A Man of Letters, page 29
Camus was the complete wandering street kid, the tough and personable young proletarian, always ready to fend off a blow, fanatical about soccer and swimming and bodily fitness. The solid, communal ethos of the working class was to remain with him all his life, even after his two middle-class marriages and his final wealth. It was soon clear to his alarmed mother that he was a passionate reader and very intelligent. He was helped by a remarkable schoolmaster who was a dogged philosopher and a minor writer. The boy easily got through the lycée; he read Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and at the university he distinguished himself by his thesis on St Augustine. But the soccer and the swimming went on, the lonely wanderings in the countryside and the low quarters of Algiers, and presently the easy sexual encounters on the idyllic Mediterranean beaches with the girls from the cigarette factories. He saw himself as the impassive Spanish Don Juan to whom girls and women flocked. He turned to journalism and was also soon working with poor theatrical groups; and, with his chosen friends, was for a time involved in Communist politics. It was natural to be a left-winger and to feel that something ought to be done about the Arabs who were the victims of the rich French farmers and entrepreneurs. He read and argued about the mixed cultures of the Mediterranean. He deplored the ruthless Roman influence that had prevailed rather than the Greek sense of limits and ‘nothing too much’. Algeria was mindless, exploited by France, and was barbarous, but the barbarity was of nature and could be called primitive and innocent. His senses responded to the harsh mountain landscape, the stony plateau, and the desert that was another sea; to the clear sunlight, the brassy heat, and the seductive silence of the evenings. The deep sense of ‘indifference’ in him responded to the indifference of nature, but not in a Northern, Wordsworthian way: there was nothing ‘deeply interfused’ here. Each stone or tree was an object: his visual sense of the ‘things’ of landscape is intense in all his writing. Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as rock. His work as a journalist would eventually lead him to lapse sometimes into rhetoric and sentimentality, but his best manner is plain, detached, lonely, and laconic: abruptly lyrical and briefly sensuous. There is a sentence in his Notebooks – ‘One of our contemporaries is cured of his torments by contemplating a landscape’ – that marks his identification with his country. What are those torments? Not of conscience or poverty alone. At the age of sixteen, he had become tubercular. The disease never left him; it is at the heart of his ‘indifference’, and the almost too vivid sense of the instants of hope.
A large part of McCarthy’s book is given to the stormy story of Camus’s career as a polemical journalist, first in Algiers and then in Paris during the German Occupation. One marvels that, coughing out his lungs, Camus was able to work and quarrel so hard and carry on with his compulsive drinking and his part as habitual seducer – who tried desperately to save his first wife, a morphia addict; who loved his much-tried second wife and their children, and was capable of tortuous passion in his liaison with the Spanish-refugee actress Maria Casarès. In love, Camus was a gambler but (as McCarthy says) a prudent one.
I find McCarthy helpful about The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, and The Fall, and especially The Plague. Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year was, of course, the literary source of The Plague. In Defoe, the storyteller is omniscient. In Camus, the real narrator is concealed in the voices of Oran, the city of the plague; the use of many narrators is a success because it ‘flaunts’ the limits of the people’s understanding and says ‘less’ to suggest mysteriously ‘more’. ‘Anonymity’ and ‘amputation’ remain, McCarthy writes, ‘the watchwords of Camus’ art’. The aim is to offer a collective view and to make it more positive than a single narrator can; the remote, invisible ‘narrator who puzzles’ is, to McCarthy, a ‘thoroughly modern achievement’. It seems to derive from Camus’s inheritance of the communal mind. Only short passages of his journalistic rhetoric break the spell for a moment. Outside of his political polemical writing or works like The Rebel, which are rather lumbered up with research (which is, in fact, sketchy), Camus is a natural personal essayist.
McCarthy thinks the last book, The Fall, is a far better book than The Plague. The Fall was written in defiance of the writer’s block that paralysed Camus’s imagination during the Algerian conflict, and at a time when he had no hope of recovering his health. The remedy for the artist was to transfigure his evil by attacking himself. Simone de Beauvoir thought that the story was a confession of a hidden guilt – the guilt that the Don Juan, the habitual seducer, felt toward his wife. It is true that in his Notebooks, which I find very revealing, he does groan and lacerate himself on this score. But The Fall goes far beyond the personal. Camus was a great mimic and talker, and in this tale he magnifies these gifts: the verbosity of a hypocrite at the confessional. Camus has a strong sense of the French classical tradition, and McCarthy says that Clamence, the penitent lawyer, ‘is a pessimistic moralist in the long French tradition that goes back to La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère. Like them, he attributes all man’s actions to egoism.’ Clamence feels himself justified by his resemblance to all mankind. But Camus undercuts the language of Clamence with the irony that is the classical French gift. McCarthy’s final word is that ‘despite the lack of redemption’ The Fall is a piece of religious writing about man’s fallen state: ‘It is a superb novel written from the viewpoint of a world without men.’ Clamence is indeed as isolated as Tartuffe. By a stroke of genius, Camus sets the confession not in the clear light of Algeria but in the deceiving fogs of Amsterdam, with its concentric circles of canals, which are the inescapable circles of Hell. The place is ‘hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea steaming like a wet wash’. Holland is a country where ‘everything is horizontal, no relief; space is colourless, and life dead. Is it not universal obliteration, everlasting nothingness made visible? No human beings, above all, no human beings! You and I alone facing the planet at last deserted!’ With an awful glee, the penitent lawyer, who has himself committed a crime that will implicate anyone so foolish as to discover it, talks his way into moral complacency* by incriminating mankind. What an irony that ‘the outsider’ of Algiers should turn up as ‘the insider’ in Amsterdam!
(1982)
Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro
The exhibition which celebrates the 150th anniversary of Pissarro’s birth has now travelled from London to Paris and is soon to arrive in Boston, and three stout, handsomely illustrated and scholarly volumes are here to inform a layman like myself. They also test and enlarge our response to a restless and prolific artist of very complex character. The introductory essay to the general catalogue by John Rewald is a rhetorical attempt to revive the history of the long battle between the Impressionists and the Salon. He appeals to Nietzsche and grinds his teeth at the name of Gérôme. Two other contributors, Richard Brettell and Françoise Cachin, are more inquiring and more nourishing. The Ashmolean volume reproduces an enormous number of Pissarro’s drawings and working sketches; we see Pissarro’s foundations as a graphic artist who came to painting late. And Ralph E. Shikes and Paula Harper are very searching and enlightening on the relation of the life and work.
A literary person, venturing to write on a delightful art, can, at any rate, be fortified by some words of Walter Sickert – I take them from Franchise Cachin – partly because Walter Sickert was a painter who was also dashing and got to the heart of the matter in print; partly because he liked to make the then unfashionable assertion that he was a literary painter, which was almost true: ‘Pissarro … remains the painter for those who look at, rather than for those who read about, painting.’
We have read; but we have also looked, and Pissarro does take one clean through the surface of his pictures into their depth and architecture. Sickert’s word, ‘remains’, has exactly the overtone of ambiguity to which we respond. Pissarro does distinctly ‘remain’ in our visual sense and minds. Other Impressionists give us sensations of evanescence and the dance of suffused light; Pissarro seems to convey the haunting permanence of an hour that has been lost.
The distinguished writers who rallied to the Impressionists were, like ourselves, in the usual literary difficulty of seeing the ostensible subject as ‘the hero’ of the painting whether it is person, action, or landscape; we are also apt to see analogies between the manner of prose and paint, each arrangement of brush strokes being a possible phrase. For us the famous ‘Young Girl with a Stick’ is ‘the dawn of adolescence’. George Moore was lyrical about those dream-like apples that would ‘never fall’. Hostile critics who were bored by Pissarro’s fields of cabbages and who called him ‘a market gardener’ got the tart reply that the Gothic artists were bold enough to use the humble cabbage and the artichoke as ornaments in their cathedrals.
As a firm atheistical materialist Pissarro hated being credited with penetrating ‘the soul of nature’, but none of our literary tribe went so far as Zola, in his later years, when he inflated Cézanne in ‘L’Oeuvre’ and turned the painter’s life into a typical Zola-esque melodrama. For myself I am tempted to see Pissarro and other Impressionists as artists who retrieve that forgotten storyless hour of the day in which the clock has beautifully stopped. One of the merits of Ralph E. Shikes and Paula Harper’s Pissarro: His Life and Work is the following statement that puts the hour back into paint – look again at the early and Courbet-like Côte du Jallais near Pontoise:
It is often perceived that Pissarro was consistently interested in firmly structured compositions, in itself a visual statement of permanence. His perspectives imply a single, fixed viewpoint; if the world of nature is in flux, the one who views it is stable. Monet, by contrast, in many of his last paintings, dissolves the viewer into the scene; there are few reference points that relate to space on a human scale or gravity as a human experience. But Pissarro constantly reasserts the fact of humankind interacting with the natural world both in his subjects and in his insistence on a logically constructed space seen from a still point.
Yet there was a transformed prose in Pissarro’s mind; it lay in his political convictions. He had read Property-is-Theft Proudhon, Elisée Reclus, and Kropotkin. He was called ‘the poet-logician’ by Gauguin. Like more than one of the Impressionists, but more lastingly and even in a practical way, he was imbued with the innocent millenarian dream of Anarchism. He had an active hatred of the centralised bourgeois state. Vague though the dream was – and he was never able to define what he precisely meant by it beyond talking about the joyful liberation of perpetual creative work that would insulate us from the sorrows of life – the dream gave a grace to his sense of the need for social justice. His anarchism was not sentiment: it is related to his particular kind of humanism, an earnest of manna for the humble worker at a period when Guizot was telling everyone to ‘get rich’; it was also perhaps a spur to his changes of style and the eagerness to try new means. Yet also, in some intimate way, it was connected with what he called, with some irony, his ‘Creole passivity’ or foreignness; in the sense that Chekhov was a passive artist, i.e. one who chooses to be hidden in his work.
It is clear that Pissarro, who appeared simple to the point of sanctity, was a deeply complex man. Some believed he was naïve and self-taught: he was not. Far from being a peasant, he was distinctly a bourgeois and had little in common with the peasants he lived among in the valleys of the Seine and Oise. He rarely individualised the peasant. His revolt against the bourgeois was (he always said) a personal family affair but not violent as Cézanne’s was in his relation to his banker father.
Pissarro’s own upbringing had anomalies. Born in 1830 in the Danish island of St Thomas in the West Indies, he was a child of one of the Sephardic families of part French and part Portuguese Jews who had emigrated to the island because it had become the most prosperous entrepôt for trade in the days of sail. His parents were successful general shopkeepers, mainly in cloth. Money-making (as Trollope said when he went to St Thomas) was the sole preoccupation of the colonial population, and the strong Jewish colony benefited from the religious tolerance of the Danes.
The colonial wealth had also drawn a shrewd itinerant Danish painter, Fritz Melbye, who did well out of the European demand for exotic topographical landscapes, and it was he who noticed and first tutored the young Pissarro’s remarkable and lasting graphic talent there, and indeed made possible his eventual freedom from the detestable fate of keeping shop.
Pissarro had two particular gifts: intense concentration in sketching the humble mestizos and Indians, and an eye for intimate rather than panoramic landscape – as one can see in the exhaustive store of drawings in the Ashmolean collection. He had also power as a colourist. One picture, ‘Carnival Dance’, has the verve of Goya in his maja period. (This picture was done when he and Melbye went to Venezuela.) What really released him from his years in the shop was an economic crisis: the sudden change from sail to steam which killed the St Thomas trade. The crowded Pissarro family returned to their relations in France in 1855 and were prosperous enough to live in Rue de la Pompe in Passy. At the age of eleven Camille had been sent to school in Paris, as was common for colonial boys. But now he was in France for good to study Courbet and get the friendship of Corot, but bringing with him his ‘Creole passivity’ which for him meant, by a paradox, a dedicated and intellectual absorption in work. He had in mind a revaluation and revival of the French landscape tradition which was at first stimulated by the then unfashionable Barbizon School. He had also arrived in the Paris of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann and the triumph of the bourgeois reaction.
Pissarro’s was the classic rejection of the bourgeois ethos by a dissident son. He went so far as to quarrel with his dominant mother, a woman given to hysteria, because of his liaison (which eventually became a much opposed civil marriage) with the family servant. He went off to live close to rural poverty in Pontoise and then Eragny, painting peasants at work in the fields; moving to the logical link of the peasant with the market, on to the appearance of the factory in the rural scene, and to daily labour on the docks of Rouen.
All the critics in the present volumes point out that Pissarro was not really close to peasant life – even his wife, a country girl whose family had a little land of their own, ‘came to have marked bourgeois leanings.’ He rarely notes the harshness of field labour. He can even be said to have generalised those awkward bodies as they bend to the pattern of work.
Richard Brettell’s long essay on each phase of Pissarro’s art says his upbringing in a Jewish bourgeois family ‘did little to equip him to understand or sympathise automatically with the peasantry,’ and if he made obvious gestures to Millet he in fact reversed Millet’s tendency to ‘aggrandise’ the peasant monumentally. Yet, although in many pictures his peasants are seen pausing or resting in the private satisfactions of being simply alive, there are many others who are the half anonymous shapes of a team enclosed in the geometric trance of a habitual drama. I am thinking of The Harvest (1882) and The Gleaners (1889). The superb apple gatherers are working, but their work is stylised, almost arrested; and from the arms of the figures reaching up to the tree one gets the sensation of a moment slowed down, explored, even enlarged and enriched as if caught, as Brettell says, in a pavane in which the grasses, the trees, the flowers and fruit, the light and shadow of the hour have merged with the bodies of the gatherers in a conspiracy of nature with man; yet without any intrusive suggestion of allegory. We are in that ‘plein air’ which annoyed the Salon.
The critic Mirbeau put Pissarro’s manner in excellent words: ‘Even when he paints figures in scenes of rustic life, man is always seen in perspective in the vast terrestrial harmony like a human plant.’ On the other hand, as Brettell says in another connection, Pissarro’s innate sense of social history emerges in his market pictures, where the figures are individual, talking shapes:
These pictures suggest that it was the economic inter-relationship between the fields and the town which fascinated Pissarro and that for him the life of the peasant was not a seasonal cycle of sowing and harvesting, but rather one of events that ended with the market.... These images form the necessary bridge between ‘la vie agreste’ and ‘la vie bourgeoise,’ and complement Pissarro’s landscapes with factories.
The peasant turns into ‘the petit commerçant’ (However, The Harvest does seem to contradict this theory.) I incline to the belief that what drew Pissarro and others to the country factory was the novel arrangement of shapes that had to be assimilated to the rural scene and even tamed. Industrialism came late to rural France. There is nothing Satanic in the well-known chimneys of the factory near Pontoise. Satan comes later in Pissarro’s political cartoons.
Like all important artists Pissarro feared to repeat himself. A painter’s painter, he was preoccupied with experiment in style and means to the point of anxiety and restlessness. There is an exchange of influences in his responses to Cézanne, Monet, Degas, Gauguin, and Seurat particularly. To some contemporaries, most of whom became famous before he did, his changes of style marked him as a conservative who had become derivative and undecided in his objectives. Modern critics like Rewald and Brettell reject this view and see the intellectual vitality of a man re-making himself.
The passion for increasing the difficulty year by year was indeed innate from the beginning. If there is self-doubt it is of the studied fertilising kind; if there is anxiety it is the anxiety of an ambition which had to endure many harsh setbacks. Monet and the others became successful long before he did, partly because they were consistent and also – Shikes and Harper say – because Monet was a man of spontaneous passion and immediate conviction, if in the end he repeated himself, whereas Pissarro sought renewal in the temptation to see reality through many windows, and yet wavered because he was essentially a ‘balanced thinker’.
