The pretensions of this uncle to writing criticism and even to creating actual art (the latter illustrated by the small Impressionist-style pictures he painted, with which he decorated his office at the Ministry of Finance) I had transferred to the nephew, simply changing their object. The uncle, husband and father thrice over, civil servant with the meager salary, had (according to the tittle-tattle) to apply frequently to close relatives in order to pay his bills, and this is why, no doubt, the nephew presented himself in my phantasm in the guise of a petitioner, even though in everyday life he had been one of the supporters of that uncle, who was in fact endowed with enough shrewdness so that his whole circle of friends found more amusing than inopportune his habit of playing the part of the penniless daubster alongside his persona as pen pusher surrounded (as is proper) by green cardboard boxes. Kipouls—one can assume—owed certain of his features to Lutèce, features pushed into a grimace, given my discomfort and the awareness I was gradually acquiring of the singularity of what surrounded me. But, this being so, it still remains to disentangle the reasons why I was obsessed by this Kipouls or, more exactly, by the intrigue of which he was the central figure.
Arms and legs sore, body marked here and there with large purplish-blue deposits, veins hardened by the extractions of blood and various injections, and especially (as a consequence of the tracheotomy) chest racked by that bellows action which seemed to be set in motion when I went to the w.c., amplified in an almost terrifying way in the effort at excretion, and appearing then to involve that whole part of my body between my throat and my bottom, whence the stupefying sensation of having been transformed either into a collapsed accordion or into the pipes and fittings of a mains drainage system, to this being added the oddness of no longer recognizing my sex, which had become to some extent foreign to me, so deformed had it been by the catheter they had inserted without my knowledge and that I had retained while I was biologically reduced to a kind of minimum subsistence—these infirmities, gradually discovered, had given me the feeling that for the time being, I was nothing but a cripple. Was this why, by a detour, the memory of the family gimp became involved, and were there, for my cousin Loulou, in my mind, where a cheerless carnival was taking place, other motives for showing himself than his mandate as substitute for his clubfooted uncle?
I have said that my cousin’s constant preoccupation, the obsession that made him so insistent but was in fact only my own insistence in the form of an unending repetition of a single phantasm, that incurable desire which turned him into a pest when in truth what was pestering me must have come from the depths of my own desires, was to succeed in gaining a position as dramatist or, failing that, as theater critic. I have also described—with respect to the real cousin—the attachments he had to the world of the stage, by way of one person at least whom I knew very well and whose memory does not fail to move me: the woman who, for me, was “Aunt Claire” and, for him, his father’s second wife. If the unexpected intervention of this cousin, whom I am far from regarding as a nuisance but to whom I have never given more than his due of familial affection, can scarcely be explained except by his role as emissary of someone or something the recollection of which was provoked by my pitiful condition, I believe that the club-foot—even if my infirmity attracted his and I used his failings as a basis for composing a type of would-be artist and petitioner—has less weight here than the singer, and that it is to my aunt, an actual native of Brussels, rather than to the Lutetian so proud of belonging to the circle of “Les Parisiens de Paris” that I must turn, in order to decipher the message that I addressed to myself by inventing the intrigue of which my cousin was the shabby hero.
This half-fictional relative whom I had fashioned the way one creates a character in a novel, mingling features taken from someone else with certain of his real features (the slender figure that seemed expressed by the word “Kipouls,” the rich-young-heir aspect to which must have corresponded my choice of a neighborhood such as Passy or La Muette, in which he never lived, as the site of his machinations)—did he not represent at that moment a grotesque or hateful version of those who, where art is concerned, are only dabblers avid to see their names printed in the gazettes? After the elegant British couple placed in a very Lake Poet verdant setting, after the variety star who had burned the boards all her life and even when retired still burned with a holy fire, came this needy amateur wiping his soles on every doormat and maneuvering to place at whatever cost a production so mediocre that it could not interest anyone. Helot at the same time as foil, this absurd abstraction showed me that thing which, for every artist—including the most authentic—is the monster that may one day devour him: a certain thirst for success liable to declare itself even before he has become aware of it, a thirst that will of course be impossible for him ever to slake (one success only increasing the desire for success) and that, once the first bold move has been made, is likely to produce a succession of incredible platitudes even on the part of one who, in this regard, has avoided it for many long years. It illustrated, in other words, what I flatter myself I have not become but, equally, what I was in a fair way to becoming at the time when my nascent intellectual pretensions and my snobbery as petty bourgeois of the sixteenth arrondissement were blending into a single unpleasant amalgam. As he was depicted by the echoes that came back to me, wasn’t my cousin, in a sense, another version of me: an apish copy, no doubt, but not without some sort of resemblance, exactly as between monkey and man there is, beyond the imitation that makes one laugh, a real underlayer of original similitude that one must expect to see manifest itself—even if in rare flashes—in the most civilized man? Was it therefore owing to a disquieting analogy of this kind, calculated as though I had been gifted with second sight into the densest of my shadows, that, like a remorse which one cannot shake off, the outrageous puppet wielded his inexhaustible power to harass? Or, through him, was it not the singer who slyly sought to intervene, she who had been, for me as a child, the embodiment of great art, and the memory of whom could scarcely fail to be ensconced in a recess of this intrigue, which not only implicated someone of her immediate circle but seemed to parody the efforts, at once tender and tinged with childish vanity, that her husband (I was told) used to lavish so that she should be recognized as she deserved to be?
With the couple of English writers, I identified so fully that I experienced no difficulty at finding myself divided into the duality of a man and a woman. With the variety actress, with whom I had identified at the beginning in the first person, a distinction had eventually been established. As for the calamitous cousin, we had nothing else in common but this relationship of cousinhood, and if I speak of him today as of an ironic double, it is only hesitantly and upon reflection, long after my stay in the Hôpital Claude-Bernard, mistaken in the very beginning for a hospital in Brussels. From the earliest to the latest of these phantasms one could observe a degradation, as though progressively, as the element of mythic extravagance was eliminated, the artistic life itself—the single thread running through these three illusions—had become for me distant enough to be the object of a judgment and had at the same time been denuded of its too marvelous colors: I belonged, with total satisfaction, to that prestigious pair of literary people that I was; I fostered, as though they had been mine, the glittering memories and present-day concerns of the great actress; now, while the concept of my own identity was not in the least eclipsed, I was haunted by the pitiful little man whose laughable schemes—which reached me only as secondary realities since they were conveyed to me by public rumor—could neither immediately nor remotely be chalked up to my account and irritated me, not so much the way one is irritated by blunders committed by a close relation as because they had been dinned into my ears. At one end, therefore, was a blind acceptance of a metamorphosis absurd but as seductive as a fairy tale; at the other, a refusal to risk myself in wretched incidents that also involved artistic activity but regarded as dirty linen and with a most critical eye. Between thi
s childlike adherence and this disenchanted rejection, there was my captivated interest in the words and deeds of that Sandier or Sanguier, whose name with its taste of blood and fire could have been that of a corsair or leader of a gang, an actress with a talent certainly a little crude but marked by a generosity which the couple moving about with their air of superiority in the highest intellectuality lacked just as much as did the poor conceited specimen of humanity for whom the small theaters where he was trying contemptibly to be performed represented an inaccessible Olympus.
Leading, in the guise of this couple, the almost divine life I have long dreamed of—a life à la Coleridge or Thomas de Quincey as open to the adventurous enchantments of opium as to refined conversations conducted over tea—I had merged with them without the even minimal distance between us that would have been expressed by the fact of giving them a name. On the other hand, I had dubbed with the burlesque pseudonym of “Kipouls” the character with whom I refused to discover the least analogy in myself. Anonymous to the extent that I had projected myself entirely into her image, still softly lit by the limelight, the woman of the theater had been given the handsome name of Sandier or Sanguier at the moment when, without disimpregnating myself of her, I had begun to differentiate myself from her. Having returned from the utopian heights of the time when the poets whom I would have liked to resemble appeared to me as creatures of a different clay, like the dandies, the prophets, or the demigods, yet undefeated by the discouraging profusion of lilliputian Babels that my eyes—as they sharpened—revealed to me little by little in this domain, it seems that with this figure of the actress, soon positioned at a distance as though I had detached her from myself only the better to admire her, I held in equal balance the naïvely superterrestrial effusion and the gaze that reduces to dust everything it evaluates in order to put it back in its place.
An illusion that vanished without my having had to try to escape from it, the couple of English aesthetes had barely occupied me more than twenty-four hours. If my cousin, the failure, proved more tenacious, it was against my wishes. I submitted, on the other hand, with fairly good grace to the incursions, just as indiscreet, of that woman of the theater whose profession, in the marginal way of a prostitute (she, too, devoted to makeup, the night life, and artificial light), was to move an audience and to enclose it for a time within the magic circle of a completely personal seduction. Doesn’t one have to deduce from this that if, with the English couple, I had allowed those pure spirits which occupy a place of honor in the transcendence of art to return to their home, and if, by thrusting away the undesirable Kipouls, I was intending to flee the cads who make use of art—gracelessly—as a means of obtaining a certain social consideration, I felt myself on an equal footing with those people of whom the old star performer of Paris—whose acting always sparkled with passion—appeared to me a perfect example? Neither angel nor demon, but fantasy with a fully living form, she had probably been sent—into that hell-like chamber where my dream occupied the royal bed of justice—to offer me, in a striking abridgment, the image of the condition of the artist in what was for me its sharpest truth: a mix of splendors and miseries, of greatness and servitude, that equivocal condition concerning which, despite Baudelaire’s fulgurating statement about art considered as a form of prostitution, I was slow to grasp the fact that the gift of the self and the desire to please, sincerity and stagecraft, adjust themselves in it according to the same necessity as the obverse and reverse of a coin, whatever the sovereign may be whose effigy the smelters have struck upon it.
It was an actress whose retirement did not stop her from working for the good of her profession, who had come to me as the embodiment of the type of artist I now hold to be the most moving and whom I would declare exemplary if not for my fear of stupidly laying down laws merely on the basis of something that touches me in a completely personal and perhaps purely circumstantial way: the ardor with which she had always acted had shown that she was ensnared and more or less in love with the gestures she made and the sounds she uttered; it was also a relationship of love that had tied her to her public; yet now it was clear that, beyond the love which, through love of her work, she had for her own person, she loved the theater enough not to think of anything but herself, since the only attachment she had kept to the world was her devotion to those of whom she could say to herself that the stage had consumed them or that, younger, they were bravely preparing themselves to undergo the trial of it. Did I want to prove to myself that if I did not have the same unconditional love for my calling, I was also capable of playing my part with ardor and entering deeply into the skin of my character, when I swallowed the dose of poison that led me in imagination to Brussels, concerning which I have for a long time tried to understand why my delirium chose that city, thinking at first that the choice might have been suggested to me by the fact that my cocktail party hosts had gone there in the days immediately preceding that party, also by the fact that it was in Brussels that I had met for the first time that young woman with whom I had too openly flirted, finally asking myself whether it was not for a more profound and at the same time simpler reason: attached to that city by childhood memories that remain very dear to me, and notably by the memory of my Aunt Claire, whom I saw there in all her brilliance as professional singer, I had perhaps gone back there the way a wounded bull returns to its querencia and attempts to take refuge on the small piece of ground it has chosen as its place of asylum?
In that room which, once the illusion of Brussels had dissipated, I still did not manage to situate right away (placing the Hôpital Claude-Bernard first somewhere near the street of that name, in other words in the southern part of the Ecoles quartier, and not in the north of Paris, near the Porte d’Aubervilliers), my cousin took over from the actress every night. It did not occur to me that there might exist a relationship between two characters of such opposite natures and whose succession corresponded to that of two very distinct motifs. From the ex-star to the insipid aspiring playwright, the distance was such that I scarcely noticed that there was a certain similarity of profession between her and him. I was far less aware, even, that they both took me back to the same period of the past, she, with her fame that must have dated back to the first years of the century, he, to the extent that the ill-natured gossip of which he was the object concerned, not the married man I knew best, but the bachelor I met when I myself was a very small boy. With greater reason, I did not notice that in the case of one as of the other, I was setting foot in a very particular sector of my distant past. The old celebrity whose name recalled to certain people so many beautiful evenings was, in fact, a résumé of the celebrities of my earliest youth, and the sparkling wake of that name, which had been on everyone’s lips in the tumult of the boulevard, did not cease to reflect certain wonders that Paris had in the old days caused me to experience (like the evening when I had been taken into the vicinity of the Madeleine or the Opéra swarming with promenaders to see the “illuminations” for which a visit, I believe, from the King of Belgium had been the occasion). My cousin, so unfairly changed into a swaggering nobody, came to me, despite his dismal figure, from the same shining and slightly equivocal background, since in him were confusedly assembled that “artistic” line of my mother’s family into which it was no doubt not by simple chance that a professional singer had married and of which I knew rather early on that it included in a distant branch the very famous actress Lanthelme (whose pearl necklace contributed to her rather murky renown as a pretty woman and who, almost on the eve of the war of 1914, disappeared mysteriously in the waters of the Rhine when she was sailing in a yacht with the editor of a large Paris newspaper and a few other people).
Unlike the pair of aesthetes, so insubstantial in their ethereal heights that they were like a fragrance emanating from flowers in which one becomes lost but from which one soon separates as the walk continues, the aged actress and the bachelor anxious to make himself known stuck to me with all the weight of the layer of memorie
s which they implied. What they carried thus, like a wealth of contraband, was not the artistic life such as I was able to imagine it when I set my heart on being a poet, but a much more ancient bit of my past life: the one that, beyond the splendors with which the Alexandre III Bridge (as though gilt-edged) and the coach of the Comte de Chambord (as incandescent as the name of its royal owner) had amazed me early on, allowed me to glimpse that world apart which the little word “art” serves to position as a whole, even though incapable of summing up the fantastic diversity of its charms.
Thus named because of its shadowy spaces, whence people and things seem to emerge, whereas it represents (as everyone knows) a scene in broad daylight, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch happens to have been the first monumental painting that I admired after having been duly informed of its quality as masterpiece. I was eight or nine years old, and my parents had taken us on a trip around Holland on the occasion either of an Easter vacation that began in Brussels—where my Aunt Claire had been living since she was widowed—or of a summer visit to a beach on the North Sea. Besides the “chiaroscuro” that brought out, along with the central character, a background figure that one might think was that of a woman, very small (as was my mother), but which I now know to be that of a little girl in a long dress, I appreciated the historical nature of the picture, and, oddly, the Louis XIII appearance of the male costumes and of the large musketeer-like felt hats, the whole coated with a noble patina and thus misted over in the exact proportion required by the antiquity of the scene. In the course of that trip, I also saw The Anatomy Lesson (à propos of which my father pointed out that the cadaver they were dissecting seemed to light up the room in which the picture was hung) and other great examples of Flemish painting, including (if it is in fact there) a Christ on the Cross by Van Dyck, the Christ with tawny, lined flesh that my mother, in Holland or elsewhere, found so moving the moment she rested her eyes on it and the pathos of which, conveyed to me by my mother’s attitude, struck me too. Our summer vacation the year before had been spent in a place close to Lake Geneva which we had left to make a few excursions, going to Freiburg (where I saw, in an old city setting of which I recall no detail but only the antiquated atmosphere, a gray or tiger cat of a phenomenal size sitting in front of a door), to Berne (of which I remember only the bears), to Zermatt whence we went up a mountain that measures, as I have not forgotten, 3,136 meters in height and is called the Gornergrat. Begun with a night on a train, that trip had been the first that I made across the border, and I have not forgotten how, in the Swiss stations, the sight of the stationmasters in red caps and abundantly ornamented with braid gave me the enchanted feeling of being far from home. I brought back from it several wooden knickknacks representing bears, a few greenish foliated stones collected on mountain paths, and a postcard or other image in color showing the Simplon express going full speed. The number one attraction, which was also the final attraction, had been our ascent of the Gornergrat, where I learned, in the presence of the Matterhorn and Mont Rose (given life and movement by a party of mountain climbers like a line of ants, visible through the telescope), what proud intoxication you experience face to face with the high peaks, even when your belvedere is a spot to which you have been taken by a cable car. It was a revelation of nature in its “eternal snows” aspect, like a first degree of initiation before the one that, the following year, would consist in having a foretaste of the beauties that can be produced by human hands.
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 16
