IN 1952 James helped save from destruction Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence. Local authorities wanted to tear it down and build a high-rise, so he raised money from wealthy Americans to preserve the pilgrimage site. On the day I visited the atelier, the northern gray sky mirrored its neutral walls. A large crucifix was hanging prominently. French country chairs with straw seats, baskets of onions, dusty bottles, and human skulls were arranged in a curator’s idea of Cézanne’s still lifes. Tapestries were draped across the easel. Withered fruit and flowers reminded visitors that Cézanne spent weeks, even months, finishing his paintings. Two prints—one by Poussin and another by Delacroix—were displayed above a high shelf. The Delacroix, a triangular composition that recalled Cézanne’s views of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, was a romantic depiction of a lion devouring a horse, whereas the Poussin, a landscape of shepherds in Arcadia, was more meditative. Cézanne, we were to understand, married the virtues of these two artists and made something of his own. A dense thicket pressed against the atelier’s garret-style windows. Hidden in the corner was a tall door, only about a foot wide, through which Cézanne removed his large canvases of bathers. In the atelier there was a solitude bordering on somberness. Eating a fig from a large tree beside the entrance, I remembered a letter Cézanne wrote to his son, in which he said, “As for me, I must remain alone, the meanness of people is such that I should never be able to get away from it.”
MY LANDLADY IN PARIS says that her grandfather knew Cézanne, and that there exists a French expression—Jamais saint n’a fait miracle dans son pays—that translates as “A saint never performs miracles in his own country.” This describes the city of Aix’s coolness toward Cézanne, its native son, during his lifetime. Perhaps the same was true in the early careers of writers such as Seamus Heaney, in Northern Ireland; Joseph Brodsky, in the Soviet Union; Derek Walcott, in colonial Saint Lucia; and Wisława Szymborska, in Iron Curtain Poland—because they were poets whose poems were definite and self-sufficient, rather than incomplete, hanging in space, or lost. Pierre-Auguste Renoir said Cézanne was “a lone wolf ” and a “real person.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY for James Lord called him “an intimate of Picasso and Giacometti,” and it reported that he is survived by “his longtime companion and adopted son.” When I knew James, he was working steadily on a new memoir about his experiences as a gay man during World War II, about which he said, “I’m not holding back, though I could never go as far as you do!” When he said this, it took me a moment to understand that he meant it as praise. He often apologized for talking so much about himself, though I encouraged him to do so.
Thinking about his expatriate life, I remember an episode in the book Six Exceptional Women in which he recounts a visit with Alice B. Toklas during her final years—this was in the sixties, before James had settled permanently in Paris. We forget that Toklas lived for twenty years after Gertrude Stein died. James describes “a small apartment in an ugly modern building,” somewhere on the outskirts of the city. He finds a woman living “with regret and desolation,” but not because of the ugly circumstances in which she finds herself. He writes:
I sat on a chair by her bedside. . . . Alice asked me questions about myself, about my life in America. She said that she thought I had been wise to go back there to live. She felt that she herself had been fortunate to live away from America before it became the most powerful country in the world, because she thought it would be difficult for anyone to live abroad and find fulfillment there if he were leaving behind the most powerful country in the world. I am naturally not so sure as she was about that. I asked whether Miss Stein had felt likewise, and Alice said, “Gertrude never left home in the same way I did. She was always at home through the language, but I was at home only through her.”
Part X
A MILD WINTER has prompted the vegetation of Paris to wake up early. Since February, plum, cherry, and almond trees have been blossoming in France, and the buds on the hazelnut trees are releasing grains of pollen into the wind. Has grim winter really ended?
If the temperature is higher than twelve degrees Celsius, the bees become curious and depart their hives to gather pollen. It’s a signal that a new cycle is beginning. The drones bustle about in the hive, drawing on their reserves to feed the larvae. But what will happen if a cold snap comes? With so many hungry mouths to feed, will the reserves run out and the little colony die? A burst of life that comes too early can be hazardous for the bees. This sounds dark and theatrical, as if from a poem by Baudelaire, where the grit of life comes under the most meticulous pressure of language, and art results. Even though Baudelaire was wary of the lushness of nature (“I have always thought that there was in Nature, flourishing and reborn, something impudent and distressing”), I respect him for abandoning the decorum of the past.
As a poet, I am a worker bee beside other workers who are metabolizing language, like nectar, into poetry.
