I decided that three hundred and forty euros was too much to pay for a taxidermied bird that is a death omen and sometimes associated with insomnia and madness.
Part VI
THE CLOUDS ROILED across Paris today as if in a Constable painting, and I walked to the English-language bookstore on the rue Princesse to hear Shirley Hazzard read from her new novel, The Great Fire, about the atomic bombing of Japan. The little upstairs reading room was crowded, and it was difficult not to think about what would happen if there were a great fire there. Hazzard read a brief, painful excerpt about war and then answered questions for an hour. Since the Australian ambassador was present, there was much talk of Sydney, where Hazzard had attended school. She did not explain why it had been twenty years since her quietly sorrowful novel The Transit of Venus was published. And in each of her answers, she mentioned her deceased husband, Francis Steegmuller, the American author, translator, and Flaubert scholar.
In her memoir, Greene on Capri, Hazzard says of her friend, the taciturn English author Graham Greene, “When friends die, one’s own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers. . . . Yet I hope there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him—not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well—on an island that was ‘not his kind of place,’ but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.”
JAMES LORD speaks often about friendship. The other day, when he was sick in bed and wearing red pajamas, I visited him. His hair was tousled as he spoke, and while listening I noticed the view through a little window behind him, which I opened at his request.
One could see the Louvre on the other side of the Seine. And the ornamental gold dome of the Institut de France, which houses the Académie française, established in 1635, suppressed during the Revolution, and restored by Napoleon Bonaparte. Somehow I doubt that there are many poets among its forty members, called “immortals,” who have official authority over the French language.
James was speaking about Jean Cocteau, whom he met during the summer of 1950 at the urging of Picasso. But Cocteau “was not a generous person,” James insisted, because he had “little capacity to empathize and listen.” Is there any quality more important to friendship than the ability to listen? It is a sweet, reasonable way for us to show our love for one another. James is a civilized man with a genial capacity to listen—he is not ponderous or pedantic. As we conversed, I thought about the small group of friends and mentors who have helped me to explore the darker corners of the soul through poetry, which is one of the functions of lyric poetry. Or, to put it another way, I thought about how friendship has helped me speak to both the pleasures and pains that constitute a life. With his steady kindness, James, too, encourages me onward.
About my enemies, I have little to say. William Butler Yeats famously observed that “we make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” So if there are enemies, perhaps they reside within and are, paradoxically, a gift to the poet. Sometimes, when I read a poem, if I sense no conflicted self—insolent, prating, hurt—I’m left thinking, Is that all? I remember the metaphysical poet George Herbert, in his poem “The Windows,” saying, “speech alone / Doth vanish like a flaring thing, / And in the ear, not conscience ring.”
What matters in the life of a poet is the life of the imagination, and friendship—not bitterness or resentment—can nurture the thirsty soil of the poet’s mind. In her friendship with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop found a more autobiographical structure for her poems. And Lowell found in Bishop an alternative to the dense, symbolic early style he favored. This is no surprise, really, since the composition of poems is born out of the composition of lives. It was Yeats again who said, “Friendship is all the house I have.”
IT IS EARLY SPRING in Paris, and the Judas trees are bleeding their sublime pink blossoms. This afternoon I went looking for 14, rue Clauzel, the address of the small paint shop where Cézanne ordered his oils—burnt lake and Prussian blue and cobalt and chrome yellow and cinnabar green—to fill canvases with the unmistakable brick-shaped brushstrokes that are his signature, in mirage-like depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Château Noir, and the deep, dark woods at Bibémus where he often walked alone.
Van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, and others all displayed their work in the small shop window. This is where they started off.
“I HAVE NOT MANAGED to become intimate with anyone here. Today, when the sky is overhung with grey clouds, I see things even more in black,” Cézanne lamented. But the American painter Matilda Lewis remembers the pleasure of his company at the lunch table:
His manners at first rather startled me—he scrapes his soup plate, then lifts it and pours the remaining drops in the spoon; he even takes his chop in his fingers and pulls the meat from the bone. He eats with his knife and accompanies every gesture, every movement of his hand, with that implement, which he grasps firmly when he commences his meal and never puts down until he leaves the table. Yet in spite of the total disregard of the dictionary of manners, he shows a politeness towards us which no other man here would have shown. He will not allow Louise to serve him before us in the usual order of succession at the table; he is even deferential to that stupid maid, and he pulls off the old tam-o’-shanter,
