Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (27 page)

That evening, after the kids were out of the way, he
talked to me quietly and soberly. He made it clear that I was not only punishing myself but
the kids as well. He talked not only as a friend but also as an analyst might talk to a
patient. In the course of his talk he opened my eyes to a twist in the situation which I had
been blind to. He said that I should endeavor to find out—for my own good—whether my desire to
keep the children was based on love for them and concern for their welfare or on a hidden
desire to punish my wife.

“You’re not getting anywhere this way,” he said. He spoke so gently and
reasonably. “I came here to help you. If you insist on going through with it, I won’t desert
you. But how long can you hold out? You’re a bundle of nerves now. Frankly, Henry, you’re
licked—but you won’t admit it to yourself.”

Walker’s words had their effect. I slept on it, thought it over another
twenty-four hours, then announced the decision.

“Walker,” I said, “I’m throwing in the sponge. You’re right. I’ll send her a
wire to come and fetch them.”

She came immediately. Relieved as I was, I was nevertheless heartbroken. And
with the dull ache came exhaustion and loss of spirits. The place now seemed like a morgue to
me. A dozen times a night I would wake with a start, thinking that they were calling me. There
is no emptiness like the emptiness of a home which your children have flown. It was worse than
death. And yet it had to be.

Did it, though? Did I really try hard enough? Couldn’t I have been more
flexible, more ingenious, more inventive, more this, more that? I made myself the most bitter
accusations. I was a fool to have listened to Walker, wise and well meaning though he had
been. He had caught me in a moment of weakness. Another day and I would have had the courage
and the will to resist his suggestion. Though I couldn’t deny the truth of his words, I would
nevertheless say to myself: “But he’s not a
father!
He doesn’t know what it means to
be a father.”

Wherever I strayed I stumbled over something that they
had dropped and forgotten. There were toys everywhere, despite all that my wife had carted
with her. And tops and marbles. And spoons and dishes. Each little object brought the tears to
my eyes. With each passing hour I wondered aloud what they were doing. Did they like their new
school? (Tony was being put in a nursery school.) Had they found new playmates? Did they fight
as much as ever, or were they too despondent now to think of fighting? Every day I had the
impulse to go down the road and telephone them, but I resisted the urge for fear of upsetting
them. I tried to resume the writing, but I had no thoughts except for them. If I took a walk,
hoping to shake off my black thoughts, I was reminded at every turn of some little incident,
some escapade, we had shared together.

Yes, I missed them. I missed them like sin. I missed them the more for all the
difficulties we had gone through together. Now there was only Walker. And what good was I to
Walker, or he to me? I wanted to be alone with my grief, my bereavement. I wanted to go up
into the hills and bellow like a wounded bull. I had been a husband, I had been a father, I
had been a mother—and a governess and a playmate and a fool and an idiot. Now I was nothing,
not even a clown. As for being a writer, I wanted no more of it. What could I possibly say
that would be of interest or of value to anyone? The mainspring was broken, the clock had
stopped. If only a miracle would happen! But I couldn’t think of any solution that would have
the remedial virtues of a miracle. I would have to learn to live again as if nothing had
happened. But if you love your children you can’t learn to live that way. You wouldn’t
want
to live that way.

Life, however, says:
“You must!”

I went back to the bathroom, as I had the morning they left, and I wept like a
madman. I wept and sobbed and screamed and cursed. I carried on like that until there wasn’t
another drop of anguish left in me. Until I was like a crumpled, empty sack.

Ephraim Doner is the father of that little genius, Tasha. I have been wanting to say something about him ever since I began this potpourri.

This is a testimonial, long-deferred, in the key of
Ut-mineur
. I began it, to be truthful, many months ago, while sitting for a portrait he did of me on rising from my bed of sorrow.

Some believe that the man and the artist are one; others hold a different view. No doubt it depends on who you are as to whom you meet and what you find of perfection or imperfection in the one you meet.

And, let me ask before we start—can you put together what has been torn asunder?

There are times, I must say, when I see in Doner only the father, or only the friend. There are times when I see in him the artist and nothing but the artist. Usually I see all the ninety-eight elements of which he is composed, and I see them combined to a degree which is not only exciting but inspiring. For when he is at par, this incredible Ephraim, he is the apotheosis of the one and only: man in the image of the Creator. When I see him thus I feel like weeping. And I do weep occasionally—a tender, affectionate weep,
dans les coulisses
, so to speak.

What is it about the man that moves me so at times? The fact, or the realization of the fact, that he neglects absolutely nothing. Or, to put it positively, that he shows concern, genuine concern, for everybody and everything.

Every time I take leave of him the word ritual comes to my mind. For there is something about this loving concern which he manifests, something of awareness in it, perhaps, which lends to all his
actions the flavor of ritual observance. As soon as I think in this wise I perceive why it is I am always so happy in his company. I know then that every act of Doner’s is a demonstration of the truth, as Eric Gutkind puts it, that the supreme gift which life offers us is the chance to know eternal life. To put it more mundanely, when Doner adds a little seasoning to the food he serves he is putting another touch of God in it, nothing less.

Ephraim Doner has had a hard life, and a gay one. Only the gay dog knows how to be tough, how to butter his bread with caviar, so to say, when there’s nothing but mustard to be had. Concerning his struggle to live the life of an artist, Doner has a thousand and one stories up his sleeve. The best one is the one about sleeping with the donkey—in Cagnes-sur-Mer. All his stories are variations on a single theme, to wit, that to become an artist one must first
be
an artist. No one is born an artist. One elects for it! And when you elect to be the first and last among men you find nothing strange about sleeping with a donkey, putting your paws in the garbage pail, or swallowing reproaches and insults from all the near and dear ones who regard your way of life as a grave mistake.

I believe it was Santayana who wrote at length about “the good life.” What he said I am still ignorant of, because I am congenitally incapable of reading Santayana. I do know, however, what is meant by the good life, and why the artist’s life is a preparation for the good life. The reason, in a word, is this: the good life is the holy life. (Wholly living, wholly dying.) It is the kind of life in which you do your utmost every day, not for art, not for country, not for family, not for yourself even, but because it’s the
only
thing to do. Life is being, which includes doing and not doing. Art is making. To be a poet of life, though artists seldom realize it, is the
summum
. To breathe out more than one breathes in. To walk two miles when asked to walk one. Thus to honor, obey and worship the Creator. “The full Name over the
full world,” as Gutkind says. This the poet of life heralds every day of his life.

To divagate…. When I ask Maître Ephraim, as I fondly call him, whether I should learn to do precipitations (in the water-color medium) by the technical route or by the intuitive-experimental method, he answers: “Use more parsley!” Now there is good reason why parsley—“more parsley”—constitutes a full and just answer. Parsley, as everyone knows, is an herb. The herb, like the ritual, has been sadly neglected in our progressive, work-a-day world. Though the herbs belong to the vegetable kingdom, they are nearer to the mineral than the animal kingdom. Which is to say that, as an enclave, they also form a hegemony. They are autonomous and autochthonous. Wholly aside from these attributes, they possess an elixir which is a source of health and vitality. A sprig of parsley, consequently, has the same inspirational quality for the devout water-colorist as does the shamrock for the Irish bard.

But let me not forget! With the parsley always goes a bit of the
Shilchan Aruch
, the
Kabbala
, and the Book of Daniel. The parsley is thrown in at the last minute, as when making a good omelette. What really sustains me, fortifies me, guides my hand, whether for precipitations, sunbursts or sandstorms, is the crystallized wisdom of those huge, soaring birds—the anonymous prophets—who hovered for generations over the cosmological riddle.

To make it still more clear, Doner will take me by the hand. “It’s like this, Henry….”
Like this
means that he is preparing to dive into the labyrinth. “A full answer,” he says, “is always in the nature of a riddle. If someone asks, ‘Why the Sphinx?’ the answer must contain the Sphinx as well as other things. Some people regard this sort of answer as evasive. The trouble with such people is, they never put the right questions. A full answer may omit facts and figures, but it always includes God. Now water-color problems are not cosmological problems. Nor even epistemological
problems. Why waste time, then?
More parsley!
That settles it.”

There is a self-portrait of Doner’s which will probably hang in a museum one day. It is a superb painting as well as a superb portrait. The shirt is as alive as the expression on his face, and the background is of a texture rich enough to support the sins of a saint—or an ephah of barley. Doner is there widespread, like the Pentateuch itself under the rays of the noonday sun. He is there agape, if I may put it thus, for he has caught that fugitive look which the mirror renders when we catch a glimpse of ourselves off guard. Doner sees himself looking at himself but without knowing that it is himself he is looking at. In this fleeting glimpse of his unknown self he has contrived to introduce an element of the
cocasse
. As if Jacob, waking from his dream, beheld a fly on the end of his nose. One ought not to say that he is looking at himself; but then neither is he looking at the world, for the world has dissolved momentarily. It is just a glance that he has given us, but in this glance is contained the wonder of life.

A detail. … If you look closely you will observe that one ear is spread fan-wise. There is something verging on the ridiculous in the way this ear protrudes. Only an adept could have balanced the hypnotic glance with this bizarre appendage. It
is
an ear, however. An ear that has caught something from afar.
What?
The wheeling of the constellations? The croaking of a frog? Perhaps only the whispering of time babbling of eternity. Whatever it was, the owner heard it with his whole being. For an instant he was the sea shell. The
mysterium
.

To do a good portrait, it goes without saying, one must be able to see into the soul of the sitter. To do a good self-portrait, one must look into the ashes. Man builds on the ruins of his former selves. When we are reduced to nothingness, we come alive again. To season one’s destiny with the dust of one’s folly, that is the trick. In the ashes lie the ingredients for portrayal of self.

Now the spirit of Doner is large and boisterous. There is a roar
to it, as the surf in an empty shell. It is the roar of the universe, the same which splits the soul of man in moments of revelation. And who, in his right senses, would attempt to make a canvas roar? Yet Doner has done just that. And he has done it with a cigarette glued to his lips.

That cigarette! A link, not with reality, but with the art of badinage. Only with cigarette to lip does he really talk. Talk persiflage and camouflage.
Pythagoras plus Aquinas equals Jonah and the whale
. Or—
Micah is to Isinglass what Job is to Jehovah
. With that cigarette glued to his lips, Doner can take the measure of any man—and his ancestral tree to boot. To use his own language—“It was thus that Mordecai made a shambles of Belshazzar.”

Ephraim Doner and Bezalel Schatz: of all my friends these are the only two whose educational background I envy. Schatz was educated in his father’s school, in Jerusalem: the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts. He learned nothing but arts and crafts; all the other subjects which we cram down our children’s throats he learned on the side, and learned them better that way. As for Doner, who was born and raised in Vilna, he had the fortune to have for a grandfather a famous rabbi, known not only as a great scholar but as a man of wisdom. They are blessed, these two friends. They are free spirits. They were not indoctrinated, they were taught to think for themselves. Theirs is still an insatiable curiosity—about everything. Coupled with a healthy disregard for mundane facts. As a reader, Doner is omnivorous. He reads with equal facility in Hebrew, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian. Every year he rereads
Don Quixote
. He is one of the half-dozen Americans I know who also reads everything that issues from the pen of Blaise Cendrars.

Almost every time we go to town we stop at the Doners for dinner. And whenever the Doners make their trip to the sulphur baths they invariably stop at our place for dinner. While waiting for the duck to brown we usually play a few rounds of ping-pong. By the time dinner is ready to be served Tasha has made a half-dozen pictures.

When we are not talking books, food, education (the insanity of it), herbs or painting, we are talking and drinking wine. The leitmotif which runs through all our talk is France. It was in 1931 or ‘32 that I met Doner in Paris. Just once. We did not meet again until he took up residence in the Carmel Highlands, about seven years ago. To hear us talk, you would think that we had spent the greater part of our lives in France. We did, of course, spend the
best
years of our lives there. And we have never forgotten it.