Written on Water, page 22
In terms of technique, the first picture has already been simplified to the extent possible, but in order to capture the complex layering of the boy’s spirit, a welter of brushstrokes has been added atop the blocks of color. The picture of the second boy from seven years later is composed entirely of flat blocks of color, but the flatness here has a rich substance of its own.
There was a man named Chocquet (according to the Japanese transliteration) who must have been Cézanne’s friend and whose portrait appears twice in this volume. The first time that we see him, he already looks old and senile. His lips seem to tremble, and he sits with his legs crossed, one hand resting on the chair back, fingers splayed. From his head to his shoes and socks, a look of querulous distrust conveys his cowardice, his reproachfulness, his pettiness. It is clear that this is a man who has been through everything and learned nothing thereby. He’s at loose ends but at the same time believes himself rich with the fruit of his experience, of which bounty he is only too happy to share in the form of lectures delivered beneath a triumphal arch consecrated to the virtues of old age. The satire here is not entirely lacking in sympathy for its subject. But in a painting from nine years later, this sympathy has expanded into an exquisite tenderness. This time, he sits outdoors against a backdrop of dense foliage, and although his hair is still gray and his figure similarly gaunt, he looks much younger. The terror of his own incomprehension has given way to a sense of perplexity that, because it encompasses everything around him, is much more serene. In his lowered eyes, we can see sentimentality, grief, retirement. His sunken mouth carries a little smile; perhaps he’s spending a pleasant summer morning in the garden. There is love in every single brushstroke, for this man, and for his stubborn affection for life.
Those who are interested in the exaggerated and distorted line of modern art would do well to look closely at his over-sized, obliquely angled hands.
Over the course of several portraits of the artist’s wife, we can also detect some significant psychological developments. The first example uses the traditional image of a pair of lovers as its theme, but when we look ahead to the later paintings, it is clear that the woman portrayed here is strikingly similar to the artist’s wife. This is clearly a depiction of the painter’s own love story. The background is romantic. Tall reeds of some sort grow by the side of a lake. The limpid sunlight shines across the woman’s white bonnet, with something of the freshness of a line from an old Chinese poem: “tender reeds in the distance green / white dew lends a frosty sheen.”1 The woman lays her hand on the man’s bare arm, just below his shoulder. She is a shallow woman at bottom, who finds virtue in obeying the rules, yet in the moment that she is illuminated by the sunlight of love, she becomes more generous of spirit, smarter, more confident in her knowledge of the world, and all of this moves her so much that tears shine in her eyes. The painter desires her to be transformed in this way, and thus he paints her just so, while he represents himself as an entirely passive, subordinate, and characterless young man, sitting with his head bowed at her feet, accepting her kindness, his body seemingly shrunken to one size smaller than hers.
In this, her very first appearance in Cézanne’s work, she is depicted with a squarish face and slightly protruding eyes. She seems a mild young woman who has undergone the rigors of a strict bourgeois upbringing. This is why she remains exceedingly reserved throughout. Yet entranced by his own romantic ideals, Cézanne has sanctified their relationship through his art.
Her second appearance in his work comes as a real shock. It must be quite a few years later. She sits on a sprawling old velvet sofa the color of dark clouds, her head bent to her sewing, with prominent circles under her eyes, a sharper nose, and a squarer chin. She is strong-willed: her hair is pulled back into an unshakable iron bun, and her upper body is sheathed in what looks likes galvanized sheet metal. The door to the room is visible just behind her, a hard rectangle, locked. There is flowered paper pasted on the wall, and each flower resembles a little iron cross. Can it be easy for a poor artist’s wife patiently and smilingly to maintain such iron-clad wifely virtue? What a frightening thing life can be!
When Cézanne goes on to paint his wife five years later, he captures her in a tender moment. Her hair is loose, and she is wearing what appears to be a nightgown, made of satin, its soft and luminous flow of wide vertical stripes seemingly unable to prop up her body. She holds her head to one side, lost in her own thoughts, and reminiscence makes her young—although a young woman’s eyes could not contain the depths of sadness in these eyes. She is someone who has suffered for her ideals, only to discover much later that very little remains of them. Even their remnants are distant and indistinct, and yet, because she has suffered, they seem all the more appealing, like a simple melody floating through the air from afar, mingling with the breath of the earth and the seasons.
This aspect of her, however, is only fleeting. In another portrait, her hair appears to have been clipped short like a boy’s, and even her face resembles that of a boy who has been weathered by a storm, aged before his time. Her chin extends forward from the picture frame, and her sharp semiprofile resembles a rust-blackened blade that’s just cut through an apple and is sticky with its sour juice. Yet she smiles, and in her eyes is a bleak courage—a courage that would seem solemn, if she had been able to manage something heroic rather than merely bleak.
The next picture is even more unhappy. The painter’s wife sits in her husband’s atelier, a brilliantly colored floral-print window shade slanting above her head. Sunlight and shadow play across the wall, but the light here does not belong to her. She is merely the woman from the kitchen. She wears greasy, somberly colored clothes. The object she is clasping in her hand might be a handkerchief, except the way she holds it suggests that it is more likely a dishcloth. She was probably busy using it when he called her in to serve as a model, and much as one would placate a child, she has decided to stay for a moment to humor him. She has been smiling all these years, and now the time has come for the painter to acknowledge the truth: it is an exhausted, insipid, and sloppy smile. On that long-suffering face, there is very little left of the feminine. One eyebrow is raised, perhaps parodying her disappointment, and the parody itself is actually a gesture of tenderness, of the sort that’s only possible through a long and familiar intimacy. You need to look carefully before you can see it.
Cézanne’s final portrait of his wife is lively and distinct. She sits in a flower garden illuminated by the sun, with luxuriant foliage and the white, swirling dust of late spring and early summer on the road behind her. She is wearing her best Sunday gown, tightly encircled by a whalebone corset. She has recovered the slim figure of her youth, and when she stretches out her arms, her wrists look firm and lovely. And yet the spring scene in the background has nothing to do with her. The painter’s circumstances have improved, the hard times are behind them, but having been formed by precisely those hardships, she is no longer able to live her life in peace. The happiness on her face is a happiness devoid of content. If one were to remove that brilliant backdrop, the happiness on her face would seem strangely hollow, even idiotic.
Having seen Mrs. Cézanne’s wifely virtues, it’s something of relief to see a selfish woman. His subject in Woman in Bonnet and Leather Shawl has a long pallid face and a long nose, and her eyes possess a chilly allure. She retains the rancorous air of a city slicker who has ended up in the countryside. She could be a gentry woman, or she might be a con artist with pretensions to gentility.
In a very few brushstrokes, the painting entitled Statue manages to express that solidity and hardness that is the special quality of stone. This is the most statuelike object I have ever seen reproduced in a book of paintings. I don’t know whether the painting was intended as some sort of parody. It looks to me as if it may well have been: this all-too-typical image of a child, with prominent and plump cheeks, round belly, and contoured limbs, is supposed to convey divine health and vitality but ends up smacking of greed, impudence, and an excessive fondness for wine and women, instead. In the end, this Cupid resembles neither a god nor a child.
In addition to these, there is a large group of paintings that take groups of bathers emerging from the water as their theme. Each of these paintings is set on a shore beside a wood. There are a few men who look mostly alike, but the focus is on a number of women and the difficult task of capturing their gestures and the figural beauty of their bodies. This is especially true of the last such picture, Women Bathers, in which the depiction of the human form has gradually grown more and more abstract, prefiguring the cubism of the century to come.
There are two paintings sketching Mardi Gras that seem to be about the naked pursuit of love between men and women during the wild jubilance of the carnival. The atmosphere is frenzied, and the brushwork is frenzied as well, and what I took away from these paintings was merely that the women’s midsections were invariably bigger than those of the men.
The Last Day of Mardi Gras, however, is a masterpiece. Two vagabonds, dressed up as harlequins, are on their way back from the celebration. One holds a walking stick, and the other is unsteady on his feet, his waist bent and one hand propped on his knee, holding himself in a slyly jocose posture. They seem to be walking downhill. All the lines in the painting are slanted, and the atmosphere is suggestive of the repose that comes in the wake of desire fulfilled. Mardi Gras is an ancient custom, which has long since fallen into disfavor, but the faces of these two men are as common as could be. They are giddy with a simple sort of self-confidence, drunk with their own inconsequential cleverness, betrayed by their own lack of feeling, and lack of interest.
Boy with Skull presents a student on the cusp of maturity seated next to a table, his knees pressed against the legs of the table, as if they can no longer fit underneath, as if everything has somehow gone out of proportion. His face is truly that of a student: mischievous, inquisitive, full of fantasy, impatient of others. One can almost feel the pressure exerted on his legs by the wave-shaped edges of the cheap wooden table at which he sits. On the table, there are books, a ruler, and a skull sitting atop some papers. The skeletons used for the study of anatomy possess a real intimacy, because they are merely ordinary; one’s student’s days are especially ordinary, like the smell of feet perspiring inside a pair of basketball shoes.
A portrait of old age is found in Woman in a Straw Hat. Her head is bowed as she counts the beads on her rosary, and under the brim of her hat is revealed a foxlike face whose humanity has been diminished by half, leaving only cupidity. She lacks the energy for stealing, larceny, or the hoarding of goods, and this lethargy leaves her uneasy. She bends over her rosary, praying not for serenity or for heavenly ideals but only to be allowed to continue to murmur over the hard little beads, to count and catalog more of the objects that lie within her purview. She will not be with her beads for much longer, and she can do nothing more than pass them back and forth across her mouth until they are slick with the smell of her spittle.
Cézanne’s own old age was not like that at all. In his very last self-portrait, he wears a hunting cap at a rakish tilt, like a man about town. He has grown a white beard, and his slender, raised eyebrows give him the crafty look of a man who’s seen through it all. The smile in his eyes is exceedingly endearing, as if to say: I know—even after I’m gone, spring will come again. Old age is not lovable in and of itself, but there are many lovable old people.
Of the landscape paintings, I am fondest of his Broken House. This is a white house sitting beneath the afternoon sun, with a blackened window that looks like a solitary eye peering out from a face. There is a great big crack running from the roof all the way down to the ground, so that the house looks as if it’s laughing itself to pieces. The little path that leads to the house is already barely visible through the undergrowth, and the house is surrounded on all sides by weeds, which look extremely soft and pale under the sun, forming a blurry expanse. The suffocating color of the sun reminds one of the lines of a poem: “On the ancient road to Chang’an, no sound and no dust, no sound and no dust / through fading sunset in the west wind appear the towers of the Han imperial tombs.” Here, however, there is no magnificent past to mourn, only bourgeois desolation, emptiness within emptiness.
ON THE SECOND EDITION OF ROMANCES
I always used to think to myself: when my book has been published, I want to make the rounds of the newsstands, and I want the cover of my book, in my favorite blue-green hue, to open a little nocturnal blue window on the shelf, through which people can see the moon and all the excitement of the evening. I’m going to ask the news vendor, feigning nonchalance, “How’s it selling? Too expensive, isn’t it? Would anyone really buy it at that price?” Ah! Make yourself famous as early as you can! If success comes too late, the pleasure of it isn’t as intense. The first time I published a couple of pieces in the school magazine, I was deliriously happy, poring over the pages again and again, as if seeing the words for the first time. But nowadays, I’m not so easily excited. Which is why I have to push myself even harder: Hurry! Hurry! Otherwise it will be too late! Too late!
Even if I were able to wait, the times rush impatiently forward—already in the midst of destruction, with a still-greater destruction yet to come. There will come a day when our civilization, whether sublime or frivolous, will be a thing of the past. If the word I use the most in my writing is “desolation,” that is because this troubling premonition underlies all my thinking.
I’ve been meaning to go see the kind of bengbeng opera that’s already fallen out of fashion in Shanghai but could never find the right person to go along with me.1 I’m too embarrassed to admit that I’m interested in such a rubbishy, lowbrow sort of thing. It was only recently that I finally came across a married lady whose family didn’t dare accompany her to see Zhu Baoxia in the midst of the summer heat, so we went together.2 As soon as the huqin player began to tune up, I listened with a strange twinge of sorrow to the high winds and distant skies of the melody, intertwined with the squeak of strings. “Heaven and earth dark and brown, cosmos vast without bounds,” the wind blowing through the northern passes, howlingly pursued by the emptiness in its wake, with nowhere to stop and rest.3 A man in a great blue robe beats the rhythm out on a bamboo clapper, with a ruthless hand: “Kua! Kua! Kua!” He moves to the front of the stage, very close to the audience, deliberately drowning out the singer: “Kua! Kuu-wa! Kuu-wa!” His blows rain mercilessly down. I’m sitting in the second row, and I’m so overwhelmed that my head swims, and so much of the stuff in my brain is beaten out that I’m left only with what’s most primitive. In the poor cave dwellings of the northwest, people can only live the most rudimentary of lives, and even that is no easy matter. The people in the play contend at the top of their lungs with the caustic wind of the huqin and the iron beat of the mallet. The northern girl playing Li Sanniang, her skin dark and without a trace of powder, with two ink-black streaks for eyebrows, buckets dangling from her carrying poles as she makes her way to the well, laments the bitterness of her fate: “Though I can’t compare with Wang Sanjie . . .” She keeps her eyes fixed on the ground as she loudly and gravely declaims each word. When she is drawing water from the well, along comes “a dashing young commanding officer on horseback,” who turns out to be her son, with whom she is unknowingly reunited. This little general later begins to suspect that this poor country woman is indeed his mother and questions her about her family background: “What was your father’s name? Who was your mother? What about your older brother?” She answers each question, her “I’s” sounding like “Ah’s,” until she’s even explained her sister-in-law’s background: “Ah have a sister-in-law called Zhang.” Living in cave dwellings, surrounded by violent dust storms and perpetual dusk, one’s existence is restricted to simple facts: who is your father, who is your mother, your brother, your sister-in-law? There’s very little to remember, so nothing’s ever forgotten.
Before the main play, there was also a short comic sketch about a woman who manages to kill her own husband. Two huge streaks of rouge drooped down across this lascivious woman’s broad cheeks. Even the sides of her nose were covered with rouge, so that only a narrow strip of powdery white nose remained. This contrivance—aimed toward creating the impression of a high, narrow, and aquiline Greek nose—just didn’t fit the width of her face. Her teary eyes seemed to be located on the side of her face, like an animal’s. She had a gold tooth, two long, greasy braids dangling almost to her ankles, and from under the sleeves of her pink blouse, you could catch a glimpse of her plump, copper-colored wrists. Her husband’s aggrieved spirit lodges a complaint with the authorities, appearing as a gust of wind. An officer in a palanquin, having heard him out, reports: “There’s an apparition blocking the road.” The magistrate asks, “Is it a male apparition or a female apparition?” After a careful inspection, the answer comes back: “The apparition is male.” The magistrate orders the officer, “Follow that apparition, and make no mistake about it.” He follows the wind to a fresh tomb, where the young widow is arrested. She kneels in front of the officer as she explains how it came to be that her husband came home to her one night, fell suddenly ill, and died. She tries a hundred different circumlocutions in order to get her meaning across. And still he doesn’t understand. She sings: “Your honor! Did you ever see a stove without a fire? Did you ever see a chimney without smoke?” The audience cheers.
Women who manage to get the upper hand in barren and backward country aren’t actually much like the wild roses most people imagine them to be, with dark, flashing eyes, even stronger than a man, brandishing a horsewhip in one hand and willing to use it at the slightest provocation. That’s just an image city dwellers have made up to satisfy their need for titillation. In the barren wastes of the future, among the broken tiles and rubble of the ruins, the only sort of woman left will be like the singers in bengbeng opera, who are always able to find a way to survive safe and sound, no matter in which era and no matter in what kind of society; their home is everywhere.
