The Recognitions

by William Gaddis

  —Difference?

  —To selling your pictures.

  —Well then, Wyatt said looking away from the blemished smile, down to the floor, bringing his arms together behind him twisted until he’d got hold of both elbows, and his face, thin and exhausted, seemed to drain of life. —Yes, that . . . that’s up to the pictures.

  —It’s not, of course, Crémer said evenly.

  —What do you mean? Wyatt looked up, startled, dropping his arms.

  —I am in a position to help you greatly.

  —Yes, yes but . . .

  —Art criticism pays very badly, you know.

  —But . . . well? Well? His face creased.

  —If you should guarantee me, say, one-tenth of the sale price of whatever we sell . . .

  —We? You? You?

  —I could guarantee you excellent reviews. Nothing changed in Crémer’s face. Wyatt’s eyes burned as he looked, turning green. —Are you surprised? Crémer asked, and his face changed now, expressing studied surprise, scorning to accept; while before him Wyatt looked about to fall from exhaustion.

  —You? For my work . . . you want me to pay you, for . . . for . . .

  —Yes, think about it, said Crémer, turning to the door.

  —No, I don’t need to. It’s insane, this . . . proposition. I don’t want it. What do you want of me? he went on, his voice rising as Crémer opened the door.

  There was hardly light, not enough to cast a shadow, left in the room. As they had talked, each became more indistinct, until Crémer opened the door, and the light of the minuterie threw his flat shadow across the sill. —I regret that I disturbed you, he said. —I think you need rest, perhaps? But think about it. Eh?

  Wyatt followed him to the door, crying out, —Why did you come here? Now? Why do you come at dawn with these things?

  Crémer had already started down the stairs. —At dawn? he called back, pausing. —Why my dear fellow, it’s evening. It’s dinner time. Then the sounds of his feet on the stairs, and the light of the minuterie failed abruptly, leaving Wyatt in his doorway clutching at its frame, while the steps disappeared below unfaltering in the darkness.

  Il faut toujours en avoir sur soi, de l’argent, vous savez . . .

  Like lions, out of the gates, into the circus arena, cars roared into the open behind the Opéra from the mouth of the Rue Mogador. Around it this faked Imperial Rome lay in pastiche on the banks of its Tiber: though Tiber’s career, from the Apennine ravines of Tuscany, skirting the Sabine mountains to course through Rome and reach with two arms into the sea, finds unambitious counterpart in the Seine, diked and dammed across the decorous French countryside, proper as wallpaper. Nevertheless, they had done their best with what they had. The Napoleons tried very hard. The first one combed his hair, and that of his wife and brothers, like Julius Caesar and his family combed theirs. J. L. David (having painted pictures of Brutus, Andromache, and the Horatii) painted his picture looking, as best he could manage, like Julius Caesar; and Josephine doing her very best (the Coronation) to look above suspicion herself. Everyone rallied round, erecting arches, domes, pediments, and copied what the Romans had copied from the Greeks. Empire furniture, candlesticks, coiffures . . . somewhere beyond them hung the vision of Constantine’s Rome, its eleven forums, ten basilicas, eighteen aqueducts, thirty-seven city gates, two arenas, two circuses, thirty-seven triumphal arches, five obelisks, four hundred and twenty-three temples with their statues of the gods in ivory and gold. But all that was gone. There was no competition now. Not since Pope Urban VIII had declared the Coliseum a public quarry.

  As the spirit of collecting art began in Rome, eventually it began in Paris, reached the proportions of the astounding collection of that wily Sicilian blood the Cardinal Mazarin, murmuring to his art as he left in decline and exile, —Que j’ai tant aimé, French enough to add, —et qui m’ont tant couté. If the Roman connoisseur could distinguish among five kinds of patina on bronze by the smell, French sensitivities soon became as cultivated. If, to please the Roman connoisseur, sapphires were faked from obsidian, sardonyx from cheap colored jasper, French talents were as versatile: “Un client désire des Corots? L’article manque sur le marché? Fabriquons-en . . .” (And one day, of Corot’s twenty-five hundred paintings, seventy-eight hundred were to be found in America.) Even then they knew the value of art. Or of knowing the value of art. As Coulanges said to Madame de Sévigné, —Pictures are bullion.

  Paris, fortunate city! by now a swollen third of the way into the twentieth century, still to be importuned by those who continued to take her at her own evaluation. Perhaps a kindred homage which rang across the sea was well earned (from a land whose length was still ringing with the greeting —Hello sucker!): perhaps fifty million Frenchmen couldn’t be wrong. Four million of them, at any rate, were nursing venereal diseases; and among the ladies syphilis brought about some forty thousand miscarriages that year. “Paris”: a sobriquet to conjure with (her real name Lutetia), it bore magic in the realm of Art, as synonymous with the word itself as that of Mnesarete, “Phryne,” had once been with Love. Long since, of course, in the spirit of that noblesse oblige which she personified, Paris had withdrawn from any legitimate connection with works of art, and directly increased her entourage of those living for Art’s sake. One of these, finding himself on trial just two or three years ago, had made the reasonable point that a typical study of a Barbizon peasant signed with his own name brought but a few hundred francs, but signed Millet, ten thousand dollars; and the excellent defense that this subterfuge had not been practiced on Frenchmen, but on English and Americans “to whom you can sell anything” . . . here, in France, where everything was for sale.

  Under the eyes of Napoleon I (atop a column in the Place Vendôme, “en César”) the Third Republic bickered on. Having established their own squalid bohemias, there was no objection to handing the original over to their hungry neighbor across the Maginot Line, who was busy scrapping the Versailles treaty, fragment by fragment, until the day when a German envoy would be shot in Paris, and, weeks later, a peace pact signed to prepare for a re-enactment of the bloodshed which had provoked this expression of faith from one killed in it, “Il y a tant de saints, ils forment un tel rempart autour de Paris, que les zeppelins ne passeront jamais.” And Paris waited, as ever ready as Phryne beset by slanders and threats, to rend her robe and bare her breasts to the mercy of her judges.

  In an alley, a dog hunting in a garbage can displayed infinite grace in the unconscious hang of his right foreleg. Little else happened that Saturday night in August. Saint Bartholomew’s Day was warm. It was the dead heat of Paris summer, when Paris cats go to sleep on Paris windowsills, and ledges high up, and fall off, and plunge through the glass roof of the lavabo. The center of the city was empty. A sight-seeing bus set off from the Place de l’Opéra. A truck and a Citroën smashed before the Galeries Lafayette. At the Pont d’Auteuil, a man’s body was dragged out of the Seine with a bicycle tied to it. Among the fixtures, tiled and marbled shapes remindful of a large outdoor bathroom, in the cemetery at Montrouge a widower argued with his dead wife’s lover over who had the right to place flowers on her grave. In front of the Bourse, a deaf-mute soccer team carried on conversation in obstreperous silence. On the Quai du Pont Neuf, a Frenchman sat picking his nose. Then he put his arm around his girl and kissed her. Then he picked his nose. It was Sunday in Paris, and very quiet.

  On the terrace of Larue, under the soiled stature of the Madeleine’s peripteral imposture, Wyatt considered a German newspaper. Taxis limped past, bellicose as wounded animals, collapsing further on at Maxim’s, late lunch. Unrepresentatively handsome people passed on foot. Some of them stopped and sat at tables. —In Istanbul in the summer, a lady said, —it was Istanbul, wasn’t it? We used to take long rides in the cistern, in the summer . . .

  Wyatt read slowly and with difficulty in Die Fleischflaute, an art publication. His show was over. No pictures had been sold. He had thrown away La Macule quickly
, after reading there Crémer’s comments: —Archaïque, dur comme la pierre, dérivé sans cœur, sans sympathie, sans vie, enfin, un esprit de la mort sans l’espoir de la Résurrection. But at this moment the details of that failure were forgotten, and the thing itself intensified, as he made out in Die Fleischflaute that there had just been discovered in Germany an original painting by Hans Memling. Crude overpainting had transformed the whole scene into an interior, with the same purpose that Holofernes’ head had once been transformed into a tray of fruit on Judith’s tray (making it less offensive as a ‘picture’): this one proved to be a figure being flayed alive on a rack, since over-painted with a bed, and those engaged in skinning him were made to minister to the now bedridden figure. A fragment of landscape seen through an open window, said Die Fleischflaute, had excited the attention of an expert, and once it was taken to the Old Pinakothek in Munich and cleaned, the figure stretched in taut agony was identified as Valerian, third-century persecutor of Christians, made captive by the Persian Sapor whose red cloak was thrown down in the foreground before the racked body thin in unelastic strength, anguish and indifference in the broken tyrant’s face, its small eyes empty with blindness. Possibly, the experts allowed, it might be the work of Gheerardt David, but more likely that of Memling, from which David had probably drawn his Flaying of the Unjust Judge. There followed a eulogy on German painters, and Memling in particular, who had brought the weak beginnings of Flemish art to the peak of their perfection, and crystallized the minor talents of the Van Eycks, Bouts, Van der Weyden, in the masterpieces of his own German genius.

  Saint Bartholomew’s Day in Notre Dame, reflecting commemoration of the medal which Gregory XIII had struck honoring Catherine de’ Medici’s massacre of fifty thousand heretics: the music surged and ebbed in the cathedral, and in the Parisian tradition of preconcerted effects the light suddenly poured down in fullness, then faded, together they swelled and died. At the end of the service, as the organ filled that place with its sound, the body of the congregation turned its many-faced surface to look back and up at the organ loft, and from the organ loft they formed a great cross so. Then the cross disintegrated, its fragments scattered over their city, safe again in the stye of contentment.

  Paris simmered stickily under the shadowed erection of the Eiffel Tower. Like the bed of an emperor’s mistress, the basin she lay in hadn’t a blade or stitch out of place; and like the Empress Theodora, “fair of face and charming as well, but short and inclined to pallor, not indeed completely without color but slightly sallow . . . ,” Paris articulated her charm within the lower registers of the spectrum. So Theodora, her father a feeder of bears, went on the stage with no accomplishment but a gift for mockery, no genius but for whoring and intrigue. An empress, she triumphed: no senator, no priest, no soldier protested, and the vulgar clamored to be called her slaves; bed to bath, breakfast to rest, she preened her royalty. —May I never put off this purple or outlive the day when men cease to call me queen . . . She died of cancer.

  Toward evening the shadow of the Eiffel Tower inclined to the Latin Quarter across her body. She prepared, made herself up from a thousand pots and tubes, was young, desperately young she knew herself and the mirror forgotten, the voice brittle, she lolled uncontested in the mawkish memories of men married elsewhere to sodden reality, stupefied with the maturity they had traded against this mistress bargained in youth. Revisiting, they could summon youth to her now, mark it in the neon blush uncowed by the unquerulous façades maintained by middle age, and the excruciating ironwork and chrome, the cancerous interiors.

  At a bar in Rue Caumartin a girl said to an American, —Vous m’emmenez? Moi, je suis cochonne, la plus cochonne de Paris . . . Vous voulez le toucher? ici? Donnez moi un billet . . . oui un billet, pour le toucher . . . ici . . . discrètement . . .

  A girl lying in a bed said, —We only know about one per cent of what’s happening to us. We don’t know how little heaven is paying for how much hell.

  Someone said, —But you’ve been over here so long, to an American in a hotel room who was showing his continental savoir faire by urinating in the sink. He said, —I wanted to marry her, but you know, she’s tied to her environment. Someone said, —I never knew him very well, he’s of the Negro persuasion. On the left bank, someone had just left his wife and taken up the guitar. It was at home in bed. —I dress it in her bathrobe every night, he said. Someone else suggested using a duck, putting its head in a drawer and jamming the drawer shut at the critical moment. A young gentleman was treating his friends to shoeshines for the seventh time that hour. He was drunk. The dirty Arab children sold peanuts from the top of the basket and hashish from the bottom. They spoke a masterful unintimidated French in guttural gasps, coming from a land where it was regarded neither as the most beautiful language, as in America, nor the only one, as in France. At that table someone said, —This stuff doesn’t affect me at all. But don’t you notice that the sky is getting closer? —Of course I love art, that’s why I’m in Paris, a girl said. The boy with her said, —Je mon foo, that’s French for . . . —Putas, putas, putas, muttered the man in the sharkskin suit. Someone said, —My hands are full, would you mind getting some matches out of my pocket? . . . here, my trouser pocket. Someone said, —Do you like it here? Someone else said, —In the morning she didn’t want to, so I put it under her arm while she was grinding the coffee. A man in an opaque brown monocle said, —Gzhzhzhzhzt . . . hu . . . and fell off his chair. Someone told the joke about Carruthers and his horse.

  On the quai, the man kissed his girl and returned to his more delicate preoccupation. Along the Rue de Montmartre stubby hands lifted glasses of red wine. These were the people, slipping, sliding, perishing: they had triumphed once in revolution, and celebrated the Mass in public parody; installing the Goddess of Reason with great celebration, she proved, when unveiled, to be a dancing girl with whom many had extensive acquaintance. The People, of whom one of their officers, Captain de Mun, said —“Galilean, thou hast conquered!” Ah, for them no mercy; they are not the people, they are hell itself! . . . But they knew what they wanted: Liberté, égalité, fraternité . . . evaded the decorous façades decreed by their elders, or betters, and gathered in public interiors of carnivorous art nouveau.

  In Père Lachaise an American woman bought a plot so that she might be buried near . . . who was it? Byron? Baudelaire? In the Place Vendôme another transatlantic visitor overturned a stolen taxicab at Napoleon’s feet, was jailed, fined, and made much of by his friends. In Notre Dame du Flottement a millionairess from Maine married her colored chauffeur and was made much of by his friends. On the terrace of the Dôme, beset behind the clattering bastion of her own Sainte Chapelle, the young George Washington read with silently moving lips, broke wind pensively and looked around to see if she had attracted notice. On the Boulevard de la Madeleine a girl walking alone, swinging her purse, paused to glance in at the feet showing below the shield of the pissoir, and waited to accost their owner. Someone, looking above, cried out, —What’s that? What is it? —The balloons. The balloons have gone up. In the washroom of the Café de la Régence, someone scrawled Vive le roi over the sink.

  To one side, a man read the Tribune. To the other, Al Misri. —Votre journal, m’sieur, the waiter called, waving Die Fleischflaute, —votre journal . . .

  And the shadow he cast behind him as he turned away fell back seven centuries, to embrace the dissolute youth of Raymond Lully, and infatuation with the beautiful Ambrosia de Castello, which she discouraged; and if she seemed to succumb at last, offering to bare her breasts in return for a poem he had written to their glory, it was to show him, as he approached in that rapture of which only flesh is capable, a bosom eaten away by cancer: he turned away to his conversion, to his death years later stoned in North Africa, and to his celebration as a scholar, a poet, a missionary, a mystic, and one of the foremost figures in the history of alchemy.

  III

  First of all, then, he is evil, in the judgment
of God, who will not inquire what is advantageous to himself. For how can anyone love another, if he does not love himself? . . . In order, therefore, that there might be a distinction between those who choose good and those who choose evil, God has concealed that which is profitable to men.

  —Peter, in the Clementine Recognitions

  —Wyatt . . . let’s get married before we know too much about each other.

  That was unlike Esther.

  She liked to get things out in the open, find why they happened. Still, like other women in love, salvation was her original purpose, redemption her eventual privilege; and, like most women, she could not wait to see him thoroughly damned first, before she stepped in, believing, perhaps as they do, that if he were saved now he would never need to be redeemed. There was a historical genuineness about Esther, which somehow persisted in spite of her conscious use of it. In her large bones there was implicit the temporal history of a past, and a future very much like it. There was size to her. She had the power of making her own mistakes appear as the work of some supramundane agency, possibly one of those often vulgarly confused with fate, which had here elected her capable of bringing forth some example which the world awaited. Principal among these (and no less a mistake, somewhere, which she must live out as though it were her own) was being a woman. She worked very hard to understand all this; and having come to be severely intellectual, probing the past with masculine ruthlessness, she became an accomplice of those very circumstances which Reason later accused of being unnecessary, and in the name of free will, by which she meant conscious desire, managed to prolong a past built upon them, refurbished, renewed, and repeated. With great diligence, and that talent of single purpose with which her sex pursue something unattainable in the same fashion they pursue something which is, her search for Reason was always interrupted by reasons. Things happened for reasons; and so, in her proposal it may have been simply her feminine logic insuring a succession of happenings which reasonably might never have happened at all. Or being a woman, and the woman she was, her proposal may have been an infinite moment of that femininity which is one of humanity’s few approximations to beauty, asking no justification and needing none to act in a moment of certainty with nothing to fear, one day to be recalled in a fearful moment threatened by certainty.