemy. But the mystery play
she had acted was too mysterious. Pretend to be a boy, when what she most
wanted was to be loved by one. Act the active lover so the lover will
understand she wished him to be active with her. She acted the active lover not
because she was the aggressor but because she wanted to demonstrate…
Because her father had wanted her to be a boy
she felt she had acquired some masculine traits: courage, activity. When she
shifted her ground she felt greater confidence. She thought a woman might love
her some day for other qualities as they loved men for their strength, or
genius, or wit.
Sabina’s appearance, first as a model for Jay’s
paintings, then more and more into their intimate life, her chaotic and
irresistible flow swept Lillian along into what seemed like a passion. But
Lillian, with Djuna’s help, had discovered the real nature of the relationship.
It was a desire for an impossible union: she wanted to lose herself in Sabina
and BECOME Sabina. This wanting to BE Sabina she had mistaken for love of
Sabina’s night beauty. She wanted to lie beside her and become her and be one
with her and both arise as ONE woman; she wanted to add herself to Sabina,
re-enforce the woman in herself, the submerged woman, intensify this woman
Lillian she could not liberate fully. She wanted to merge with Sabina’s
freedom, her capacity for impulsive action, her indifference to consequences.
She wanted to smooth her rebellious hair with Sabina’s clinging hair, smooth
her own denser skin by the touch of Sabina’s silkier one, set her own blue eyes
on fire with Sabina’s fawn eyes, drink Sabina’s voice in place of her own, and,
disguised as Sabina, out of her own body for good, to become one of the women
so loved by her father.