Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (36 page)

Aloysius studied each of the thirty-six images of the Eiffel Tower, and counted sixteen scenes near the River Seine. The colors were muted, tan, gray, and white. The puffy clouds were abstract outlines, and the autumn leaves were enormous. The tower was set in the clouds, pictured with an umbrella in the snow, and in another scene the tower was next to vents on a rooftop.

The Eiffel Tower was painted near a man and his dog on a beach, by a railroad track, in view on a river ferry, and in some scenes the great tower was barely a gray silhouette on the horizon. The Eiffel Tower was ironic in one scene, a slight dark spire obscured behind the silhouette of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.

Japonisme, the tradition, manner, and practice of woodblock prints and the
sumi-e
, or ink painting, was once a distinctive art movement in France. The aesthetic pleasure of natural motion, an image of bright plum blossoms on a black stone, or the scene of blue ravens on a winter bough, stimulated many impressionist painters, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Manet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh were similarly aroused by the art of the Japanese.

Aloysius decided then and there that he would paint thirty-six views of blue ravens and bridges over the River Seine. He told Marie about the Japanese artist and teacher Yamada Baske who encouraged him to use traces of rouge in his portrayals. Nathan only imagined the proposed paintings and yet he hailed the new series of blue ravens and bridges as masterful impressionistic scenes, and with an original composition of familiar views.

The
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji
by Hokusai had inspired many painters and artists in France. Hokusai, an
ukiyo-e
master of woodblock art prints, created ordinary evanescent and transient scenes of geishas, kabuki actors, samurai, and mountains in bright colors, an
ukiyo
, or aesthetic “floating world.” Rivière created the same number of aesthetic scenes of
the Eiffel Tower. Aloysius would continue the artistic practice and perception of scenes in a “floating world,” a double homage to Hokusai and Rivière.

Nathan located an apartment for us to rent at 12 Rue Pecquay in Le Marais, about a mile from the gallery on the Rive Droite, or Right Bank of the River Seine. The rooms were bright, and the furniture was old, worn, but tidy. The apartment was cold and fuel was rationed, but the front windows faced the sun and provided some heat by day. Aloysius painted near the large front windows over the street, and sometimes in the parks and cafés. He was dedicated to the creation of thirty-six views of the bridges in time for an exhibition that early summer at the gallery.

I wrote my stories and drank wine at the nearby cafés on Rue Rambuteau, Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, and Rue des Archives. The cafés were heated, and naturally crowded. We bought used clothes for the winter and most of our food at the bustling markets at Les Halles. Our French vocabulary was greatly increased with the names of bread, cheese, fruit, and vegetables. Some food was rationed, but we bought as much food as we could eat, an absolute visual delight. My brother was even tempted to paint blue
ravens over the colorful baskets of fruit and vegetables. Messy would have praised the daily markets as a paradise.

The Goldenberg Delicatessen on Rue des Rosiers became our favorite place to dine, and mostly we ordered goulash, or herring and latkes. The busy restaurant and kosher butcher shop nearby were new and established by Jo Goldenberg and his brothers, Jews from Eastern Europe. The more we ate there the more we were teased by the owner, an ironic gesture of native acceptance, and the restaurant became our reservation without a federal agent.

I read three books of
The Odyssey
one morning at a café on Rue du Temple, and was moved by a scene in book twenty-two.
Then Ulysses searched the whole court carefully over, to see if anyone had managed to hide himself and was still living, but he found them all lying in the dust and weltering in their blood. They were like fishes which fishermen have netted out of the sea, and thrown upon the beach to lie gasping for water till the heat of the sun makes an end of them. Even so were the suitors lying all huddled up one against the other.

The Métro at Place de la Concorde became the touchstone of my new imagistic prose and poetry. Ezra Pound conceived of his perfect poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” at that very station near the Jardin des Tuileries and the Musée de l'Orangerie. The scene of faces and spirits in the crowd was a trace of native motion and reason. The fourteen words of the poem, and without a verb, created a sense of presence, and at the same time, a perception of impermanence in the precise metaphor of petals on a wet black bough.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

I would have composed “blue petals on a wet, black bough,” a necessary imagistic motion of color in the poem. Pound created an image of a black bough. Why not blue petals? The natural motion of the concise images was an inspiration, and that poem carried on in my memory and imagination. Ezra Pound published “In a Station of the Metro” in
Lustra
, a collection of poems, in 1916. I walked slowly down the stairs of every entrance to the Place de la Concorde station and recited the poem with each access. Later, the images of that poem came to mind in every crowded station in Paris.

I borrowed copies of
Ripostes
and
Lustra
, recent collections of imagistic poems by Ezra Pound, from Shakespeare and Company, an English language bookstore and lending library. The new bookstore moved from 8 Rue Dupuytren to 12 Rue de l'Odéon, a more spacious storefront near the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Yes, the famous French language bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres, established by the lovely Adrienne Monnier, was across the street.

Shakespeare and Company was near the Place de l'Odéon. A music store, nose spray maker, corset maker, orthopedic shoemaker, and book appraiser were located on the same street. Nearby were the great Théâtre de l'Odéon and Café Voltaire, and the Jardin du Luxembourg. I had walked with my brother many times on the same streets, and compared the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis to the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris. Not a respectable comparison of theaters, of course, but we practiced the stories and similarities of two personal experiences.

Sylvia Beach smiled and told me that the great Ezra Pound had built the bookshelves in her bookstore. The poet as the builder of bookcases was not common, but at the time the practice seemed rather natural. Pound was a precise imagist poet, but not a precious poser. I learned later than he built furniture, and doubly associated with the poet as an imagist and builder. Ezra Pound created poetic images with a natural sense of presence.

Sylvia always read the books she sold and lent, and she was pleased to mention the names of many famous authors, André Gide, the novelist, Valéry Larbaud, the poet and translator, George Antheil, the pianist and music composer, James Joyce, the poet and novelist, and many other authors and musicians who bought and borrowed books at Shakespeare and Company.

Sylvia was surprised, as most people were, that natives had established newspapers on reservations, and she ordered copies of
French Returns: The New Fur Trade
, published by the
Tomahawk
. She was certain that many readers would be interested in my stories of the war and the White Earth Reservation. She had accepted me as an author, a new experience for me in a bookstore, and my only fear at the time was that she might have expected me to comment on the poetry of John Milton, or the plays of William Shakespeare.

I could have told stories about Mark Twain, Jack London,
Main Street
by Sinclair Lewis,
Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville, and Oscar Wilde in America, but instead related my appreciation for the poetic innovations and the cubist originality of Guillaume Apollinaire and the images of Ezra Pound. My declared passion for certain poets was partly to disguise my ignorance about most literature. She was truly moved by my intuitive story about the apparition and spirits at the station entrance, the “blue petals on a wet, black bough” at the Métro Place de la Concorde.

Sylvia was eager to talk about the chance situations, symbolic scenes, and magical adventures of Ishmael in
Moby-Dick.
She had recently suggested the novel to Adrienne Monnier. Augustus came to mind that afternoon in the bookstore, of course, because he had teased me many times to become a writer, and had introduced me to the books of many authors, including
The Call of the Wild
by Jack London, and
Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville.

The conversations turned to scenes in literature, and the poetic spirit of language, and were enlivened by her gentle and affectionate personal stories about the many authors who had borrowed books, and authors who had read their work at the bookstore. She sang the praises of modernist poets over the steady metronome lectures of heroic or romantic poetry. Sylvia was natural, graceful, independent, and humane, and with a perfect touch of sympathetic gestures and stories. I was enchanted by her spirit, sense of humor, and personal manner. There were many, many good reasons never to leave the bookstore that afternoon in the cold rain.

Sylvia invited me to celebrate the publication of
Ulysses
, an extraordinary, ingenious, and epic novel by James Joyce, and the fortieth birthday of the author, later that Thursday, February 2, 1922, at Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia had paid the entire production cost for a thousand copies of the novel. She told me the novel, more than seven hundred pages, was printed by Maurice Darantière in Dijon, France. Selected chapters had been published earlier in
The Little Review
, so the production of the entire novel was a very significant literary event, and more than a hundred copies had been sold in advance to subscribers and customers of the bookstore.

The Dijon printer sent the first two copies of the novel by train to the Gare de Lyon in Paris. Sylvia met the train that early morning, she told me later, and collected the first two copies of the novel. She delivered copies of
Ulysses
to James Joyce at 9 Rue de l'Université on his birthday. The author
was mystical about finances, numbers, and memorial dates. The creative order of his wordy world was restored on his birthday with the delivery of the first edition of
Ulysses.

Sylvia was very generous and appreciated the significance of that sacred union of publications and birthdays. I was moved by the gesture and became a wholehearted subscriber and active member of the lending library of Shakespeare and Company.

The coterie that gathered a few days later at the bookstore to celebrate the publication of
Ulysses
included the grand authors and painters of Paris. I was shied at first by the presence of so many great authors, André Gide, the novelist, Paul Valéry, the poet, Ernest Hemingway, the flamboyant journalist and short story writer, Gertrude Stein, the art collector and littérateur, André Breton, the poet and mastermind of surrealism and inspiration of the review journal
Littérature
, and many curators, painters, and musicians. We mingled with the artists and collectors but never encountered Gide, Breton, or Hemingway.

James Joyce was seated at the back of the store, almost hidden in the shelves of books. He was surrounded by admirers, mostly women, and by other eager subscribers to the publication of
Ulysses
. He crossed his long spider legs, right to left, and his white hands drooped over the arm of the wooden chair, the secure manner of a domestic animal.

Aloysius moved closer with the crowd and tried to greet the author. Joyce was distracted by the constant murmur of voices, the smack and smiles, and the wave of lights, and turned away. The author seemed to be in creative flight. He was not prompted or stage ready to acknowledge anyone in the crowd that night. Not me, and not the shirttail relations of modern literature.

I wanted to chat with the author about
The Odyssey
, and about our good friend the trader Odysseus. Joyce would surely have appreciated the story of the name, at least, but my comments apparently were lost in the literary rush and murmurs at the back of the bookstore. I move closer to the author, and leaned to his right ear, a native maneuver in the presence of hesitance and timidity, and whispered two lines of his new novel.
Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart
. I paused but the author was not moved by my gesture of respect.
Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon houses
. Finally he turned with caution, and caught me in a distant gaze. His
eyes were far away, only the slightest dance of communion under the thick spectacles. I leaned close once more and recounted my visual memory of selected images and scenes in the first few chapters of the novel.
Ulysses
was displayed in the window of Shakespeare and Company.

James Joyce carried the scent of wax, raw soap, the sweat of blue funk, creases of weary muscles, and marrow in the lung. His bones were decorous, reedy, weak, and obvious, almost transparent, and a glorious blush moved over his cheeks, the sunrise of his ancestors in a lazy smile. Joyce and his bones were cautious, and the ordinary slant and reach of a hand revealed a blue rise of heartbeats, the tender return of precious blood to his heart. My gratitude for the literary was unsteady that night, but the sound of rock doves and tinkers on the river stones evoked a sense of natural presence and native liberty.

Nathan introduced me to Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the prominent art collector and owner of the Galerie Simon at Rue d'Astorg. He was formal, serious, and precise. He paused near the entrance to the bookstore, and with only slight gestures explained that his first art gallery was established thirteen years earlier at Rue de Vignon on the Right Bank. Parisians observed street names, the
quartier
, or distinct area, the
arrondissement
or districts of the city, and
Rive Droite
or
Rive Gauche
, to denote social status on the Right Bank or Left Bank of the River Seine. The most successful art galleries were on the Rive Droite. The Galerie Crémieux on Rue de la Bûcherie was historic and an exception to the riverbank class and culture.