It was the first time I’d witnessed the therapeutic effect of literature—on its own author. I knew that books might sometimes help others, the readers for whom they’re a gift, a surprise. But I’d thought that the author himself, once he’d put them aside, didn’t and couldn’t have any more intellectual use for them. Here, though, in Czapski’s little studio/living room still filled with the great artist’s easels—now unused, alas—it turned out that whatever he’d stockpiled in an essay, a book, like a quote from a favorite writer could act like a magical injection, restoring youth, if only for half an hour. I scarcely need to add how moving this was, and what meaning it gave to the act of reading out loud.
Before his decline began, Czapski, as I recalled, still lived intensely, working, reading, writing, following current events. He had two different methods for keeping up. First, he read Le Monde every day, sifting from it news about Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe in particular. Second, he behaved a bit like the retired head of a state intelligence agency, no longer running things, but still maintaining his many contacts, who, through force of habit, continued to report on their activities to their former boss. Jozef grilled his guests about what they’d heard, read, seen. He was voraciously inquisitive. He was curiosity personified, the perfect embodiment of curiosity. When he heard some story that interested him, he responded with his whole body. We should bear in mind that he frequently received his guests while seated on the sofa, sometimes with his legs drawn up and his hands clasping his knees. He was very slender and six and a half feet tall; seated on the sofa, he looked like an old-fashioned high school boy greeting his guests, his classmates, in his garret.
Once he told me over the phone that whenever he received good news about one of his friends “he would jump like a trout on the sofa from joy.” The sofa was his reservation, his dominion, his desk, his library, his bedroom, his studio, his parlor. Czapski’s father had owned an enormous estate near Minsk, a palace in Przyluki, servants, carriages, trees, forests, fields, vegetables, and roses, while Jozef had only a sofa. In the era of which I’m now speaking, while he was still living normally, the sofa had nothing sinister about it—just the opposite. Jozef slept on it at night, while during the day, propped against a pillow that was propped against a worn spot on the wall, bent like a penknife with his Gothic knees aloft, he would take notes in his journal, write letters, sketch, receive visitors—all on the sofa. Above the sofa, shelves held books and albums of reproductions. Books, sometimes still wrapped in their packing paper to protect them from time, remained in their assigned spots for so many years that Jozef would reach for them without looking, completely automatically. His long arms, like a harbor crane, would wander on high, his fingers would tap the books’ spines and infallibly (or sometimes fallibly) extract an exhibit catalogue of Morandi’s paintings, a slim volume of Hofmannsthal’s poems, a collection of Milosz’s essays, Simone Weil’s letters, Stanislaw Brzozowski’s Diary. If, however, the book he sought was located on the top shelf, just below the ceiling, Jozef would stand on the sofa, even taller, tall and wobbling on the mattress’s soft foundations, and then I—and probably every other visitor who witnessed this—feared that this ninety-year-old gymnast would collapse. But he was on his estate, nothing could harm him on the sofa that had replaced the palace in Przyluki. He was safe in his soft castle.
There was nothing insulting about this diminution, and he didn’t feel impoverished, not in the least, the sofa truly became a palace: his towers were Morandi’s bottles, one of Herbert’s poems formed the roof, his stairways were composed of Malraux’s bloated tomes on art, and the garden was replaced by two windows, beyond which swayed the boughs of French chestnut trees.
The sofa and the scooter (which no longer existed by the time I got to know Czapski)—this was his estate, all that remained to this descendant of European aristocrats. If by chance any well-to-do reader of my text should feel his heart contract, a reflexive pang of pity for the indigent aristocrat, I should explain that Czapski lived modestly, but not in poverty, in a room forming a part of the villa-phalanstery-publishing house outside Paris called Kultura, an institution whose founder and director, Jerzy Giedroyc, was ten years younger than Jozef. He lived in one room divided into two zones: the center of the first was the aforementioned sofa, above which hung the bookshelves, while the second’s fulcrum was formed by his easels. Painting was associated with the vertical position, and had to take place in a more generous space permitting energetic motions of the arms. Painting was linked, moreover, with the chemistry of oil paints, with the smell of oil paints, with their furious staining of bedding and shirts. It had to be kept at some distance from the sofa.
The room’s arrangement mirrored the double nature of Czapski’s artistic calling. The sofa was his literature, his philosophy, the locus of both his meditation and his melancholy (since if he ever doubted his own talent, his vocation, it was not among the easels, but on the sofa).
The easels were his work tools. The more I come to know of his canvases, scattered across Europe, the more I admire his painter’s gift, derived from l’école de Paris, from Bonnard, Matisse, but turned to his own individual expression and directed toward seeing, toward vision: a black woman begging in a Paris subway tunnel; Rostropovich playing his cello; a vertical yellow cloud sailing majestically above a yellow field wearing a black cap of forest; carts in the station of Saint-Lazare; a highway, a setting sun, and a little black car lost in the great expanse of the Ile de France; still lifes, countless still lifes. Once he told me, “You know, you can paint a still life even on your worst day, when nothing else is going right,” and since then I’ve always regretted that I can’t paint still lifes on my worst days—some in the style of Morandi, others à la Czapski, teacups dissolving on the tablecloth like sugar in tea, tables large and small (like the last props remaining from the long-gone glory of the palace in Przyluki, although clearly these tables shared nothing of substance with that phantom palace vanished in the past), three jars filled with large and small paintbrushes, and above them a blue-green agitated space, as though the brushes were recalling earlier paintings, dreaming about them, as if the brushes possessed their own memories (this is a late painting, from 1988, called Shadows and Brushes); apples and flowers, a rainbow shooting up from a little house and vanishing into a fleecy black cloud; three women leaning lazily, obliquely on a balustrade, looking outward (Escurial, 1983); a vase and a white dishcloth, a field near Sailly, a red car, an ad for Morley nylons, portraits of familiar and unfamiliar faces.
So many years of painting! From the early twenties through the late eighties. Seventy years of painting, in Krakow, in Paris, in Warsaw, then just sketches in the Soviet camps, and once again outside Paris; years, moreover, of thinking about painting, writing about art, articles, the occasional startling discovery. His late discovery of Milton Avery is one such example: the American painter followed a route like Czapski’s, artistically at least, and his status in the United States was similar to Czapski’s, that is, he was a universally recognized master, an authority, a contemplative man of great personal integrity, untainted by commercialism.
He painted everywhere, at home and on his vacations, which had little to do with relaxation; they allowed him, rather, to occupy himself with plein air painting. It’s clear from his journals that painting often assumed an ecstatic form for Czapski; not always, not every day, but at his peak, at his best moments, after much preliminary labor, after drudgery, strenuous labors, and failed attempts, he’d achieve great ecstatic feasts, Dionysian festivals—a flame. That’s what he himself called his work—it was suspended between drudgery and flame. Short-lived banquets. Moments. But from those moments hundreds of paintings emerged. In 1992 we went to see a great exhibit of Czapski’s work in Warsaw; landscapes, still lifes, genre paintings that arose from a variety of impulses and needs, now completed, fulfilled one another in the halls of the National Museum, ecstasies transformed into an enduring forest of canvases.
Though the easels played a great part in Czapski’s spiritual life, this doesn’t mean that the sofa, with its calmer, more sober and rational rituals, was secondary, meaningless. I can’t even come close to formulating this relationship, not least because I—like most of his friends—knew only his cheerful, smiling, contemplative side, whereas I could infer the other Jozef, reckless, raging, only from certain paintings or journal entries. But it’s a puzzlement, to be friends with a man who’s cheerful, good-natured, open, kind, intelligent, brimming with curiosity, all the while knowing that he has another side, less safe, less settled, more dramatic, far removed from his usual calm sea of courtliness.
While working at his easel, Czapski encountered dark, stormy forces, did battle with them, worked to master them. It’s hard to imagine that there were people who didn’t see this at all, who were put off by what they took to be his angelic sweetness, his excessive goodness. But there were—Czapski had enemies who became his enemies only because he seemed to have no enemies, he was too kind, too gentle, too wise, too calm, too open. (I’ll remark parenthetically that of course since they became his enemies they could no longer claim that Czapski had no enemies, that he was worshipped uncritically.) They didn’t see, or rather didn’t suspect, Czapski’s other side, his passion and his capacity for facing demons. His guests were met, as a rule, by a smiling, thoughtful man, sometimes a little sad, sometimes troubled by something that had happened to a friend (or the drought in Ethopia!), but ordinarily full of warmth and good humor, sincerely and unaffectedly caught up in what was happening in their lives.
He spent many afternoons with his guests, drinking coffee to which he added six lumps of sugar. I’ve already mentioned his greedy, gluttonous, gargantuan curiosity. He was interested in Poland and Russia, Europe and Asia, art and poetry; communism’s abrupt, accelerated downfall thrilled him; he was tormented by the problem of evil and suffering, but his face lit up when the subject was meditation, concentration, an intense, internal life, those who had learned to live attentively, serenely. He had his agents, emissaries, specialists in various continents and questions. He learned of the changes taking place in Russia through Michal Heller; Maria Nowak brought him news from the Third World; Wojciech Karpinski discussed his visits to European museums; visitors from Poland, Piotr Kloczowski and others, kept him up on Polish current events; Jula Jurys, Teresa Dzieduszycka, and Joanna Wierusz-Kowalska described their readings and adventures. Sometimes he would dwell on one scrap of news for days on end—a tragic famine in the Sudan, or the unexpected blossoming of a “poor people’s bank” in Bangladesh. In this he was like Simone Weil. Raymond Aron writes somewhere that once he and his wife were out strolling in the Luxembourg Garden in the spring, I think, when Paris and the weather banish all worries and gloom, when they came upon a tearful Simone Weil, who exclaimed, “You mean you haven’t heard? The police in Shanghai have opened fire on demonstrating workers!”
Czapski knew how both to take others’ troubles to heart and to rejoice wholeheartedly in their successes. There were images that apparently haunted his imagination, such as the description he read in a book by Audiberti of a cow’s torments as it was being led to the slaughter: it put up a fight even with its legs already broken, and finally its executioners had to light newspapers under it to get it moving. This was the furthest extreme, the extreme of cruelty, nature devouring nature, human beings without scruples. And then on the other hand the joy when something happened to contradict this tragic vision of the world. He never stopped pondering the questions that were key to his efforts, ceaselessly abandoned and renewed, to construct a theodicy. These efforts were entirely unsystematic, though; I’d even say he resisted drawing final conclusions. As if constantly awaiting new guests, friends, emissaries, and agents, Czapski refrained from pronouncing his final sentence on the state of the world. New witnesses kept turning up: a flood in Bangladesh shattered the fragile achievements of the “poor people’s bank”; demoralized by decades of collective farms, Ukrainian peasants no longer knew how to till the land; anti-Semitism surfaced in Poland. But then other messengers would appear bearing better tidings: a gifted new painter had surfaced in Germany; the avenger Solzhenitsyn had arisen from the gloom of Stalinist oppressions; a smart, witty young man had just arrived from Poland. The court deliberated daily, councils were held, Judge Czapski heard out the witnesses, he was known at times to cry, to rage, to rhapsodize—he had an extraordinary gift for empathy—but he never rushed to pass sentence, he’d postpone the moment of judgment for later, tomorrow, the next day, until finally he lost his strength and died, and the sentence was never pronounced. And this was as it should be, the theodicy was meant to remain incomplete. This wasn’t a matter of carelessness, laziness, or neglect, nor was this a case of the court’s usual foot-dragging, its well-known red tape. Judge Czapski must have known that he didn’t have the least desire to pass sentence on the world, that he’d never get it done …
There may have been moments when the time to pronounce sentence seemed at hand, when the judge’s patience wore thin. But the very procedures adopted by the court incorporated the principle of endlessly postponing the moment of judgment. The stream of witnesses lured to Czapski’s afternoon councils never seemed to dry up. The names I’ve mentioned form only a fraction of Jozef’s friends and guests. From Poland came Andrzej Wajda, Krystyna Zachwatowicz, Jacek Wozniakowski, Adam Michnik, Stanislaw Rodzinski, Elzbieta Lubienska, and so many others. Jeanne Hersch visited from Geneva, Dimitrijevic from Paris, the Vernets from Belleville, Milosz from California, Jerzy Stempowski from Berne, many years earlier. And so on and so on: I don’t know anything about some of his visitor-witnesses, many had died before I came to know Czapski, he never mentioned others—but it’s not my purpose to compile a complete or comprehensive list of Czapski’s friends. I’m sure, though, that he spoke to each of them in his particular way, that is, cutting straight to the chase, jettisoning mere pleasantries and small talk, conducting his endless investigation in the matter of the world. And I couldn’t have been the only one to fall under his spell; other pilgrims must have admired him as I did (Jeanne Hersch said: “Peintre, écrivain, dessinateur Czapski est aussi un être exceptionnel”), others must have been drawn to him as though to a wellspring, a source. I’ve used the metaphor of the judge in part because Czapski was beyond a doubt one of those thirty-six righteous men in whose watchful presence the Hassidim believe. And also because the righteous judge can’t pass judgment, he never knows enough, the witnesses are always insufficient, new facts are always turning up. Just as the judge is making his deliberations one person kills another, while elsewhere a different person saves someone, and the judge will learn of this only next week, or perhaps next month, next year. He can’t pass judgment on time, time eludes the nets of justice, flows forward, craves change.
Why must a painter judge the world? Where does he pick up such outrageous notions? Who’d given this old emigrant living in suburban Maisons-Laffitte—who knows what sort of passport he had, if his situation was even legal, or as the clerks at the French prefectures say, régulière—permission to pass judgment on the whole of being? But those who knew him had no doubts. I open the catalogue for a large exhibit of Czapski’s paintings to discover the lovely text of a writer from Lausanne whom I’ve never met, Jean-Louis Kuffer. And I realize immediately that Jean-Louis Kuffer admires Czapski in precisely the same way that Adam Michnik and Jeanne Hersch and Andrzej Wajda do. Admiration for Czapski was ordinarily two- or even threefold: admiration for the painter, for the writer, the author of essays and memoirs, and finally, fo
r the man himself, for his simplicity, intelligence, and goodness. Everyone who met him knew instantly that this was one of the Righteous Ones. And this gave him the right to pass judgment, the right he never exercised, as I said, since he never pronounced sentence. He did have days when the world’s cruelty dealt him what seemed a final blow, when his face grew gray from indignation and fatigue. But other times he’d be enchanted by something he’d read or seen, he’d fall beneath the spell of a landscape’s beauty, or one of Cioran’s piercing aphorisms, or a reproduction of a Matisse or a Soutine, and his words would fill with joy. Since if he was a judge, he judged not isolated occurrences, not incidents from the police blotter, and not even only historical events, but the world as such, and hence the age’s interior life as well, its books and paintings, its music, and even its landscapes and trees, commuters’ faces on suburban trains, the faces of people glimpsed in cafés.
Here for example is an excerpt from his diaries: “A café. A fat woman in front of me wearing a cobalt dress tinged with violet, badly washed hair curled into little ringlets. Powerful, tanned arms. A man in glasses with a face like a lamp and small eyes by a table on a sofa of Venetian rose. Across from him my head in a mirror with hair like Ben-Gurion’s. A tired face with harsh streaks leading down from the nose, cheekbones, sharp hobnails for eyes, the kind of complexion that’s always almost magenta. Ce corps qui est à moi et qui n’est pas moi. The top part of the mirror grows more and more pinkish-brown. Splendid; the top of my face grows even rosier from ruddiness of the shutters shielding the café from the sun.” Obviously this judge, who was also a painter, above all a painter, judged and observed himself as well, unlike those other judges who judge others exclusively and lose sight of themselves as soon as they don the wigs that transform them into wax figures, bodiless and passionless, so that they can’t see themselves.
A Defense of Ardor Page 7
