The Burnt Orange Heresy

by Charles Willeford

  “The war?” I said, puzzled. “The war in Vietnam?”

  “No, no. The Seminole War. It is well known in Europe that these, the Florida Seminole Indians, are at war with your United States. Is it not so?”

  “Yes, I suppose so, but only in a technical sense. The Seminoles are actually a very small Indian nation. And it’s not a real war. It’s a failure on the part of the Indians to sign a peace treaty with the U.S., that’s all. Once in a while there’s a slight legal flare-up, when some Florida county tries to force an Indian kid to go to school when he doesn’t want to go—although a lot of Indians go to school now voluntarily. But there hasn’t been an incident with shots fired for many years. The Seminoles have learned that they’re better off than other Indian nations, in a legal way, by not signing a treaty.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “I learned this from M. Cassidy, but I wrote some letters first to be certain.” He pursed his lips solemnly and looked down at the countertop. “I will die in Florida now. This much I know, and a Frenchman does not find it so easy to leave France when he knows he will never see it again. There are other countries in the world that would have welcomed me, M. Figueras. Greece, Italy. The world is too good to me. I have always had many good friends, friends that I have never met. They write me letters, very nice letters from all over the world.”

  I nodded my understanding. It was perfectly natural for strangers in every country to write to Debierue, although it had never occurred to me to write him myself. The same thing had happened to Schopenhauer in his old age, and he had been as pleased as Debierue to receive the letters. Any truly radical artist with original ideas who lives long enough will not only be accepted by the world at large, he will be admired, if not revered, for his dogged persistence—even by people who detest everything he stands for.

  But there was a major difference between the old German philosopher and this old French painter. Schopenhauer had accepted the flood of congratulations on his birthdays during his seventies as a well-deserved tribute, as a vindication. Debierue, on the other hand, while grateful, seemed bewildered and even humbled by the letters he received.

  “But I am not sorry I came to Florida, M. Figueras. Your sun is good for me.”

  “And your work? Has it gone well for you, too?”

  “The artist”—he looked into my eyes—“can work anywhere. Is it not so?”

  I cleared my throat to make the pitch I had been putting off. “M. Debierue, I respect your stand on art and privacy very much. In fact, just to sit here talking to you and drinking your fresh orange juice—”

  “The fresh frozen,” he emended.

  “. . . is an honor. A great honor. I’m well aware of your reluctance to show your work to the public and to critics, and I can’t say that I blame you. You have, however, on occasion, permitted a few outstanding critics to examine and write about your work. You’ve only been in Florida for a few months, as I understand it, and I don’t know if you’ve completed any paintings you’d be willing to show an American critic. But if you have, I would consider it a privilege—”

  “Are you a painter, M. Figueras?”

  “No, sir, I’m not. I had enough studio courses in college to know that I could never be a successful painter. My talent, such as it is, is writing, and I’m a craftsman rather than an artist, I regret to say. But I am truly a superior craftsman as a critic. To be frank, in addition to the personal pleasure I’d get from seeing your American paintings, an exclusive, in-depth article in my magazine would be a feather in my cap. The sales of the magazine would jump, and it would be the beginning for me of some very lucrative outside assignments from other art journals. As you know, only one photograph of any single one of your paintings would be art news big enough to get both of us international attention—”

  “Do you sculpt? Or work with collage, ceramics?”

  “No, sir.” I tried to keep the annoyance I felt out of my voice. “Nothing like that. I’m quite inept when it comes to doing work with my hands.”

  “But I do not understand, M. Figueras. Your critical articles are very sensitive. I do not understand why you do not paint, or—”

  “At one time this was a rather sore point with me, but I got over it. I tried hard enough, but I simply couldn’t draw well enough—too clumsy, I guess. If I didn’t have a well-developed verbal sense I’d probably have a tough time making a living.”

  “I’ve got to go to the restroom, Mr. Debierue,” Berenice said shyly.

  “Certainly.” Debierue came around the bar and pointed down the hallway. “The door at the far end.”

  I climbed off the stool when she did and looked down the hallway past Debierue’s shoulder. Berenice was undoubtedly bored, but she also undoubtedly had to go to the can. At the end of the short hallway there were two more doors en face, in addition to the door to the bathroom straight ahead. One door was padlocked, and one was not. The padlocked door, with its heavy hasp, was probably Debierue’s studio and formerly the master bedroom of the original owner.

  I took the Polaroid camera out of its leather case, and checked to see if there was an unused flash bulb in the bounce reflector.

  “This camera,” I said, “is so simple to operate that an eight-year-old child can get good results with it almost every time. It’s that simple.” I laughed. “But before I learned how to work the damned thing I ruined ten rolls of film. It’s ridiculous, I know. And with typing, which I had to learn, I was equally clumsy. I took a typing course twice, but the touch system was too much for me to master.” I held up my index and second fingers. “I have to type my stuff with these four fingers. So you can see why I quit trying to paint. It was too frustrating, so I quit trying before I suffered any emotional damage.”

  He looked at me quizzically, and stroked his hooked nose with a long finger.

  “I guess I sound a little stupid,” I said apologetically.

  “No, no. The critic—all critics—arouses my curiosity, M. Figueras.”

  “It’s quite simple, really. I’m purported to be an expert, or at least an authority, on art and the preschool child. And what it boils down to is this. Most motor activity is learned before the age of five. A preschool child can only learn things by doing them. And if you have a mother who does everything for you—little things like tying shoelaces, brushing your teeth, feeding you, and so on, you don’t do them yourself. After five or six, when you have to do them yourself, in school, for example, it’s too late ever to master the dexterity and motor control a painter will need in later years. Overly solicitous mothers, that is, mothers who wait on their children hand and foot, inadvertently destroy incipient artists.”

  “Have you ever written about this theory?”

  I nodded. “Yes. A short book entitled Art and the Preschool Child, and I’ll mail you a copy. It explains, in part, why men who are psychologically suited to becoming painters turn out so much bad art. It isn’t a theory, though, it’s a fact. A neglected point that I made is that such people are not lost to the world as artists. If their problem is recognized, they can be rechanneled into other artistic activities that do not call for great manual dexterity.”

  “Like what?” Debierue appeared to be genuinely interested.

  “Writing poetry, composing electronic music. Or even architecture. The late Addison Mizner, who couldn’t draw a straight line in the sand with a pointed stick, became an important South Florida architect. His buildings in Palm Beach—those that remain—are beautifully designed, and his influence on other Florida architecture has been considerable, especially here on the east coast.”

  I stopped before I got wound up. Debierue was pulling on me—on me!—one of the oldest tricks not in the book, and here I was, falling for it, just like the rawest of cub reporters. It is a simple matter for the person who is wise with the experience of being interviewed to learn the interests of the interviewer. Then, all he has to do is to keep feeding questions to the interviewer and the interviewer will end up with an interview of him
self! Naively happy with a long and pleasant conversation, the interviewer will leave the subject in a blithe mood, only to learn later, when he sits chagrined at his typewriter, that he has nothing to write about.

  The toilet flushed. Debierue waited politely for me to continue, but I swirled the juice in my glass, sipped the rest of it slowly until Berenice rejoined us, and then excused myself on the pretense that I also had to use the facility.

  I still carried my camera, of course, and I quickly opened the door on the left of the hall, across from the padlocked door. I closed it softly behind me and took the room in rapidly. If one of Debierue’s paintings was on the wall, I was going to take a picture of it. But there was only one painting on the wall, a dime-store print in a cheap black frame of Trail’s End—the ancient Indian sitting on his wornout horse. In the 1930s almost every lower middle class home in America contained a print of Trail’s End, but I hadn’t expected to find one in Debierue’s bedroom. Either Cassidy, in his meanness, had hung it on the wall, or it had been left there by the owner of the house. But I still couldn’t fathom how Debierue could tolerate the corny picture, unless, perhaps, he was amused by the ironic idea behind the print. Of course, that was probably the reason.

  The bedroom was austere. A Hollywood single bed, made up with apple-green sheets—and no bedspread—an unpainted pine highboy, a wrought-iron bedside table with a slab of white tile for a top, and a red plastic Charles Eames chair beside the bed made up the inventory. There was a ceiling light, but no lamp. Debierue was a nihilist and stoic in his everyday life as well as in his art, but I felt a wave of sympathy for the painter all the same. It was a shame, I felt, that this great man had so few creature comforts in his old age. There was no need for me to slide open the closet door, or to search the drawers of the highboy and paw through his clothing.

  I took a nervous leak in the bathroom, and turned on the tap to wash my hands in the washbowl. I opened the mirrored cabinet to see what kind of medicines he kept there. If he had any diseases, or an illness of some kind, the medicines he used would furnish a valid clue, and that might be worth writing about. Except for Elixophyllin-K1 (an expectorant that eases the ability to breathe for persons with asthma, emphysema, and bronchitis) and three bars of Emulave (a kind of “soapless” soap, or cleansing bar for people with very dry skin—and I had noted the dryness of the painter’s hands already), there was nothing out of the ordinary in the cabinet. A pearl-handled straight razor, a cup with shaving soap and brush, a bottle of blue green Scope, a half-used tube of Stripe toothpaste, a green plastic Dr. West toothbrush, a 100-tablet bottle of Bayer aspirin, with the cotton gone, and that was it. There wasn’t even a comb, although Debierue, with a bald head as slick as a peeled almond, didn’t need a comb. As bathroom medicine chests in America go, this was the barest cabinet—outside of a rented motel room—I had ever seen.

  I returned to the living room in time to hear Berenice say, “Don’t you get lonely, Mr. Debierue, living way out here all alone?”

  He smiled, patted her hand, and shook his head.

  “It’s the nature of the artist to be lonely,” I answered for him. “But the painter has his work to do, which is ample compensation.”

  “I know,” Berenice said, “but this place is a million miles from nowhere. You ought to get a car, Mr. Debierue. Then you could drive over to Dania for jai-alai at night or something.”

  “No, no,” he protested, still patting her hand, “I am too old now to learn how to drive an automobile.”

  “You could take some students,” Berenice said eagerly. “There would be a lot of students who would like to work with you in your studio! And I bet they’d come with cars from all over”—she turned to me—“wouldn’t they, James?”

  Debierue laughed, and I joined him, although I was laughing more at Berenice’s droll expression—half anger and half bewilderment—because we were laughing at her. For any other painter of equal stature, Picasso, for instance, the suggestion of a student working with a master was valid enough. But for Debierue, who showed his work to no one, the idea was absurd. Debierue had sidetracked me neatly. It was time to get back to business.

  I put an affectionate arm around Berenice’s waist and squeezed her as a signal to keep quiet. “You didn’t answer my question a while ago, M. Debierue,” I said soberly. “You have been very nice to me—to us both—even though we’ve invaded your privacy. But I would like to see your present work—”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry, M. Figueras. You have made your visit without reason. You see,” he shrugged, “I have no work to show you.”

  “Nothing at all? Not even a drawing?”

  The corners of his mouth drooped morosely. “Work I have, yes. But what things I have done in Florida are not deserving of your attention.”

  “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

  His strained half-smile was weary, but his features stiffened with a mask of discernible dignity. His voice dropped to a husky whisper. “The artist alone is the final judge of his work, M. Figueras.”

  I flushed. “Please don’t misunderstand me,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean what I said to come out that way. What I meant was that I don’t intend to criticize your work, or judge it in any way. I meant to say that I would prefer to be the judge of whether I’d like to see it or not. And I would. It would be an honor.”

  “No. I am sorry but I must refuse. You are a critic and you cannot help yourself. For you, to see a picture is to make a judgment. I do not want your judgment. I paint for Debierue. I please myself and I displease myself. For a young man like you to say to me, ‘Ah, M. Debierue, here in this corner a touch of terracotta might strengthen the visual weight,” or ‘I like the tactile texture, but I believe I see a hole in the overall composition. . . .’” He chuckled drily. “I must say No, M. Figueras.”

  “You are putting me down, sir,” I said. “I know there are critics such as you describe, but I’m not one of them.” My face was flaming, but my voice was under control.

  “With the art of Debierue, one man is a crowd. Me. Debierue. Two people are a noisy audience. But to have one spectator with a pen, the critic, is to have many thousands of spectators. Surrealism does not need your rationale, M. Figueras. And Debierue does not paint ‘bicephalous centaurs.’”

  “He won’t let you see his pictures, will he?” Berenice guessed, looking at my face.

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe,” she turned and looked coyly at Debierue, “you’ll let me see them instead, Mr. Debierue?”

  He stepped back a few feet and examined her figure admiringly. “You have a wide pelvis, my dear, and it will be very easy for you to have many fine, beautiful babies.”

  “By that he means No for me too, doesn’t he?”

  “What else?” I shrugged, and lit a cigarette.

  As I had suspected, Debierue had disliked Galt’s criticism. I could have begged, but that would have been abhorrent to me. If this was the way he felt there was no point in pursuing the matter anyway. In one way, he was right about me. It would have been impossible for me to look at his work without judging it. And although I would not have said anything derogatory about his work, no matter how I felt about it, there was bound to be some indication of how I felt—pro or con—reflected in my face. If he didn’t actually believe that his paintings were worthy (although his faculty for criticism was certainly not as good as mine), all I could do now was take him at his word. I felt almost like crying. It was one of the greatest disappointments of my life.

  “Perhaps another time, then, M. Debierue,” I said.

  “Yes, perhaps.” He stroked his beaked nose pensively and studied my face. Not rudely, but earnestly. He glanced toward the hallway leading to his padlocked studio, looked back at me, smiled at Berenice, and tugged pensively at his lower lip. I suspect that he had expected me to put up a prolonged, involved argument, and now he didn’t know whether to be grateful or disappointed by my failure to protest.

 
; “Tell me something, M. Figueras. I am called the Nihilistic Surrealist, but I have never known why. Do you see much disorder here, in my little house?”

  “No, sir.” I looked around. “Far from it.”

  For an artist, the lack of clutter was most unusual. Painters, as a “class,” are a messy lot. They collect things. An old board with concentric swirls, a rock with an intriguing shape, jumbles of wire, seashells, any and all kinds of things that have, to them, interesting shapes or colors. A chunk of wood, for example, may gather a heavy patina of dust for years before a sculptor finally detects the shape within the object and liberates it into a piece of sculpture.

  Painters are even messier, in most instances, than sculptors. They stick drawings up here and there. Pads with sketches are scattered about haphazardly, and they clutter their quarters with all kinds of props and worthless junk. Things are needed for visual stimulation and possible ideas. This clutter is not confined to their studios either. It generally spills over into their everyday habitat, including the kitchen and bathroom.

  And a Surrealist, like Debierue, dealing in the juxtaposition of the unlikely, would ordinarily require a great many unrelated objects in his home-studio to nudge his subconscious. But then, Debierue was an anomaly among painters. My experience with the habits of other painters could hardly apply to him. Besides, I had not, as yet, seen the inside of his studio. . . .

  “As you see, I am an orderly, clean old man. Always it was so, even as a young man. So it may be, after all, that I am not the Surrealist. Is it not so?” The grooved amusement lines crowding his blue eyes deepened as he smiled.

  “It’s a relative term,” I said politely. “A convenient label. ‘Superrealist’ or ‘Subrealist’ would both have served as well. The term ‘Dada’ itself was just a catchall word at first, but the motto ‘Dada hurts,’ when it was truly followed or lived up to in plastic expression, was quite important to me. In fact it still is, but I’ve always considered ‘Surrealism’ as a misnomer.”