Radical Shadows Read online

  May there be many a summer morning when,

  with what pleasure, what joy,

  you come into harbors seen for the first time …

  At last, he has found his art, his Ithaka: it is poor. And in truth we note that in all his previous efforts, whenever he tended towards opulence of expression, towards pompousness, he failed. Cavafy is a very different poet from, say, Sikelianos; words do not spring up from within him. It took him quite a few difficult years to come to terms with this bitter realization, to accept that with his own nature, the only thing left for him was to grab on to something and to express it in as lean a manner as possible, replacing verbal sumptuousness which he lacked with the greatest possible precision, like that of a naked rock in the light, the light of Ithaka. He had encountered along his path the Cyclops and wild Poseidon rendered in false-ringing grandiloquence—to recall the words of Apollonius that Cavafy will later cite. Now he knows they were but phantoms set before him by his own hesitant soul:

  Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

  wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

  unless you bring them along inside your soul,

  unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

  This, as well as the entire poem, is not an a priori moral injunction; it is a ripe conclusion after a long struggle with monsters. And this besides:

  as long as a rare excitement

  stirs your spirit and your body.

  This last line shows the kind of liberated sensibility that he expresses with such exactness for the first time. Spirit, body, emotion: a combination that reveals the manner in which Cavafy functions as a poet.

  Considering the long journey of this poet towards his Ithaka—of which I have given only a faint idea—I note that the surprising phenomenon in this man is that he was able to create the so very individual features of his art, not only through his gifts, but even more so through his weaknesses. This, I think, is the basis of his originality. His poetry is a ceaseless ascent over its own obstacles. The particular genius of Cavafy is his ability to step upon his difficulties and to rise up, retaining them and remaining true to himself. One marvels observing this poet who seems to start out without any talent, except the talent of persistence, gathering little by little the living elements that he can sort out from a scrap pile, then fitting them together, transforming obstacles into stepping stones, and proceeding with the deliberateness of accumulated experience. From the outset until the moment he reaches his Ithaka, we observe him as he consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or instinctively, discards laboriously and ceaselessly those elements that do not correspond to his inner reality. This is for me the meaning of the poor Ithaka of Cavafy. If we now re-read the final lines of the poem, we will hear, I believe, once more the poet’s whisper to which I referred at the beginning:

  And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

  Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

  you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

  Wise and full of experience: that is what Cavafy was indeed. Not long ago, listening to E. M. Forster speak to me about Cavafy, I experienced one of the deepest emotions I have felt recently. This elderly man recounted his memories with so much youthful freshness. We were sitting at a table in a tiny Indian restaurant. “The Greeks resemble the English, my dear Forster,” Cavafy had once said to him, “but there exists a slight difference; we Greeks have lost our capital. Pray, my dear Forster, pray that you English never lose your capital.” The writer of A Passage to India, who had been linked at the outset of his career with John Maynard Keynes, one of the most famous economists of our time, remained silent for a moment, as if he were hearing from afar the words of his friend, who knew how to speak of the “journeys” of men, as well as of places.

  From Black and White

  Eugène Ionesco

  —Translated from French by Esther Allen

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  ONE SATURDAY NIGHT in late 1982 at a tiny theater in Westwood, my friend Alina and I saw two one-act plays for children that Eugène Ionesco wrote for his daughter, Marie-France, when she was young. There was a reception afterwards in a gallery that was exhibiting some of Ionesco’s lithographs, and the man himself was present, though he did not seem to be a person who made any display of being the man himself. Alina is Romanian, and was soon deep in impenetrable conversation with Ionesco’s wife, Rodica. Not knowing how else to start a conversation with him, I asked in my hard-won Southern California French if he would please sign a poster of one of his lithographs for me. “Esther,” I told him. “Comme dans la Bible.” Francophile to the marrow of his bones, as only a Romanian can be, he didn’t miss a beat. “Ah no,” he replied, “comme dans la pièce de Racine.”

  There it is: my poster. It has hung on the wall of wherever I happened to be living for the last fifteen years: a large, roughly human form (is it a king?) outlined in thick black lines on a white background, and colored in red, green and orange (he did eventually succumb to color). At right, below, a scrawl: “Pour Esther, l’amitié d’Eugène Ionesco.”

  A year before that evening in L.A., Ionesco had published Le noir et le blanc (from which the following words and images are excerpted) in a deluxe limited edition with original lithographs (Editions Erker, 1981). It was reissued in a trade edition by Gallimard in 1985; this is the first time any of it has appeared in English. Translating it has been a way of returning the friendship Ionesco’s hasty line bestowed.

  The lithographs were made during a residence of several weeks in a charming provincial town; Ionesco was given an artist’s studio and an assistant, and gave himself over to the unfamiliar combat with line, shape and image that he found different from yet akin to his usual grappling with language. He had no illusions about the outcome. “Looking at [these sketches],” he writes, “I ask myself how Salvador Dali and Leonardo da Vinci were able to draw so well, but the universe goes on, so I believe that anyone, no matter who, can or must speak his piece.”

  These drawings are the work of a man in his early seventies, and in quite fragile health, though with a decade and a half of his life still to go before his death in 1994. Looking at them, we can ask ourselves if Youth might perhaps be nothing more than a highly effective marketing device.

  TO DRAW, PAINT OR PHOTOGRAPH, you have to know, to be able to see, to perceive: behind the reality that is there for everyone (which, true, is no more than approximately the same for everyone) lies a second reality, more subjective and therefore, paradoxically, more universal and more exact, and then, according to each person’s individual capacity, a third reality, a fourth, etc. The farther you go in the successive realities, the more of a realist you are, which is to say, the truer you are, not in the sense of conventional realism, but of true realism. There are several degrees of truth, or several depths. Several heights, I would say. But realism isn’t reality! It’s a school, a style, a manner. This sense of vision is a necessary but insufficient condition, for skill is also a factor, in other words, the art, the mastery that grows out of apprenticeship, the manual range of each artist. Everyone is an artist; I mean everyone is a spiritual being whose eye and hand are more or less practiced. Language is more or less easy: watch out for those who can’t speak, or speak with difficulty.

  What is all this around me? Why is something there? I put this fundamental question to myself dozens of years ago in a discussion with Emmanuel, a classmate at my lycée. I didn’t yet know that the same question had been clearly formulated by the great philosophers. Once it is given that something exists, a second question arises: why is there evil rather than good? The terrible wars that take place now have no fundamental reason for being. And this despite all the explanations and reasons people give: without any motive, independent nations are swallowed up. The seizure of the economy by hegemony or war is superfluous, since all sorts of exchanges can be made through contracts and treaties. Industrialization can enable us, in the long run, t
o find a way to give everyone their daily bread. Wars are what prevent the development of greater universal well-being. They drain away all the energy and wealth that could have gone toward useful activities. Not long ago, the President of a Republic received a foreign Head of State. To the question asked by the President—“Why do you and your allies wish to overthrow Afghanistan’s social and economic regime, when the Afghan people do not want you to? They are happy as they are.”—the idiot Head of State replied, “Ah non, il faut faire la Revolution.” Whereas it is obvious that that is precisely what must no longer be done, what no one must ever do again. All the reasons given for political action, historical action, are simply irrational.

  This hunger must be appeased, these appetites must be destroyed. I speak only as a sensible man. This simple, sensible language is spoken by no one or by very few people. Because it is banal, people consider it devoid of truth. Whereas the truth is elementary. I’ve already spoken of all this several times in my books. Maurice Genevoix used to tell me that I had so much good sense I seemed to be out of my senses, mad. Someone else declared that I was abnormally normal. I am a mortal who is more constantly and more sharply aware of his mortality than are many others. I had many friends I would have wanted to show my drawings to. I still have several, far fewer. Where are the rest? C. tells me, “I doubt they’re anywhere.” My turn to lose my senses: I doubt they’re nowhere.

  Ate too much at noon, drank too much beer; I no longer feel supple at all, I’m out of sorts. Maybe only for as long as it takes to digest. I start on some other drawings, my therapy.

  One cannot keep oneself from thinking, it’s been said. All right, then, let’s think. And I think, I think, I would like to think only drawing. There is always that other language, my language, the words that overrun me, the words that creep into the drawings, which can often be reduced to words.

  This character: is it a King? That thing around his head: is it a crown? He looks quite sad to me and yet I draw him in a state of joy, his advisors surround him. These advisors are unlike any others: their heads are triangles, with the wide base on the bottom. That’s one interpretation. I think it’s hard to give this drawing any other. No, these are lines on paper, lines and paper. Paper.

  From a black spring emerge, explode, several types of black and white creatures. But why only human heads and not plant or animal heads? I’ll do that another time, I hope, if Larèse loans me his studio again. Does it turn? A turning composition. I believe that the nucleus in the middle is the dispenser of life, a kind of life. (Not at all, I add, it’s a piece of non-thought. Look, there are two ovals, two little ovals, towards the top, at right and left.) But no, it’s just a carousel, like the ones at parks and traveling fairs. But the carousel symbolizes, too.

  The tree of evil, which projects its creatures. On the right, above, a triangle, a figure that is trying to escape. This is plausibly the tree or mast of evil; to the left is a devil on his seat. To the right, a triangular figure with tridents or forks for teeth, or serpents’ tongues; closer to the tree, a diabolical figure, sad, severe, but to the left of the tree, a grinning head, a second grinning head that looks like Uncle Nicou, poor idiot. Why is that triangular head, a little farther up on the left, so morose? It may be a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst; he has a kind of black boot to his right, I wanted to make it a form devoid of any sense. (How tiresome, I haven’t taken any more tranquilizers.)

  In fact, this should be a graphic composition with some black, some white and some geometric forms. I shouldn’t have put in those lines that look like noses, eyes, eyebrows. Fortunately, on the far right, a black triangle—which means absolutely nothing—supports, at the end of a chain, another black triangle. One does no more than find nature’s forms again, debased. That’s what one finds most often: triangles, rectangles, rings and thorns. I haven’t gotten to steam-powered machines, much less electronic machines. But my objects are not tools: hence their uselessness, of which I approve. I repeat myself in my drawings because nature repeats itself. Still, the inventory of nature’s forms is far more numerous, far richer. Once again, I have a plan to do better: to deform other forms. As for inventing nonexistent forms, that’s another problem, more difficult. Perhaps impossible. I’m ready for all sorts of undertakings; I will attempt the impossible. For that, I tell myself, you must not have too much science, ingenuity and ignorance of drawing will see you through. This drawing, too, is a composition, for everything starts at a center from which these forms move away. I have the feeling that it’s rhythmic. My hope is that this is all that can be said of these shapes, these lines: a rhythmic equilibrium of antagonistic figures or forms. The black part, richer. Once again, I have a plan to do better: in the black areas, you can see the grain of the stone where the pencil has rubbed against it. There is light there. Rhythm and light, as far as I can tell. That’s all, that’s how one should speak of a graphic composition, but it is imperative to make things no one has seen before, otherwise why draw: to compose the uncomposable or to compose well with the uncomposable, or to make the composable uncomposable. Theories.

  There is nothing to do, finally; one always falls back on black and white, on evil, cruelty, however ridiculous they may be. There is no good, in my drawings, or who knows, despite myself, this light that appeared on its own, the top of the bright tree. Are there really so few things that express at least what is somewhat good? If this black holds up in the light, have I nevertheless made a positive work? There is also, at right, a platform that looks like a woman’s hat. That’s what it looks like to me, but not to other people, who will see something else there. But any one of these drawings is unlikely to be looked at with the particular attention I might want. What will speak is the whole. Maybe.

  The same procedure: a black tree with black branches and black leaves, the branches that emerge from the trunk have heads, or support heads. It strikes me as funny. It may be funny. With my ghosts of Good and Evil, black and white, I will have made no more than some funny drawings, fortunately.

  Men’s heads and horses’ heads emerging from calyxes. Toys for children; it looks, pictorially, as if it’s taking flight: is it merry?

  There again I didn’t know too well what I was going to do, it was the hand that guided me, distracted me, the hand which is the rhythm.

  Too embarrassed to interpret this drawing.

  White and black. Hanged white men and hanged black men. Compelled not to admit it. But above all, equilibrium of white and black, equilibrium within antagonism. The figures, pretexts for shapes. Is this true?

  I cannot truly affirm that this drawing does not represent a tree. It is even a widower tree, an orphan tree. It bears not a single flower, a single leaf. It is alone, it has no children. No one near it. Sad, abandoned. Its own abandonment is what it offers. It weeps like a willow.

  I could put some green, red, pink on it: it would have flowers and leaves. But I can no longer lift its sagging branches.

  Yet I find it worthy in its sadness. Is it waiting for spring, even now?

  The little white spots on the trunk are the grain of the stone: it is a child of stone. Its branches don’t seem frozen to me, it is sad—but not dead or sick. Some movement. Does it want to touch the earth?

  This is not an old tree. It is an adult. It is sorrowful but severe, far from being prostrate or dying. It has a soul.

  A heart blooming at the foot of a branch that bears flowers and shoots. Beside it, other flowers, another heart, pirouette freely through the air. The light penetrates or surrounds them. A clover, larger than life, or a flower, or a heart is growing out of the central branch. Nor does the branch sink into the earth or into a trunk. The branch itself, detached, pirouettes freely.

  Not far, on the right margin, a Saint Anthony’s cross. The composition, forms and light, seems to me to be there.

  Conclusion

  What you’ve looked at: it wasn’t faces, it wasn’t masks, it wasn’t monstrous figures, it wasn’t caricatures, it wasn’t shap
es, or signs, it was nothing.

  Perhaps semblances of fleeting apparitions. Right now all is calm in the space of this mental universe.

  _____________

  Back in Paris we learn that Maurice Genevoix is dead. Two days later, we attend his formal obsequies at the Invalides, for he was a severely disabled war veteran. He was ninety years old, one of the youngest men I’ve ever known. After having finished writing a book at the age of eighty-nine and a half, he wanted to begin a new career as a painter. I didn’t see him often enough, outside of the Académie where I so rarely go. The last time I saw him, we all had to march in a single-file line from the dictionary chamber to the library. I don’t remember what ceremony it was all for. He was behind me. He started tickling me. I knew another very young old man, Paul Morand, who also died at close to ninety. He was more than eighty when he wrote one of his best books, Venise. He didn’t like my habit of wearing a polo-neck sweater to the sessions on the dictionary. He told Simone Gallimard, “Advise him to wear a shirt and tie.” Two days later, a Thursday, I went to the Académie wearing a tie, I pointed it out to him with my finger, and he caressed my cheek with such tenderness. He was my sponsor at the Académie, he and Wladimir d’Ormesson, and Genevoix was the secretary in perpetuity. All three of them asked me to present my candidacy at once, while I was very hesitant. Wladimir d’Ormesson is also dead. I’ve lost three young friends, who were among the best. Because there was a lot of opposition to my candidacy and he wasn’t sure I would succeed, Paul Morand went to get Henri Massis, who was very sick, he put him in a car and brought him to vote for me. I was elected on the first round by seventeen votes against sixteen: the decisive vote was cast by Henri Massis, a dying man. Two weeks before Paul Morand’s death, my wife called him to tell him we were going to invite him to our house in the country soon. Paul had just written me a letter saying he had no more than a few moments left in front of him. Then he had a heart attack, was taken to the hospital and did not come back.