Falling Through Space (10 page)

On the side of buying the painting was a line I had read somewhere by Gertrude Stein. She had said you can either have great paintings or you can have great clothes, and that she had chosen to have paintings. Also, I kept remembering once when I was nineteen years old and was in Birmingham, Alabama, with fifty dollars to spend. It was a bright January day at the end of Christmas vacation and I was standing on a sidewalk halfway in between a clothing store, where a pair of gold cocktail shoes with three-inch heels was begging me to buy them, and an antique store, where an old handmade cobbler's bench was on sale for exactly the cost of the shoes. I kept going back into the antique store and marveling at the patina on the wood of the bench, sitting on it, as a real cobbler once sat, and rubbing my hands along the smooth dark sides.

In the end I went into the clothing store and bought the tight uncomfortable golden shoes and left the bench. I had cast my lot with vanity and I knew it. That bench haunted me for years. Every time I wanted a table to go beside a sofa or a place for a child to sit and color I would think about the wide purpose of the bench, the intelligence of its design.

Meanwhile the golden shoes had carried me to a lot of drunken fraternity parties and disappeared into the destiny of cocktail clothes.

Now, some years later, I walked in and out of my living room past the beautiful painting that I was trying to make up my mind to buy. It was the first work I had seen by the American realist Ginny Crouch Stanford, who later would become my friend and paint the brilliant paintings which would become my book covers, and the story of that damn cobbler's bench kept pounding in my head, a moral tale if there ever was one.

Finally I gave in. I wrote a check and mailed it off and the painting was mine. I think I should note that I was properly appalled that I could so easily become the proprietor of another person's work and ran out and wrote a will leaving the painting to the painter at my death.

It is still my favorite painting. It keeps getting closer to me. It hung for many years above a fireplace. Then above a baby grand piano. Now it is beside my bed, on a wall that looks out upon a lake. “Those eyes,” people say when they look at it, meaning the beautiful, haunting face of the young black-haired girl who leans in the painting against a marble statue of an angel. “My God, those eyes.”

“I know,” I answer. How long that painted look has lasted and never lost its power to charm and amaze.

Once I made that initial plunge into buying art, the rest was easy. I didn't buy another pair of high-heeled shoes for years. I didn't buy cocktail clothes or new placemats or recover the sofa. My money was spent on paintings and pieces of sculpture and pottery and photographs. By the time I left New Orleans and went to live in a simple light-filled house in the Ozark Mountains, the only things I cared enough about to pack up and take with me were these beautiful individual products of other minds and hands. For seven years I lived alone in a small frame house on a mountain and hardly ever bothered to lock the door. Anybody that wanted to steal the things in that house would have been someone I wanted to meet. I don't think I ever lost sight of how fortunate I was to spend my days and nights surrounded by the best moments of some of the best minds of my culture.

Finally, I had accumulated too much wonder. I was in danger of becoming a museum curator, which is a fine occupation but not a good thing for a writer, who needs to travel light and stay flexible.

So I have gone into phase two of my fascination with art. I have started giving it away. I am fortunate in having three sons who also love beautiful things, and among them I am able to keep many walls and flat surfaces covered with art in various cities in the southeastern part of the United States. I lend them paintings and photographs and they lend them back to me. I will turn a corner in one of my children's houses and there is a painting I bought one snowy January day in Boulder, Colorado, or, I'll enter a room in an apartment and there is a piece of pottery from the day I discovered the famous Calabash potters of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Life will not give us everything we want. It will not give us happiness, or “the seven Visigoth crowns in the Cluny Museum,” as Elinor Wylie once wrote. But it may give us “a very small purse, made of a mouse's hide. Put it in your pocket and never look inside.”

Art civilizes and makes clear. Living with art is charming, in the old sense of the word. The art object draws you into it, does a little dance for you, calls up, praises, sings. God Love Artists, my daughter-in-law once wrote to me on a postcard from the Museum of Modern Art's exhibit of Picasso. They Make It Right.

T
HE NEW ORLEANS PHOTOGRAPHER
Clarence Laughlin was a friend of mine. He was a genius. Genius can not be dissected or understood. It can only be loved and celebrated and wondered at.

Clarence was a New Orleanian and proud of that fact, but in his heart I think he was always a child of the bayou country. He drank its sugary wines and honored its legends until his death this January at eighty. He gave up its sugary tongue, however, and taught himself to speak in such a way that almost no trace of his Cajun accent remained. More about this later. First I want to talk about his magic.

Everything about Clarence was magical. In his presence you could believe in magic or destiny or kismet. He thought it was kismet that we came to know each other. He felt this way about many of his friends.

I had heard of Clarence. One day another photographer came tearing into the offices of
The Courier
, where we both worked, showing us photographs and copy for a story about Clarence. “You won't believe this man,” he was saying, or words to that effect. “He's incredible. He knows everything.” I looked at the photographs. There was this smooth-cheeked white-haired man with piercing eyes already demanding something from me. Some answer. Some return. There were also pages of quotations. I read them with great interest and attention.

About a month later a friend took me, on a cold rainy Sunday afternoon, down to the Faubourg-Marigny to see an exhibition of Clarence's work and hear him speak. It was a new gallery with tall freshly painted walls and high ceilings. People were milling around drinking wine and talking in quiet voices. There was violin music on the stereo. And on the walls were the most incredible photographs I had ever seen. Absolutely original, as was their maker. He came into the gallery, wearing a coat thrown over his shoulder like a cape, and took the podium and began to talk about art in a way I had never heard. About the relationship between art and the subconscious mind, about the forms art takes in its insistence on telling us what we're thinking. About how art takes us past the veils of illusion and returns us to ourselves. About what a photograph means and why light and shadow fascinate us, about how unique we are and how alike, how mysterious we are and how predictable. I was dazzled.

I ordered two photographs and went home and wrote him a long letter in answer to the questions he had raised in my mind. Later, when I knew Clarence well and became his friend, I would drive him to the Lafayette Station post office to pick up his mail, boxes of fan mail from all over the world. I suppose when I wrote him I thought I was the only one who did.

Anyway, I mailed off the letter, not expecting or even particularly wanting a reply, and in a few days he called me. There was his rough, exciting, enormously civilized voice on the phone, inviting me down to the Pontalba to see his books.

At that time he had a huge apartment in the Pontalba overlooking Jackson Square. It contained a library of almost two hundred thousand volumes. They were the most incredible books I had ever seen. Clarence slept on a small bed in the midst of those bookshelves. He could put his finger on any book without consulting a catalog. But then, he only got out the ones he was interested in. You could ask all night but he would not produce a book he didn't want to talk about.

As soon as I arrived that first night we went right to work. Clarence got out some books and began my education. “Look,” he would say, “look at this. You must understand this. Listen to what I'm telling you.” Leonor Fini, the French surrealist poets, Balthus, Klimt, Lafcadio Hearn, British illustrators, Italian cartoonists, the lists of things I must learn and “be exposed to” went on and on.

Oil interests in the gulf, people destroying the wetlands, plastic cups, undisciplined children, women smokers, unlettered so-called writers, Mayor Moon's attempts to bring a sound and light show into Jackson Square, the list of things he hated and warred against was also long.

“But, Clarence,” I would say finally, “I want to see your photographs. I came to see your photographs. Please show them to me.” Then, grumbling, he would get out a stack of prints and begin to tell me how they were created. Created they were. Planned and executed with the care an architect takes with a building. Only Clarence was the planner
and
the builder
and
the carpenter and the plumber and the one that cut the trees down to get the lumber.

It wasn't easy being his friend. You had to be able to move fast. Clarence was full of ideas and he feared nothing except having his knee give out or his books cut up by greedy dealers. He was haunted by the idea that someone would get hold of his treasured art books and cut them up and sell the pages.

At the height of my friendship with Clarence he had me in a car one spring day driving down to Terrebone Parish with four surrealists from Chicago in the back seat. We were going to see the cemeteries. I was driving my small blue Datsun. The surrealists were huddled together in the back seat. Clarence was riding shotgun, telling me how to drive and reading the map and lecturing about Cajun cults of death and black silk funeral flowers and enamel photographs of the dead and carvings on tombstones and surrealism in general and the bad state of the arts.

He turned to me suddenly, as if he had just remembered something important. “I've been meaning to tell you that whenever you have time we can start our diction lessons,” he said.

“What?” I answered, for this was new to me.

“I've decided to teach you to speak properly,” he said. “So that people will take you seriously.” The surrealists looked down at their hands, embarrassed for me.

“That's okay,” I said. “I'll just stay like I am.”

“Of course not,” he said, and went back to the map. “It took me a long time to learn to speak correctly but I learned. You will learn too.” Alas, we never had time for our lessons.

I learned of his death by reading of it in
Time
magazine. It was a cold wet winter evening. I was at a newsstand on the corner of Third Avenue and 73rd Street in New York City. I bought the magazine and stuck it in my pocket and walked outside and stood on the street thinking about the last time I had seen him, the night he showed me his new darkroom in the library he built onto the back of his wife Elizabeth's house in Gentilly. Then I thought about the last month he spent in the Pontalba, about how bad his knee had become and how he cursed it. About the hundreds of boxes of books he had packed and the pulley system and cardboard chute he invented to lower the boxes down the three flights of narrow rickety Pontalba stairs. I thought about the expression on our faces as Clarence outlined his plan to sail the boxes down from floor to floor.

That night I had a dream. In the morning I began to develop it into one of my Journal Entries for National Public Radio. The dream appeared to be about Picasso but as I developed it I saw it was really about Clarence. In such a way the mind gives up its secrets. I call it magic. Clarence called it art. Here then is the dream and its unfolding.

I dreamed last night of Picasso. We were driving through the Delta looking for a house for him to use as a studio. We were in my little blue Toyota. I was driving. Picasso was in the jump seat. “They gave me everything I wanted,” Picasso said. “Money and fame and beautiful lovers.”

“They let you paint your chairs,” I said. “That was the good part.”

“I painted what they wanted,” he said. “The more ridiculous it was the more they liked it.”

“You were a genius at fourteen,” I said. “What else could you do? You had to find ways to make it more amusing.”

“I needed blue,” he said. “I wanted a blue made of ground-up sapphires. If I had had the right blue. It really made me mad not to find that blue.”

“You did all right,” I said. “You did just fine.”

“Guernica,”
he said. “They all wanted
Guernica
. Look at the drawings, I told them. Look at the eyes on the women. Look at the love scenes.
Guernica
, they demanded. Show us war.”

“It was wild,” I said and we laughed together at that. Two artists out for a drive in the country. It was a bright spring day in the Delta. The sun made mirages on the asphalt road.