Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (37 page)

Kahnweiler told me in a casual conversation about his first gallery and the cubist paintings the French police had seized at the end of the First World War. The police sold the entire collection of art, more than a thousand cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Maurice de Vlaminck, at public auctions over several years.

The Galerie Kahnweiler was a German name, and that was enough cause for the police to declare war reparations. I was amazed that he was not embittered by the outright political thievery. He seemed to be more concerned that the value of the cubist art would be diminished at public auctions.

Moïse Kisling, the painter, was intense, straightforward, and resolute about his art and stories. Naturally, we talked about our evocative dreams and memories of the First World War. He was a wounded veteran of the
French Foreign Legion. Nathan translated parts of our conversation, and a few days later we visited his studio and viewed some of his paintings. Aloysius was drawn to the blues, of course, and slowly moved his hands in a natural flow over the sensuous shapes of the nudes in the portraits.

Moïse had lived at Le Bateau-Lavoir, a commune with many other artists and authors in Montmartre, and later he moved to Montparnasse. The stories he told about the famous “boat laundry” residence of artists were similar to the ironic spirit of stories told by natives on the White Earth Reservation.

Moïse was born in Kraków, Poland. Nathan mentioned that he had studied art and was inspired by impressionism. An art teacher encouraged him to study in Paris. The style of his painting was original, of course, but the erotic shapes of nudes were similar to the portraits by Amedeo Modigliani, and the character and colors were similar to the scenes of Marc Chagall. The landscapes were natural scenes in motion, waves of color, bright and spirited. The faces of nudes and other portraits were oval, calm, and weary.

My comments about art and literature in the presence of the artist or author were descriptive but never comparative. I learned to study and respect individuality, and at the same time conceded that the best stories told on the reservation were inspired and improved by many other stories. Published stories were similar to the mutable native oral stories. No author or storier could have invented the entire structure and use of language, but only the original, elusive images, and ironic scenes of characters. Painters likewise created innovative scenes and portraits with curious motions, semblance, and color, but not the actual composition of the paint.

Moïse became a citizen for his military service and wounds, and he was proud to be French. He aimed his pipe at several artists around the store, those who had not served to defend the liberty of France. Nathan translated the stories we told about our experiences of the war, and later he urged me to write the very same stories for publication. That was the first time that he had ever mentioned the translation and publication of my stories into French. The enticement was revealed at the very heart of my chat with the Moïse Kisling.

Moïse had never encountered natives, but he understood that the enemy was haunted by the fear of being scalped. The Polish, he declared without hesitation, would have been native compatriots, not the enemy, and never
scared away by the
Indien
. He pointed in the direction of his stories and seemed to know everyone in the world of art, including the impressionists, cubists, fauvists, and surreal artists, and many art gallery owners, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Nathan Crémieux. Moïse remembered with tears of pleasure the great heart and generosity of Marie Vassilieff and La Cantine des Artistes.

Nathan reminded me later that he certainly had decided to translate and publish a selection of my new stories and some stories published in
French Returns
by the
Tomahawk.
Nathan had never published an author, but he was impressed with the publication of
Ulysses
by James Joyce. Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company had published several books in the past, and the most significant was
Ulysses
. Galerie Crémieux would be my publisher. Nathan paused and decided then and there the title of my stories,
École Indienne
by Basile Hudon Beaulieu.

Nathan surprised me that night. I was excited, naturally, that he would translate and publish my descriptive and ironic stories. Aloysius had already thought about the cover art. To celebrate the event we invited Nathan to dinner at the Goldenberg Delicatessen in Le Marais. We had no idea, at the time, that he knew the owner and was a regular customer at the restaurant. Jo Goldenberg greeted Nathan at the door, and teased him about crazy art and artists. Our association with the famous gallery owner was always remembered at the restaurant.

Nathan ordered gefilte fish with carrots and horseradish, his favorite, and told stories about several artists and gallery owners before the First World War. Pablo Picasso had envisioned cubism and painted
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
fifteen years earlier at Le Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. That radical cubist portrayal of nudes, two with masks, in a brothel, was a decadent torment to some, and a mockery of the fascination with constitution, manner, representation, and poise of brush and color.

Nathan continued the stories about Le Bateau-Lavoir, the commune of artists located near the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur. Max Jacob, the painter, created the nickname Le Bateau-Lavoir, an ironic description of a rickety laundry boat. The commune was nothing more than a ramshackle building divided into tiny inexpensive art studios. Most of the artists who lived and painted there were poor, migrant, innovative, and influenced the new movements in cubist and surrealist art.

Le Bateau-Lavoir was in ruins, without heat or electricity, and yet the artists created radical visions and conversions of portraiture and landscape that became a signature of modern art. Picasso, Jacob, Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani, André Salmon, Georges Braque, Henri Matissse, and the great poet Guillaume Apollinaire lived and worked at times at the laundry boat.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had established his first art gallery at 28 Rue Vignon in 1907, the very same year that Picasso painted the sensational
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Kahnweiler was a regular visitor at the shabby Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre.

Nathan pushed his chair back, posed at the side of the tiny table with one hand on his chin, and waved his other hand as he continued the stories. The dramatic gestures were persuasive as he mocked the manner of Kahnweiler. Tease and gentle mockery were common practices in the new world of art dealers and gallery owners, and in that sense the galleries could have been located on the White Earth Reservation.

Picasso was slouched in a corner chair. The studio was dark, and stank of wine, sex, tobacco, and kerosene. Kahnweiler studied the five angular images of women in a brothel. Nathan touched his cheek and ear with one finger, cocked his head and moved closer to the table, pointed at the imagined easel in the story, and proclaimed with a slight accent that
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
was extraordinary, admirable, and indefinable. The word “crazy” might have been heard later in a sotto voce comment. The primitive gaze, shards of angular bodies, and the ironic bunch of fruit, were not native visions or creative scenes. Cubism was in a mighty transition on the right side of the huge canvas of
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
. There, two figures wore ceremonial masks, and the women in the painting were much taller on the canvas than Picasso, Nathan, or Kahnweiler.

Jo Goldenberg was delighted to hear another version of the famous painter and art dealer stories, and then he teased us that native ceremonial art had never been a movement of prostitutes or brothels in brick, blocks, and cubes. Yes, but inspired native artists had created many colored horses and visionary memories on ledger paper.

Guillaume Apollinaire, Amedeo Modigliani, and many other artists moved from Le Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre to La Ruche at Passage de Dantzig, west of the Cimetière du Montparnasse and the graves of Charles Baudelaire, the poet, and the statesman Adolphe Crémieux.

Marc Chagall had already lived and worked for several years at La Ruche, the octagonal beehive studios, with other migrant artists from Belarus and Russia. Chagall and many other artists spoke more Yiddish and Russian than French. He had returned recently from the Vitebsk Arts College in Soviet Belarus. The artists in the hive forever groused about the stink of the nearby slaughterhouses.

The Pont Royal, one of the oldest bridges over the River Seine, connects with the Jardin des Tuileries and Pavillon de Flore on the Rive Droite, and on the Rive Gauche, with Rue du Bac and the fantastic Beaux-Arts Gare d'Orsay. The electric train station was completed for the Paris
Exposition Universelle
, or World Fair, in 1900.

Aloysius sketched outlines of the Pont Royal and the flow of the River Seine. We walked across the bridge several times that afternoon and studied the curves and weathered stone, down one side of the bridge and returned on the other. We walked along the Quai des Tuileries, the Quai Voltaire, and Quai Anatole France near the Gare d'Orsay.

Aloysius created several rough outlines of ravens perched over the tiers of four stone buttresses between the five elegantly curved arches of the bridge. Then my brother decided to paint blue ravens at the train station. There, near the Hôtel de la Gare d'Orsay, we encountered the mighty James Joyce. He lived a few blocks away and walked along the river once a day, in the late afternoon. Aloysius reminded him of our presence at the book event at Shakespeare and Company.

Joyce smiled and leaned to the side on his cane, but we doubted at the time that he recognized our faces from the bookstore. He was a spirited roamer in the literary world, and steadied the sentiments of love and death with his cane. Sylvia Beach once told me a story about the time she first met the author, and that became my approach near the hotel. My inquiry was the same,
Is this the great James Joyce?
Yes
,
James Joyce
, the author said firmly and then reached out to shake my hand that afternoon, as he had done with Sylvia Beach. She told me his hand was limp, a boneless hand, and he wore a heavy ring on his left middle finger. Yes, his right hand moved with casual grace, but an ordinary gesture was miscarried in the hesitant reach of manners.

Joyce recognized my voice, however, and my poetic recitation of two sentences from his novel
Ulysses
. He was gracious, and much more pleasant
on the Quai Anatole France than he was seated in a crowd of literary admirers at Shakespeare and Company.

Aloysius declared that James Augustine Aloysius Joyce shared his given name. The White Earth Reservation was envisioned in the names of three saints, Saint Aloysius Gonzaga an Italian Jesuit, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, and Saint Augustine the Blessed. Augustus Hudon Beaulieu was our uncle and publisher of the
Tomahawk
, Ignatius Vizenor was our cousin, and Father Aloysius was the name of the priest at Saint Benedict's Mission.

Joyce raised a single white finger to his cheek and explained that the name Auguste was French, Augustin was Irish, and he was named in the spirit of two saints, Aloysius and Augustine. The Irish endured in the names of saints, and in poetry. Pray there are more saints in my names by heart and history, and so he counted out the most obvious given names, James the Just, James the Less, James the Deacon, and Saint-James, a commune in Manche, France. The Epistle of James, and the surname Joyce, or Josse and Goce, in Ireland, were joyous compositions of deceit and irony in literature. James of Irony, a saint to honor, and he turned to continue his walk across the Pont de la Concorde.

› 23 ‹

A
PRÈS
G
UERRE

— — — — — — —
1923
— — — — — — —

Paris was a sanctuary that year for posers and at least seven expatriate native veterans of the First World War. The City of Light was our solace and bright promise, and, at the same time, an easy retreat for the many pretenders, native and otherwise.

Pierre Chaisson, one of these seven native veterans, was born in the bayou, a marvelous river storier. The other natives were from woodland reservations, motivated and unworried as we were by the chance of liberty in Paris.

The poser natives were crafty, but never wicked or treacherous, more domestic than shamanic, and more ironic than despotic. The pretenders had concocted native traditions in the stately guise of warriors, and other eccentric traits that befit the romance of native postures and spectacles in museums, theaters, and cafés.

Olivier Black Elk, for instance, was a poser with great charm and he never missed the regular gathering of natives once a week at the Café du Dôme. He was always the first to arrive at the native commune and meticulously selected a chair and table that was the most conspicuous on the terrace or near the entrance.

Olivier wore a Boss of the Plains black hat with a single bald eagle feather tied to the beaded hatband. His mere presence announced our weekly native commune at the café, and he actually provided tourists with a signature in the name of his contrived ancestors. His vanity was only comparable to the stories of native tricksters.

Black Elk the pretender never conceded that he had fabricated a native surname and descent. He was sturdy, moody, and his face and hands were darkened with cosmetics, but his country accent and strained gestures were not native and he was much too young to be the son of Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota visionary from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Olivier recounted many times and with unnatural precision that his father
was a ceremonial dancer and warrior and that he was conceived at a hospital by a young nurse and a shaman in Paris. The inception stories of his ancestors were nifty but the conception and other circumstances were not feasible.

Nathan told me that Black Elk had indeed traveled one season with William Frederick Cody, more than thirty years earlier, and the catchy exhibitions of Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Black Elk had toured England, France, and other countries, and performed for the mighty Queen Victoria.