What Am I Doing Here? (32 page)

Another evening we went to an immigrant lodging near the Porte d'Aix. There were sixteen men in three small squalid rooms. One was an airless cellar. None was cheap. The men gave us coffee and Coke, and told a long drawn-out story about a North African corpse and how the police said it had fallen from a window, which it hadn't. Then the landlord's rent-man came in, very hysterical: a slug-fingered fellow in a shiny brown raincoat. He shrieked at us: these lodgings were for workers. Workers only! No one who wasn't a worker had any business there. We weren't workers and we weren't wanted. He wasn't a worker either and he showed us his white hands. And that was our only contact with one of the famous ‘sleep-merchants'.

The Quartier de la Porte d'Aix is squalid. Its poverty is particularly offensive when compared to the wealth that encircles it. But it is at least alive. Algerians do not feel strange or threatened there, and it is one of the few places in France they have made their own. The Marseillais, on the other hand, cannot wait to pull it down; for in their eyes it is a future breeding ground for cholera – or, worse, insurrection. The Algerians may be an unpleasant necessity, but that is no reason why one should allow them to choke the centre of the city. One day, North African demonstrators so clogged the Rue d'Aix that weekend motorists could not get onto the Autoroute. The Gaullist Deputy and Minister, M. Joseph Comiti, said the Algerian quarter was a gangrene – and the way to combat gangrene is to cut it out.

Responsibility for cutting out the gangrene rests with the Socialist Mayor of Marseilles, M. Gaston Defferre, who surveys from an office of Louis Quinze splendour the masts and blue awnings of the Vieux Port. He is a paradoxical man in his sixties, a Protestant, a resistance hero, a yachtsman, a fighter of duels, a ruthless administrator, an adroit politician of the Left who enjoys the active support of the Right, a rich newspaper proprietor and a lover. He has just taken a third wife, Edmonde Charles-Roux, the novelist and former editor of French
Vogue
. He is still ambitious for power (and would become Minister of the Interior in Mitterrand's first cabinet). In 1965 he stood as Socialist candidate in the presidential elections. His party is at present allied to the Communists, but he will not sing the ‘Internationale' and winces at being called ‘Comrade Defferre'. In interview he gives out virtually nothing: there is little point in repeating what he said. Behind the tough façade I had the impression of a naive man, somewhat trapped by intrigues not necessarily of his own making.

Gaston Defferre has no great love for the Arabs. His newspaper, Le
Provençal,
loudly champions the State of Israel. But he is reputed to control the right-wing
Le Méridional
and, if so, he should have had retracted the anti-Algerian rant I quoted from that newspaper. Anyway, he has taken the first steps to pull down the Kasbah: ‘We make it known that the whole quarter of the Porte d'Aix will be demolished and rebuilt. It will not be easy, but we have promised it.'

It will not be easy, because when the demolition begins tempers will snap. But the City will win, and there will be offices and shops, apartment blocks and underground car parks. And the Algerians will have gone home or been housed in the sterile banlieue. And there will be no more Soirees de Ramadan. No Big Leila dancing naked round a goldfishbowl. And nowhere to go for one Nigerian sailor who already senses the end: ‘I go for get wooman, but is soo expensive! One emission cost three poun! O Sir, London is a heaven place. Marseilles is finish.'

Cutting out the gangrene will please a group of three gentlemen I visited before leaving, the self-appointed Committee for the Defence of Marseilles, which was founded on the evening of Monsieur Gerlache's death. They had a small room off the Canebière, bare but for posters with a red fist and the title ‘
Halte a l'Immigration sauvage!
' All three had fleshy noses and disagreeable mouths. They looked quite impressive sitting down, but when they stood up they had very short legs. They did at least speak their minds. But I thought of the bright new offices in Algiers, and the smart young executives, and the eyes of the Third World narrowing on Europe if the racists continue. Wasn't it time, I asked, to bury the hatchet?

‘Monsieur, you are suggesting we take our pants down?'

‘Not that,' I said.

 

The World of Donald Evans
by Willy Eisenhart (Harlin Quist Books, 1981)

 

 

 

 

 

O
n the night of 29 April 1977, a fire, sweeping through a house on the Stadhouderskade in Amsterdam, caught the American artist Donald Evans on the staircase and burned him to death. He left behind him, scattered among collections on both sides of the Atlantic, several thousand miniature watercolours in the form of postage stamps. These stamps were ‘issued' in sets by forty-two countries, each corresponding to a phase, a friendship, a mood, or a preoccupation in the artist's life. In style, they more or less resemble ‘colonial' stamps of the late nineteenth century. The sets were then mounted on the black album pages of professional philatelists, a background that showed up the singularity of each stamp as a work of art in its own right while, at the same time, allowing the artist to play games of pattern and colour on a grid.

In Muslim, theology, God first created the reed pen and used it to write the world. Less ambitious, Donald Evans used the same sable brush, a Grumbacher No 2, to paint a limpid, luminous world – a kind of Baudelairean pays
de Cocagne
– that would, nevertheless, mirror his own life and the life of his times. The result is a painted autobiographical novel of forty-two chapters, whose original pages, like the pages of some illuminated manuscript, have wandered abroad: indeed, the chances of reassembling them are as remote as the chances of realising the peaceable world they portray.

Fortunately, Donald Evans kept a meticulous record of all his work and entered each set of stamps in a catalogue, which grew as his work grew and which he called
Catalogue of the World.
The master copy – and several Xerox copies - survived him.
⁴

Whether by accident or design, his life was short, circular, and symmetrical; his one obsession - the painting of postage stamps. He painted them during two five-year periods: as an introverted schoolboy from the ages of ten to fifteen; then as an adult, from twenty-six to thirty-one. The fact that he believed he had ‘peaked' at sixteen or seventeen; that he had, by thirty, relived his childhood; that there are reasons for supposing that, in his eyes, the Catalogue was complete; that, having worked on the tropical zones of his world, he should have been painting the stamps of an icebound, polar country when he himself was consumed by fire — all go to reinforce the impression of symmetry.

When his friends recovered from the horror of his death, they began to celebrate his exemplary life, and to puzzle over the pieces. Because Donald Evans was so secretive, and because of his habit of slotting friendships into compartments, the autobiographical complexity of his work might well have escaped notice, or at least lain dormant, were it not for the detective work of Willy Eisenhart, who has prepared a key towards the elucidation of his subject in a cool, tranquil text that reminds one of the best American reporter style of the 1920s. It is also a very beautiful book.

 

Donald Evans was born on 28 August 1945, the only son of a real estate appraiser in Morristown, New Jersey. His mother kept a neat green lawn and was a member of the local gardening club. As a boy, he built sandcastles, and cardboard villages and palaces. He pored over maps and encyclopaedias and dreamed the geography of a world that would be better than the one in which he lived. He also collected stamps – and, at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II, drew his own commemorative issue for the coronation of his own imaginary queen.

By ten, this precocious autodidact was hard at work on his own private philately. At first, to quote Eisenhart, the stamps ‘were crudely drawn and crudely perforated with his mother's pinking shears, but he quickly became more accomplished. He began to outline the stamps in pencil and then fill them in with his pen and brush, and he solved the technical problem of the perforations by pounding out rows of periods on an old typewriter.'

By fifteen he had filled three volumes of a ‘World Wide Stamp Album' with postal issues from mythical countries such as Frandia or Doland, Slobovia or Kunstland East and West. Each country had its own complicated history – ‘of invasions, federations, liberations'. Each, in some way, expressed his ‘romantic' yearning for the remote and exotic, or the private concerns of his family and friends. Then he started going to football games; he set his sights on college, and he stopped making stamps.

There followed ten conventional years - not so conventional by the standards of his home town – but conventional enough for a middle-class American boy coming of age in the Sixties with a contribution to make in the arts. He wanted to be a painter and painted enormous abstract expressionist canvases in the manner of de Kooning. He graduated in architecture at Cornell. He travelled to Europe; looked in on the Warhol Factory; learned to dye and weave textiles; smoked marijuana; did yoga; took an interest in Gurdjieff; and was always falling in and out of love.

After leaving Cornell, he came to New York where he lived in a sparsely furnished apartment in Brooklyn Heights and got a job as an architectural designer in the office of the architect Richard Meier. But the scale of the city dwarfed and depressed him. He felt apart from the pushy exhibitionism of its artists. His love affairs were unhappy and he retreated back into his shell, back to the introverted world of his childhood - and its stamps. One day he happened to show his stamp album to friends who encouraged him to continue it. He did so — and left the United States.

 

In February 1972, he packed his watercolours and a stack of perforated papers and flew to Holland where a friend had rented a cottage ‘behind the Dike' (
Achterdijk
) near a village not far from Utrecht. Immediately he set to work on the stamps of a ‘Dutch' country called Achterdijk.

During the Vietnam years, young Americans flocked to Holland as they had flocked to Paris in the Twenties. But for Donald Evans Holland was not a hippy heaven of easy sex and easy drugs. He felt reborn there; and, one day, after stamping an antique envelope with the postmark ‘Achterdijk,' he addressed it to an imaginary correspondent, ‘
De Heer Naaktgeboren
' (Mr Naked-Born) – which was a surrogate name for himself. He loved the flat wind-blown landscapes of Holland and the high varied skies. He liked the open-mindedness of the Dutch, and paid them the compliment of learning their language. He liked the abstract beauty of Dutch brickwork; the compact scale of the architecture; and, from the seventeenth-century masters, he appropriated certain techniques, of drawing and watercolour, that were perfect for his stamps.

Donald Evans lived, off and on, in Holland for his five remaining years – in lofts, rented rooms, and tiny apartments. He was, by temperament, hypochondriac: when it was found that his chest troubles were caused by a vestigial third lung, he had it removed and recorded the event, from his hospital bed, with the stamps of twin kingdoms called Lichaam and Geest, which means ‘Body and Soul'. He was also liable to bouts of wandering fever; and he even invented a capital city called Vanupieds (Barefoot Vagabond) to describe his habit of roaming around the world. Many artists moan about being chained to their studios, but Donald Evans could set up in a railway waiting room. Perhaps the very portability of his work states his contempt for the arts and pretensions of settled civilisation – the nomad's contempt for the pyramid.

 

His colour sense was as faultless as his draughtsmanship. A set of his stamps sits on a page like butterflies in a case. And, needless to say, he loved butterflies and came up with a country for them – Rups, which is the Dutch for ‘caterpillar'. He himself said he had no originality, and that he preferred to work from photographs or given images: yet one flat panorama of Achterdijk has the ‘breathed-on' quality of a sepiawash landscape by Rembrandt. His art was so disciplined that it was patient of receiving anything that happened to attract him — zeppelins, barnyard fowls, penguins, pasta, a passion for mushroom hunting, Sung ceramics, shells, dominoes; drinks at the Bar Centrum; windmills that were ‘abstract' portraits of friends; the vegetable market at Cadaques, or a recipe for pesto from Elizabeth David's
Mediterranean Cooking
: his way of recording the pleasures of food and drink reminds me, somehow, of Hemingway.

He never set foot in Asia, but as a boy he had been fascinated by camel-trains and caravansaries and had invented desert countries for his stamp album. Later, he liked reading British travel books about the Middle East and, to create a country called Adjudani – the Persian for ‘Jewish' – he borrowed images from Wilfred Thesiger's
The Marsh Arabs.
To my delight, he also borrowed an image from me - the photo of a Timurid tomb-tower taken in an Afghan village on the Russian frontier.

As a boy, too, he had dreamed of the South Seas. Now he dreamed up a coral archipelago – Amis et Amants – a ‘French' colony populated by happy, friendly, amorous blacks: the stamps of one issue, titled
Coups de Foudre
, show a row of storm-blasted coconut palms, each painted in a different colour combination to suggest the different thunderbolts of love. Or there were the Tropides – tiny islands in Vermeer-like dots and dashes. Or the arctic country of Yteke, named after a Dutch dancer friend who could only perform in a cold climate.