The Death of Picasso Read online

  And what had he had for, say, an average meal, the good doctor had asked after he had cauterized and bandaged what was left of his ear? Meal, meal? He did not rightly take meals, he was ashamed to say. He lived off white wine and shag tobacco, with the occasional glass of Pernod. The doctor had buried his face in his hands. And blasphemed. We are commended not to blaspheme, he had said to the doctor.

  We are also commanded, by Nature, if you will, Monsieur Vincent, to nourish our bodies with food and not with poison. We are also commanded not to mutilate our ears.

  Raspail recommended onions for the poor as the most nourishing of foods for the least sous. And olive oil. He drew onions that were beginning to sprout. Green is the symbol of hope. And the olive jug must be green as well.

  4 FLOREAL

  Sander delights to sit suddenly and inventory his precocious and wicked past, knowing that mine is nothing like, amazed that he is shocked by it and cheerfully shocked by his amazement. Item, his best girl, as was, before she went off with hippy creeps in a tide of macramé, transcendental meditation, and organic meals that tasted like paper, sand, and whey, well he made it with her little sister one afternoon on the sly, scarcely thirteen, eager as a poesje rolling in catnip. Never mind his sister, since they were in rompers practically. He was an accomplished smoocher at ten, a rake at eleven, a Ganymed at twelve, a father, probably, at thirteen, outcoming Don Juan at fourteen. It was lovely, slordig, messy. Item, every girl in his set, too many out of it (what slobs! what smarm!), somebody’s soused mother on a bed at a party, unwashed French sailors in dingy hotels, a divinity student with halitosis and hung like a chihuahua.

  Impressive, I said, suggesting it was kinderspel and the evidence of a warm heart. A sigh and a dirty look. You don’t even think I’m a monster, he said. Dokter Tomas wanted to hold his nose.

  5 FLOREAL

  That the world is a skin of air around a sphere of rock is so modern an idea that no culture knows it. We mites, the big roaming animals, inhabit this balloon much as microbes swim about in the film of a bubble, which must have its Asias and Alps, just as motes of dust have their moons, seasons, and geology.

  The scale of ubi and quando is, as far as we know, one of the infinitudes so strangely interrelated, so perfectly harmonized, that we shall probably never perceive how time is knit with space, how the pulse of light is also the pulse of time, or how the energy of radiant stars can brake and still itself to become matter.

  The stuff of a world, ant, iron, cantaloupe, is light ash accumulated over quadrillions of quadrillions of eons. Finished time, said Samuel Alexander, becomes a place. This is an angel’s sense of things. Our attention is too frail to focus on it, however awful it is to admit that the nature of being is a boring subject.

  6 FLOREAL

  Chastity as contempt of the sensual. The word sensual troubles Sander, makes him wrinkle his nose. Chastity he may well never have heard of, though he keeps to it with a will.

  Value as the judgment of a discerning mind, not as agreeing to the crowd’s approval. Sander nods his seeing. Later: that things are what you are capable of making them. No cheating allowed.

  7 FLOREAL

  Shopping on shore. Our supplies over a choppy sea coming back. Sander took in a movie while I called friends: Keirinckx is doing some topnotch work he wants me to see soon. Bruno and Kaatje splendidly happy (Hans and Saartje crowed over the phone), but didn’t believe the USA where they’re just back from. Paulus says the summer students are duller than ever before.

  Sander’s film was a skinflick, French, in which mother and daughter seduce each other’s boyfriends: too gooey, his verdict, but with lots of girl on show, some grunty bedwork, make believe in his expert opinion, and lots of neat cars. Had I ever been to Paris? Tried to give him some idea of how beautiful it is, how congenial, how orderly. He said his friends told him it was a cruddy place where you had to beg in the underground. Impulsively said I would take him to see it. When? he replied.

  A place is defined anew even when returning to it after a few hours. My island, my cabin, my books, my sea.

  See how the book of essays will fit together. What the pastoral does in Picasso, what a still life is, how the erotic, like wild ginger in the Seychelles, thrives domestically in a cultivated ecology. Goya and Theokritos, Jarry and Virgil converge in Picasso’s last etchings. Cézanne comes from Virgil. Picasso takes up the Classical just when it was most anaemic, academic, and bleached of its eroticism.

  8 FLOREAL

  Finish painting the composition-board inner walls. Their white takes the sun beautifully. Pictures up, finally. The Marc Bauhaus calendar, several early Kandinskys thumbtacked up, arrangements of postcards.

  Whitecaps, a warmish wind from the east. A storm brewing far out, could move in.

  9 FLOREAL

  A gale drenching the windows: can scarcely see out. Began in the night. We feel wonderfully isolated. The Island of Snegren, Sander says in a radio voice, completely cut off by North Sea storm from Europe and all the continents. The population of two, Professor van Hovendaal the noted philosopher, and Alexander Brouwer, the schaamtellos tiener, asked for a statement by the press, replied that they couldn’t care less.

  We go out and secure the boat, leaning into the wind and getting drenched. Toweled down, Sander wears a denim jacket only. So dark we need lamps: a comforting and congenial light.

  Reading awhile, drawing awhile, Sander’s up every five minutes or so to peer out the windows, out the door, getting dashed with rain. As often, he pokes his scrotum, which seems swollen, unsettles his foreskin, and counts the days of his resolute chastity. Something short of two months, he figures out loud, not counting a wet dream a month back.

  Thought of Itard’s Victor, who needed to escape from time to time to bat the water of the stream and howl at the moon.

  Traverse Picasso with two vectors: the long tradition of the still life (eating, manners, ritual, household) and the pastoral (herds, pasturage, horse, cavalier, campsite).

  10 FLOREAL

  Strangeness and charm. After a convivial meal laid out in front of the fire late yesterday, the dark squall continuing, I had suggested that I read us a ghost story as befitting such a night. Suddenly, a slam of the door, and no Sander. Stood only half surprised, as I assumed he was making a dash for the outhouse. Half an hour, and no Sander. Either he was ill, or had not gone to the outhouse. Or was ending his chaste fast, more than likely. He would return spent and relaxed.

  An hour. I dressed for the solid rain and slashing wind. Rapped on the outhouse door: no reply. Inside, no Sander. Called. Walked and called. Back to the cabin to see if he’d returned. No. An uneasy dread. One side of the island under an assault of champing, raging waves, the other awash. Walked and called.

  Was sick with anxiety when I found him at the far end, standing braced against a tree, his face streaming in the beam of my flashlight. His eyes were closed, his mouth open. One hand kneaded his testicles, the other was satisfying his body’s demand with profligate frenzy. I clicked off the flashlight as soon as I saw. See you when you get back, I said as cheerfully and as normally as I could.

  Itard’s Victor, I said all the way to the cabin, Itard’s Victor, slipped loose into the elements, gone wild. Broke up two crates for the fire, got out a bathrobe and towels. It was another hour before he returned.

  Dried him before the fire while he shivered, hair, body, sex, which stood, his streaming eyes, tears as I discovered. His teeth chattered. Wrapped him in the bathrobe and a blanket. Put him in my bed and held him until he was asleep.

  13 FLOREAL

  Sander still feverish but, I think, in the clear. The gale left our island tangled with detritus, the staves of somebody’s dory, shells, limbs, tackle, nameless trash. Sea still high and boisterous, clouds scudding in glare.

  14 FLOREAL

  Calm. Sander for a walk with me to inspect the island. Though warm, and clearing steadily, insisted on jeans, sneakers, shirt and sweater. Has slept in b
ed with me since the wild night, sexless and cuddly as a puppy. Temperature normal. Will I tell Dokter Tomas? he asks. What’s to tell? I say.

  15 FLOREAL

  Fine weather again. Sander sets to cleaning up. A storm, he says, is to provide firewood for islanders. I get back to writing. Sander in jeans, as if the nudity he loved so much were ruined.

  16 FLOREAL

  We study phyllotaxis, diagramming arrangements of leaves on stems, using a string to plot the Fibonacci proportions. Sander’s good at this.

  Each species of animal lives in its own world. Each being lives in its own world.

  In Virgil the shrill cicada’s cry is the symbol of appetence. It is the edge of desire that gives the pastoral its identity. The erotic moves along fine gradations and differences, Daphnis and Chloe discovering each other’s bodies, the opposition of sheep and goats, sun and shade, summer and winter, grassland and rock, field and wood. Leporello’s classification of charms begins in the Anthology: I kissed, says Artemon, Erkhedemos twelve, when he was peeping around a door, and then I dreamed that he wore a quiver, was winged, spry, and beautiful, and that he brought me a brace of bantams, awful omen, and smiled at me and frowned. I have walked into bees swarming. Twelve! Thirteen is the age preferred by adepts, fourteen is Eros in full blossom, fifteen sweeter still, none sweeter than. Sixteen is for the gods to love, seventeen, bearding out and well hung, is for Zeus alone. At twenty they go for each other.

  17 FLOREAL

  Euphoria. Sander’s blue disc of eye is again calm, and he has returned to wearing water only. His chest runches out from chinning, heaping niftily where it reefs underarm at the nipples.

  We row in great sweeps around the island, brown as Choctaws. Sander refuses a haircut and begins to look like Victor when Itard first saw him.

  You know, he says, I’ve never really looked at things before, or tried to get alongside them in the right way. Selfish pig, he calls himself.

  18 FLOREAL

  The six essays are beginning to fit together just as I want them to. Find I can work on them all at once. I begin to find everything in Picasso in the Mediterranean past, of which he is the great custodian in our time.

  Sander, sprag imp and stinker, turns up glossy with sweat from running, unties his sneakers on the edge of my worktable, and says with bright sincerity, you can have my body if you want it. A scrunch in my scrotum, but I’m speechless. Don’t look so hacked, he says, I am the new Sander. I don’t take, I give. I figured it out: give me credit for being smart. I’ll stay horny in my head, ready anytime, for whatever.

  But I love you just so, liefje Sander, charmingly naked and good natured. You keep my imagination alive. You’ve helped me write my book, you have beguiled all our time here into a kind of ancient ambiance, Damon the old shepherd I, Mopsus the young shepherd you, full of piss and vinegar.

  I can always go jump in the sea, he says. You aren’t old.

  What if I wanted you, what would you want me to want?

  Grown people are Martians, he says. They don’t know nothing from nothing, but I mean nothing!

  20 FLOREAL

  Coffee and journal on the rock. Sander brings out second mugs of coffee. Iets reusachtigs! he says, adding a whistle and a shake of his ankle. Crouches on my knees and we sip our coffee. We could row over to the mainland and brag, he says, I mean just by walking around and laughing with our eyes.

  22 FLOREAL

  The dedication, if I dared, of the essays might be Péoi Aléxandros Pentekaidekaétes.

  30 FLOREAL

  Crushed green smell of fir needles, sweetgrass, bee balm in salty hair, tang of creosote at the roots, earwax faintly acrid, sweat licked from the upper lip, axial sweat the odor of hay and urine, olive and soda the pileum, celery and ginger the sac. You, Sander says, giving me look for look, bright as a wolf, smell like billy goat, tobacco, onions, zaad, Aqua Velva, licorice, and wet dog. Doesn’t all that hair tickle?

  1 PRAIRIAL

  It was the Englishman John Tyndall who discovered why the sky is blue. What we see is dust suspended in our shell of air, quadrillions of prisms shattering pure sunlight into spectra. Blue is the color that scatters. The moon’s sky is black, Mars’ is red.

  THE HUNTER GRACCHUS

  On April 6, 1917, in a dwarfishly small house rented by his sister Ottla in the medieval quarter of Prague (22 Alchimistengasse—Alchemists Alley), Franz Kafka wrote in his diary:

  Today, in the tiny harbor where save for fishing boats only two oceangoing passenger steamers used to call, a strange boat lay at anchor. A clumsy old craft, rather low and very broad, filthy, as if bilge water had been poured over it, it still seemed to be dripping down the yellowish sides; the masts disproportionately tall, the upper third of the mainmast split; wrinkled, coarse, yellowish-brown sails stretched every which way between the yards, patched, too weak to stand against the slightest gust of wind.

  I gazed in astonishment at it for a time, waited for someone to show himself on deck; no one appeared. A workman sat down beside me on the harbor wall. “Whose ship is that?” I asked; “this is the first time I’ve seen it.”

  “It puts in every two or three years,” the man said, “and belongs to the Hunter Gracchus.”

  Gracchus, the name of a noble Roman family from the third to the first centuries B.C., is synonymous with Roman virtue at its sternest. It is useful to Kafka not only for its antiquity and tone of incorruptible rectitude (a portrait bust on a classroom shelf, at odds and yet in harmony with the periodic table of the elements behind it) but also for its meaning, grackle or blackbird; in Czech, kavka. Kafka’s father had a blackbird on his business letterhead.

  The description of Gracchus’s old ship is remarkably like Melville’s of the Pequod, whose “venerable bows looked bearded” and whose “ancient decks were worn and wrinkled.” From Noah’s ark to Jonah’s storm-tossed boat out of Joppa to the Roman ships in which Saint Paul sailed perilously, the ship in history has always been a sign of fate itself.

  THE FIRST HUNTER GRACCHUS

  A first draft, or fragment of “The Hunter Gracchus” (the title of both the fragment and the story were supplied by Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod) is a dialogue between Gracchus and a visitor to his boat. Gracchus imagines himself known and important. His fate is special and unique. The dialogue is one of cross-purposes. Gracchus says that he is “the most ancient of seafarers,” patron saint of sailors. He offers wine: “The master does me proud.” Who the master is is a mystery: Gracchus doesn’t even understand his language. He died, in fact, “today” in Hamburg, while Gracchus is “down south here.” The effect of this fragment is of an Ancient Mariner trying to tell his story to and impress his importance upon a reluctant listener, who concludes that life is too short to hear this old bore out. In the achieved story the interlocutor is the mayor of Riva, who must be diplomatically attentive. The authority of myth engages with the authority of skeptical reason, so that when the mayor asks “Sind Sie tot?” (Are you dead?) the metaphysical locale shivers like the confused needle of a compass in “Ja, sagte der Jäger, wie Sie sehen” (Yes, said the hunter, as you see).

  A VICTORIAN PENTIMENTO

  Between writing the two texts now known as “The Hunter Gracchus: A Fragment” and “The Hunter Gracchus,” Kafka read Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale, which ran serially in The Cornhill Magazine from 1864 to 1866, when it was published with great success and popularity. A German translation by Marie Scott (Leipzig, 1866) went through three editions before 1878.

  Along with The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), Armadale is one of the three masterpieces of intricately plotted melodrama, suspense, and detection that made Collins as famous as, and for a while more famous than, his friend Dickens.

  Although its plot contains a ship that has taken a wrong course and turns up later as a ghostly wreck, a sudden impulse that dictates the fate of two innocent people (both named Allen Armadale), it is the novel’s opening scene that Kafka found interest
ing enough to appropriate and transmute. Collins furnished Kafka with the ominous arrival of an invalid with a ghastly face and matted hair who is carried on a stretcher past the everyday street life of a village, including “flying detachments of plump white-headed children” and a mother with a child at her breast, to be met by the mayor.

  Collins’s scene is set at a spa in the Black Forest (home of the Hunter Gracchus in the fragment). He has a band playing the waltz from Weber’s Der Freischütz, which must have struck Kafka as a fortuitous correspondence. Among the archetypes of the Hunter Gracchus is the enchanted marksman of that opera.

  In Collins it is a guilty past that cannot be buried. The dead past persists. Kafka makes a crystalline abstract of Collins’s plot, concentrating its essence into the figure of Gracchus, his wandering ship, his fate, and the enigmatic sense that the dead, having lived and acted, are alive.

  Collins’s elderly, dying invalid is a murderer. He has come to the spa at Wildbad with a young wife and child. In his last moments he writes a confession intended to avert retribution for his crime from being passed on to his son. Armadale is the working out of the futility of that hope.

  Kafka, having written a dialogue between Gracchus and an unidentified interlocutor, found in Collins a staging. Gracchus must have an arrival, a procession to a room, an interlocutor with an identity, and a more focused role as man the wanderer, fated by an inexplicable past in which a wrong turn was taken that can never be corrected.

  DE CHIRICO

  The first paragraph of “The Hunter Gracchus” displays the quiet, melancholy stillness of Italian piazze that Nietzsche admired, leading Giorgio de Chirico to translate Nietzsche’s feeling for Italian light, architecture, and street life into those paintings that art history calls metaphysical. The enigmatic tone of de Chirico comes equally from Arnold Böcklin (whose painting Isle of the Dead is a scene further down the lake from Riva). Böcklin’s romanticization of mystery, of dark funereal beauty, is in the idiom of the Décadence, “the moment of Nietzsche.” Kafka, like de Chirico, was aware of and influenced by this new melancholy that informed European art and writing from Scandinavia to Rome, from London to Prague.