Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (41 page)

I was a native literary expatriate, not an exile. My brother was a visionary expatriate painter, not an exile. We created our native sense of presence with imagination and a sense of chance, and not with the sorrow of lost traditions. Yes, we were exiles on a federal reservation but not as soldiers, and we were never exiles in Paris. So, we were expatriates in the City of Light, in the city of avant-garde art and literature. Paris was our sense of presence and liberty.

Nathan told stories about the revolution over lunch, and then continued that afternoon as we walked along the River Seine. Most of his stories were connected to sites on the river, the actual scenes of the
Révolution française
. The stories were elusive and ironic, but not obscure, and celebrated the anxious citizens who had endured the curse of power.

Bastille Day continued into the night, and we were ready and grateful to be part of the excitement and celebrations. Nathan had invited Marie and Pierre to a special dinner celebration at the Café du Dôme. The waiter secured one round table and five wicker chairs on the terrace, and we sat
close to each other, drank wine, and shouted to be heard over the rush and roar of the celebrants.

The Boulevard du Montparnasse was packed with several hundred carousers, and the human waves surged from one celebrity café that night directly across the boulevard to the next, from the Café du Dôme to La Rotonde, and to the new Le Jockey. Chinese lanterns decorated the trees on the boulevard, and the busy intersection with Boulevard Raspail. Music, poetry, and song were heard in every direction that night.

Bastille Day was more than a celebration of the
Révolution française
, the day was a national rave of the spectacular, not only liberty, but the erotic and cultural excitement of the crowds, the rush of promises, art, literature, music, and sensational adventures of stories, memory, and cultural liberty.

Nathan ordered seven carafes of wine, and we toasted every memorable poet and novelist we could name. Apollinaire, Pound, James Joyce, of course, and Blaise Cendrars. Herman Melville, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis were my only advantage in the author name game. Everyone at the table named at least a dozen authors, and then we turned to toast artists.

Nathan raised his glass to honor the marvelous conception of blue ravens by Aloysius. I raised my glass to Marie, of course, and then Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Marc Chagall. Many artists were named and then we toasted the
Révolution française.
I was tipsy, excited, delighted by the frenzy, and the natural sense of liberty, and yet cautious enough never to abuse the gentle affection of Marie.

We drank more than we ate, and then we decided to walk on the boulevard with the lively celebrants. Nathan pointed to the other side of the boulevard, so we entered the great waves of carousers, and docked together near La Rotonde. Nathan asked and the waiter reported with a wave of his hand that Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway had been seen at the café that night.

Gertrude was hardly worth the rush and shoulder of sweaty bodies through the throng of the café, only to tolerate the praise of native pretenders, but the search for the endorsed author became an ironic diversion. There were many authors, poets, and painters gathered around tables at La Rotonde, but we never found Ernest Hemingway. He was not there, and we learned later that the author was at the bullfights in Spain.

Malcolm Cowley, however, was there that night, and inspired sensational
stories about the sudden and unprovoked assault on the proprietor of La Rotonde. Nathan and Marie had heard the name of the young man, and remembered that he was interested in Dada, an ironic and absurd art movement, and the new theories of surrealism by André Breton, but he became famous for his gesture of realism that night.

Cowley had been drinking, of course, and probably made too many toasts to authors, when a spirited discussion turned to accusations that the proprietor was a
mouchard
, an informer. More than five hundred celebrants were there, and most of them heard about the encounter that night at La Rotonde. Cowley actually shouted
petit mouchard
, an insult that the proprietor was small and had informed on the café patrons for the police.

Cowley rushed forward and struck the proprietor on the jaw, a glancing blow that became a memorable literary story. Cowley was seized by two policemen and marched to a nearby police station. He told the actual story of the assault to André Salmon, the poet and art critic, who must have recounted the occurrence as a cubist portrayal of a revolution against the
petit mouchard
on Bastille Day.

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M
UTILÉS DE
G
UERRE

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1924
— — — — — — —

Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu was a visionary painter inspired by natural motion and waves of color, by abstract contours, shadows, and that marvelous brush of flight in the original portrayals by native stone, hide, bark, and ledger artists, and by the ethereal succession of blues in scenes by Marc Chagall.

Painters of this blue arc created evocative curves, muted hues of presence, green rabbis, the ghostly heart of blue ravens, red nudes, magical flight, tender guises, the reverie of native motion on the White Earth Reservation, and trusty portrayals at Vitebsk on the Pale of Settlement. These marvelous scenes were more memorable than the churchy, cultural, and mundane ethnographic duty of naturalism and authenticity.

Aloysius and Chagall were enlivened by the artistry of natural motion, and they created visionary traces of state exclaves, military outposts, traders, soldiers, shtetls, violinists, green faces, blue statues, bridges, synagogues, passenger trains, hotels, and hospitals, the mighty Dvina River, and headwaters of the Mississippi River. These creative scenes were natural unions of visionary art and community.

Chagall once lived and painted great visionary scenes in a shabby studio at La Ruche, the legendary colony of expatriate artists at Montparnasse. Aloysius first painted at the actual scenes of his portrayals on the reservation, in the livery stable, at the train station, near the rivers, and then at the front window of our apartment on Rue Pecquay in Le Marais.

Chagall had endured poverty, bigotry, and the persecution of governments, and yet he was encouraged by the great promises of the Communist Party and the Russian Revolution. Jews would be respected as citizens and granted liberty. He was surely discouraged by the trivial politics and factions of the revolutionary bureaucracy, and returned to the casual wiles and cultural teases of expatriate artists at La Ruche.

Paris was the magical sleeve of visual memories at the time, painterly scenes of exotic feigns, avian adventure, intrigues, ruses, tribute, and states of melancholy. Chagall was never secure in any country as an artist and a Jew. The colors and contours of faces in his magical paintings were sacred waves of light, the crucial motion of liberty, and the mysterious traces and cues of evolution and family.

Chagall created brilliant scenes that lingered in my dreams and memory, and these three especially:
The Violinist
, with a fantastic green face,
I and the Village
, a magical mutation and elaboration of sentiments and gestures, and later the elegant, sensual, and lasting affection in
The Birthday
.

Nathan was mainly moved by three other portrayals by Chagall,
Adam and Eve
,
The Soldier Drinks
,
To Russia, with Asses and Others
, and
The Cattle Dealer
. Blaise Cendrars, the hasty poet and novelist who lost an arm in the war, provided the title,
To Russia, with Asses and Others
, a portrayal of a rouge cow, a blue church, a perforated figure with a bucket in the dark, and a detached head afloat. Nathan first saw these paintings before the war at La Ruche. He had visited several artists at the colony, and told stories about Blaise Cendrars and Marc Chagall.

Cendrars was one of the first artists to visit Chagall in the early years at La Ruche. The poet roared with laughter, and teased his new friend about prostitutes and piety. They gathered at cafés and bars with hundreds of other expatriate artists. La Ruche was indeed the hive of wild, inspired, and visionary painters, poets, and sculptors. Le Bateau-Lavoir was another painterly lair in Montmartre. These two shabby unheated structures actually housed many of the great expatriate painters of the century and stimulated an incredible movement of visionary art and avant-garde art in Paris.

Amedeo Modigliani created portraits of lovers and more than a dozen poets and painters, such as Moïse Kisling, Pablo Picasso, and the singular oval face, elongated nose, cocked eyes, and narrow jaw of Blaise Cendrars. The poet in turn created a fantastic imagistic poem about Marc Chagall.

He's asleep
He wakes up
Suddenly, he paints
He takes a church and paints with a church

He takes a cow and paints with a cow

Chagall moved back to paint in Russia, and at the end of the war taught art in his hometown of Vitebsk, and then exhibited his recent paintings in Berlin. He returned to La Ruche nine years later and discovered that hundreds of stored paintings had vanished in his absence. Cendrars, one of his closest friends, was accused of betrayal and blamed for the disappearance of the paintings. Cendrars denied the accusation, but the lingering doubts ended the friendship.

Nathan told me as many stories about poets and novelists as he recounted about expatriate painters. Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire were the first creative writers to promote the avant-garde artists and styles of cubism, that artistic resistance to romantic scenes and perspectives, and created only outline dimensions similar to the abstract pictures by native artists.

Nathan related with conviction the prominent resistance to despotic empire politics, colonialism, the savagery of war, and the artistic resistance to the fakery of nationalism and notions of enlightenment. The obvious artistic and literary connections were the radical aspects of cubism, avant-garde, and geometric portrayals. Even so, many expatriate artists served in the military to defend the liberty of the French Third Republic.

Cendrars, for instance, was born bourgeois in Switzerland, and served in the French Foreign Legion. He lost his right arm early in the First World War at the First Battle of Champagne. He became a citizen of France.

Apollinaire celebrated the abstract dimensions and mutations of representation in cubist art and poetry. Painters fragmented the forms of perspective, and he changed the stance and stay of words in poetry. He was born Wilhelm Apolinary Kostrowicki in Russia, and changed his Polish name and moved to France. The poet survived shrapnel wounds to his head, and died of influenza shortly before the end of the war. He was honored at death by painters and poets and buried at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Apollinaire and Cendrars and many other soldiers were the actual
mutilés de guerre
in the war movie
J'accuse
directed by Abel Gance. The narrator in the movie hallucinated dead soldiers revived in the grave, and in motion on the road. André and Henri, the masked
mutilés de guerre
veterans and shy fishermen at the Quai des Grands-Augustins, were in the very same movie but had not met the two writers during the production of the cemetery scenes. Cendrars was pictured in a ghostly procession with bandages
unfurled on the stump of his right arm. Apollinaire was cast in scenes with bandages over the actual wounds on his head.

The French military commanders had allowed some soldiers to participate in the silent scenes of horror, the return of the dead in the movie, and later many of those soldiers were themselves killed in action by the enemy. They had survived the cinema of war and then died in the actual war, an ironic legacy.

My brother was excited, of course, about the innovative scenes painted by other artists, the impressionists, fauvists, and cubists, but he alone had conceived of color and contour as natural motion, and abstract blue ravens were avant-garde creations on the White Earth Reservation.

Native artists envisioned a semblance of the avant-garde in the perceptions of natural motion, and in the ordinary experiences of visual memory, the creases and fragments of reflections, impressions, stories, and visionary portrayals.

Natives were hardly considered as original and innovative artists by gallery owners and museum curators. The burdens of tribal traditions that were once denatured by missionaries and then reconstructed by romancers, federal agents, and ethnographers, and then understated in dominant theories of race, primitive cultures, and genetics. The crude discoveries and ethnographic concoctions of native stories and art precluded any inspired or sensible presentation of original native portrayals with other artists of the avant-garde at established galleries.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Paul Rosenberg, Berthe Weill, and Ambroise Vollard established galleries and promoted avant-garde painters in Paris. Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Georges Braque, Amedeo Modigliani, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and many other innovative artists were presented in singular and group exhibitions at galleries.

The Galerie Paul Rosenberg was located at Rue de la Boétie north of the Grand Palais. The Galerie B. Weill was first established at Rue Taibout and later moved to 46 Rue Laffitte near Rue la Fayette. The Galerie Vollard was established at 6 Rue Laffitte and then during the First World War the gallery was moved to the apartment of the owner at Rue de Martignac in Faubourg Saint-Germain.

The inaugural Galerie Kahnweiler was first located in a narrow space at
28 Rue Vignon, but the police seized the entire collection of avant-garde art as reparations because the owner was German. Kahnweiler returned after the war and established with a colleague the Galerie Simon on Rue d'Astorg. These and several other galleries advanced the great revolution of avant-garde and visionary art in Paris. The Galerie Crémieux was the only gallery that presented original native visionary arts.