Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (34 page)

I slightly stained a linen napkin with red wine and wrapped it around my head to simulate the wounded poet, and then continued with a recitation of selected crude and erotic scenes of war and prison by Apollinaire.
I am naked in my cell, a tomb, with the girls, clowns, and jailers.
… I paused over the actual descriptive position of sex with clowns and jailers, smiled, and declared that the poems were an understatement of his fleshy experiences, and the erotic scenes were not exactly by my brother Apollinaire.

Guillaume Apollinaire was my imagined brother, of course, a poetic totem, and always a presence in my stories. I wanted to meet him more than emperors, presidents, or popes. My story that night was the first ironic and public introduction of my brother the poet of war wounds and four days in prison.

The tourist-class meals were served in the Salle à Manger Versailles, and dinners were distinctive courses of chicken, duck, rabbit, quail, turkey, pigeon, veal, kidney, and beef tongue with potatoes, carrots, turnips, leeks, and other vegetables. The Saint Tropez was the name of the other tourist-class salon, and the café was named the Rive Gauche. The service was courteous and indulgent, the complete opposite of our troop ship experiences as infantry soldiers on the
Mount Vernon
to Brest, France.

››› ‹‹‹

Sinclair Lewis was thirty-five years old when
Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott
was published in October 1920. We were ten years younger than the author, and on our way to live in Paris. The book was very popular, and the author was from Sauk Centre, Minnesota. My brother bought me a copy of the novel in New York as we waited two days to board the
France
.

Sauk Centre was Gopher Prairie in the novel, and the main street was similar to every other small town we counted on the Soo Line Railroad between Ogema Station and Minneapolis. Gopher Prairie was probably built with white pine from the White Earth Reservation. Every board and brick of the main street was created with an absence of irony, and the tedious humdrum of manners, hypocrisy, and patriotism was reported as the grand and proper rise of civilization.

Natives had been persecuted in the name of civilization, as everyone knows, and distinct cultures were either terminated or removed to treaty reservations. The prairie, lakes, and woodland were considered vacant and available, and the original native place names were changed to accommodate the eager migrants of a new nation. The primary objective of civilization was to rename the land and cultivate a surplus of handsome corn and wheat.

Sinclair Lewis created a mundane main street of taint and remorse. The Anishinaabe, or Chippewas, were mentioned on the first page, as the minimal mirage of an ancient history. “On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flourmills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis.”

Gopher Prairie was a “frontier camp,” declared the omniscient author. “It was not a place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably.”
Main Street
would have been easy to close after the first few chapters, but several passengers talked constantly about the book at dinner and in the salons. So, the readable, but privileged and wearisome adventures of Carol Kennicott were worth the literary comments and conversations.

The dinner readers were mostly critical of the mores of main streets, and praised the author of the novel, but had no sense of the irony. The novel delivered the hypocrisy of the small town through light ironic dialogue and descriptions. I had talked many times about literature with my brother, mother, and uncle, of course, but never talked with anyone about a specific
novel. So, that was a new literary experience with captive tourists on an ocean liner.

Sinclair Lewis was a brilliant writer, and he created a sense of main street realism in omniscient conversations, rather a tease of realism in a main street town. Native totemic realism and ironic stories were the opposite, but that was hardly appreciated by most readers. Even the mockery of smug national realism competed with native shadows, stories, and a sense of presence. I asserted at dinner that the author was much more than a mere clever critic or gadfly. He was a master ironist of main streets everywhere. Lewis wrote, “Main Street is the climax of civilization.”

Lewis described a country lake as “enameled with sunset.” The tourists at dinner thought the word “enameled” was industrial and not a clear or appropriate metaphor. The sheen of that sunset was material, not natural or romantic. The enameled lake was a material glaze rather than a reflection of nature or a totem. Lewis, the omniscient narrator, created several natural and ironic perceptions of the seasons and weather in Gopher Prairie. Carol Kennicott, once a city librarian, mused that the “snow, stretching without break from streets to devouring prairie beyond, wiped out the town's pretense of being a shelter. The houses were black specks on a white sheet.”

Aloysius thought about the “black specks on a white sheet,” and in the morning he painted two singular abstract portrayals of blue ravens on the deck of an ocean liner, and blue ravens afloat on huge waves. The horizon lines in both portrayals were muted, the puffy clouds were blue, an abstract scene in reverse, and with an almost imperceptible trace of rouge.

Some sixty blue ravens in the second portrayal were buoyant on the rise and curve of waves, and touched with minimal traces of rouge, brown, and black. The ravens were abstract shapes, various and uneven contours, and with only the slightest lines, curves, or specks of color to suggest the likeness of a beak, claw, a raven eye, or wing. My brother created two magnificent and subtle paintings on our return voyage to France. His new abstract style was original and experimental with abstract shapes and muted colors.

I read five books of
The Odyssey
that night in the cabin as the ship gently swayed onward to France. One section of book nineteen lingered in my thoughts.
Ulysses would have been here long ago, had he not thought better to go from land to land gathering wealth; for there is no man living who is so wily as he is; there is no one can compare with him
.

››› ‹‹‹

The
France
cruised through La Manche, otherwise named the English Channel, and late that morning entered the dreary industrial harbor of Le Havre. A pilot came aboard and directed the steamship through the Bassin de la Manche. The city and enormous international port, once the world market center for coffee, cotton, and many other commodities, had become a gloomy tableau of warehouses, mountains of imported coal, rickety ships, and the ruins of the war industry.

The gray, gloomy harbor was at the mouth of the great River Seine. The same river two years earlier that carried three carved wooden boats, the
Odysseus
,
Misaabe
, and
Augustus
, down four rivers, the Vesle, Aisne, Oise, and Seine, out to La Manche and the Atlantic Ocean. My brother carved the boats and we christened them in combat on the Vesle. Our three boats were at sea, surely on a steady course to Portugal, Spain, or the Caribbean.

Le Havre was covered overnight with light snow, damp and cold. We boarded the passenger boat train with hundreds of other tourists, and about three hours later the train moved slowly through untold shantytowns, past makeshift covered wagons, marooned railroad cars, the shacks of
zoniers
, displaced workers, veterans and their families, and arrived at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. The station was dreary, and crowded with pushy travelers. Scruffy children roamed with pluck and determination, cut and weaved between the tourists, and with a sleight of hand, the blink of an eye, begged for a few coins, and then retreated to wait for the next train.

The persistent children at the station reminded me of hawking the
Tomahawk
ten years earlier at the new Ogema Station. We cut and cornered every passenger on the train and sold a few papers, but we were not so desperate or hungry, and had no reason to beg to eat for the day.

Our family was removed to the reservation, an empire civil war, and natives were abandoned by most democratic politicians, but never set adrift as vagrants or refugees near cities. So many young mothers and their children had lost husbands and fathers in this war and thousands of towns, churches, homes, and farms had been totally destroyed by the Germans.

I was moved by the courage of the children at the train station, and compared our experiences on the reservation to the aftermath of the war in France. Honoré, our father, worked as a trapper, hunter, and logger, and
our family was poor, partly because natives had been renounced by the federal government, but we were never desolate, abandoned, or starving.

The White Earth Reservation was a familiar landscape, and became a political treaty homeland, and at the same time a place of totemic traces, native traditions, and memories of the fur trade that transcended the contempt of outsiders and federal agents. Yet, most natives on the continent had been removed from familiar landscapes and cultural places, and detained as political prisoners by the federal government in a civil war.

The
zoniers
could have been our native brothers, descendants of the fur trade, and veterans of the war, but we were distracted with a personal mission to discover and create art and literature in Paris. We had traversed the main streets of chance and poverty in seven distinct worlds apart in thirteen days. Native totems were the stories of the first world on our journey, the second, remains of the fur trade, and the third world was the reservation. We walked for a day down the crowded main streets of the fourth world of destitute immigrants in miserable tenements in New York City. We had arrived two days early and waited near the harbor to board the
France
. The tourist-class passengers were the fifth world, and the shantytown
zoniers
the sixth world apart. The cafés, art galleries, and museums were the seventh world in thirteen days.

Lastly, we were haunted by the misery of another world apart, and grieved for the procession of wounded veterans. Young soldiers with shattered, disfigured faces, severed arms, legs, ears, and cast in silent anguish in the waiting room at the train station. Some of the soldiers wore metal masks to disguise hideous facial wounds. We entered the waiting room, saluted the soldiers, and gave our money, only a few hundred francs, to the masked veterans. My heart ached for the wounded veterans. The war was not over in the station, but what else could we do for them that afternoon? We walked in silence to the Paris Métro.

Aloysius could hardly wait to present his new paintings at the Galerie Crémieux. The Métro train was slow, noisy, and crowded with workers, and yet we felt at home. Paris had become our new course of
égalité
and our natural means and sway of
liberté
, and more secure because of our reservation experiences. Yes, we were embraced, teased, and honored by our native relatives, by the trader, healer, chef, hotelier, doctor, and others as original artists, but the power and curse of federal agents would never enable
art, literature, or native liberty on reservations. The triple prohibition of wine, whiskey, and absinthe on the reservation would be reason enough to avoid the creepy dominion of federal agents.

Aloysius pointed to our reflections in the train window, and declared that we were at last natives of liberty. That was a great moment, and a natural presence, of course, but not without a sense of native chance and trace of irony. The horrors of war had delivered us as eager soldiers to an art gallery in France.

Nathan wrote several months earlier and invited us to stay at the Galerie Crémieux. We arrived before dark and he was waiting at the gallery door. He waved his arms and shouted out his welcome and delight to see us again,
entrez, bonjour, je suis très content de vous revoir.

The decision to leave the theater and reservation, the blues of our actual departure, the chance and excitement of the journey, the boasters and stories on the ocean liner came to a memorable close that evening. Only the wounded soldiers and the children at the station remained in my visual memory. Otherwise there was a sense of peace in the great warmth of the gallery. The native objects were a reassurance, and there were two blue ravens framed on the gallery wall. Nathan had decided not to sell the last two paintings, not until my brother painted more. He always wanted at least two blue ravens on display in the gallery. Nathan was a generous and trusted friend, and his care and humor were the very reason that we had dared to imagine our presence as native artists in Paris.

› 22 ‹

É
COLE
I
NDIENNE

— — — — — — —
1922
— — — — — — —

The River Seine shimmered and curved with an eternal smile, and the natural traces of that disguise were underway on the waves of winter lights. The reflections never slighted tinkers on the stone, wounded veterans, wanderers, and trusty fishermen who steadied the stream that morning.

The waves of plane leaves, swollen beams, and barges of coal creased the slow water under every bridge of honor and tribute. The ancient sources and new catch of the river, and stories of moue and memory ran away overnight to the channel and the sea.

Aloysius had started a new series of portrayals,
Blue Ravens and Bridges on the River Seine
, on our first weekend in Paris. We walked the entire day on each side of the river from the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris to the Pont de l'Archevêché and Pont Mirabeau. The River Seine curved to the west under the Pont Royal, Pont de la Concorde, Pont de l'Alma, and past the Eiffel Tower.

Guillaume Apollinaire had published “Le Pont Mirabeau” in
Alcools
seven years earlier. Nathan Crémieux read the poem out loud at dinner and encouraged me to translate the first stanza.