The Difficulty of Being (18 page)

Where does the sense of beauty, I mean what impels us towards beauty, have its source? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What nerve centre makes it known to us? The spontaneous use of sexuality haunts all men of stature, whether they know it or not. Michelangelo manifests this to us. Da Vinci whispers it to us. I am less intrigued by
their confessions than by the innumerable signs of an order deemed a disorder, and which is not carried to the point of action. What do actions mean? They are matters for the police. They do not interest us. Picasso is an example of this order. This woman’s man is a misogynist in his works. In them he takes revenge for the domination women wield over him and for the time they filch from him. He relentlessly attacks their faces and their costumes. Man, on the other hand, he flatters, and, having nothing to complain of in him, he praises him with pen and pencil.

I COULD HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT ANY
number of subjects that occur to me. But I resist on principle. A certain preoccupation provides me with a framework, and to move out of this would be to be lost. Where should I stop? I should be like those painters who paint the frame (and why not the wall and the building?) like those Hungarian gypsies who would come down from the platform, play from table to table and who might as well have continued in the street.

For several years I have been moving away from the novel, in a period of interminable novels, in which the readers skip paragraphs and can no longer enter into the adventures of others without exhaustion.

I have always avoided surnames in my plays and almost always in my books. They embarrass me like too pressing an invitation to intrude among strangers. I was waiting for two new enterprises to obsess me: that of a film in which I would plunge into the purifying bath of childhood, that of a book such as I should have liked to carry in my pocket when I was very young and very much alone. I have made the film. It is
La Belle et la Bête
. I am making the book. It is the one I am now writing.

After
Iphigenie
, Goethe declares that his work was finished and that any further ideas would be a gift of fortune. I am inclined to think I have scraped bottom and that nothing
remains. All the better if I am wrong. If not, I shall feel no bitterness. For people like to say that we have run dry when they know nothing of our work. They know a fragment or two which they regard as my whole work and look out for the sequel without having to read the beginning. It will be pleasant for me to twiddle my thumbs, to see my work take root, stretch out its branches towards the sunny side and give me shade.

Now do not go imagining that the preoccupation driving me is of an aesthetic order. It is subject only to the line.

What is the line? It is life. A line should live at every point on its course in such a way that the presence of the artist makes itself felt more strongly than that of the model. The masses base their judgement upon the line of the model, without understanding that it may disappear in favour of that of the painter, provided that his line lives a life of its own. By line I mean the permanence of personality. For the line exists no less in Renoir, in Seurat, in Bonnard, in those in whom it seems to dissolve in the touch of the brush, as in Matisse or Picasso.

With the writer the line takes precedence over the matter and the form. It runs through the words that he puts together. It sounds a continuous note, imperceptible to both ear and eye. It is, as it were, the style of the soul, and if this line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is absent and the writing dead. That is why I am for ever saying that the moral progress of an artist is the only progress that matters, since this line slackens as soon as the soul abates its fire. Do not confuse moral progress with morality. Moral progress is but a bracing of the self.

Protecting the line becomes our therapy as soon as we
feel that it is weak or when it splits like a hair in bad condition. One recognizes it even without it signifying. And if our painters were to draw a cross on a sheet of paper I am sure I could tell you who had done it. And if I half-open a book, I recognize it before it is fully open.

Faced with this revealing line, people look only at its trappings. The more visible it is the less they see it, used as they are to admiring only what adorns it. They come to prefer Ronsard to Villon, Schumann to Schubert, Monet to Cézanne.

What can they learn from Erik Satie, in whom this adorable line goes naked? From Stravinsky, whose sole concern is to flay it alive?

The draperies of Beethoven and Wagner fill them with enthusiasm. They are none the less incapable of seeing the line, pronounced though it is, about which those draperies are wound.

You will tell me that a man does not display his skeleton, that this would be the direst offence against modesty. But this line is not a skeleton. It devolves from the glance, the tone of voice, the gesture, the bearing, from the whole which makes up the physical personality. It gives evidence of a motive force, over whose source and nature philosophers cannot agree.

Before a piece of music, a painting, a statue, a poem has begun to speak to us, we have already described its line. It is the line that moves us when an artist decides to break with the visible world and compels his forms to obey him.

For music, although apparently under no constraint to be representative, in fact is so, in as much as it reproduces what the composer has in mind to say. No other art form can express such nonsense or such banalities. And if the composer departs from what the ear is accustomed to, he angers the public in the same way as does the painter or the writer.

In the case of the composer, a somewhat rare phenomenon
enables us to see the phantom line other than by an extra sense. This occurs when it is embodied in a melody. When a melody embraces the course of the line to the point of being integrated with it.

When I was composing
Oedipus Rex
with Stravinsky, we travelled through the Alpes-Maritimes. It was in March. The almond trees were in bloom on the mountains. One evening, when we stopped at a small inn, we counted up those melodies of
Faust
in which Gounod surpasses himself. They invoke the atmosphere of dreams. Our neighbour at the next table rose and introduced himself. He was the composer’s grandson. He told us that Gounod dreamt these melodies of
Faust
and that he wrote them down on waking.

Would not this seem like the extension of faculties that allow us to fly in dreams?

It is with reference to these that Mme J.-M. Sert (most of whose words deserve to be quoted) used to say that in
Faust
one is in love and that in
Tristan
one makes love.

This ideal line retraces for us the lives of great men. It accompanies their actions and threads them together. It is, without doubt, the only certainty able to withstand the false perspective of history. It leaps to the eyes of the soul before memory interferes.

Not to mention Shakespeare, an Alexandre Dumas always makes use of it. He wraps it round with his fiction and strikes us with a truth more rigid than that of a broken stick in the waters of time.

It is this line too that the graphologist is able to extract from hand-writing, whatever artifices disguise it. The more it is disguised, the clearer it becomes. For the depositions of artifice augment the exhibits in the case.

Whatever a certain kindly woman bookseller may think—she accuses me of hoisting the flag and letting others take the risks—my line is one of shocks and of risks. The lady would see, with a little thought, that her military metaphor is, to say the least, suspect. If one does not attack, how can one hoist the flag? It is precisely the fear of becoming less able to charge in this way that might make me decide to shut up shop. Even so it would be impossible for me, so long as my legs are sound, not to run towards the outposts and hang around to see what is happening.

By and large, a line of combat runs through my works. If I have ever captured the enemy’s weapons, I have made them mine in battle. They are judged by the outcome. He should put them to better use.

From hopscotch to posters, I recognize nearly all the themes Picasso adopts in the various districts he inhabits. For him they play the part of a landscape-painter’s
motif
, but he takes them home, shuffles them about and raises them to the dignity of service.

When cubism was at its height, the Montparnasse painters shut themselves in for fear Picasso should pilfer some precious seed and make it bloom on his own soil. Once in 1916, when he took me to see them, I was party to an interminable confabulation on the doorstep. We had to wait until they had first hidden away their latest canvases, under lock and key. They equally mistrusted one and all.

This state of siege nourished the silences of the
Rotonde
and the
Dôme
. I remember one week when everyone there was whispering, wondering who had stolen from Rivera his trick of painting trees in dots of black and green.

The cubists did not realize, intoxicated as they were with their little discoveries, that they owed these to Picasso or to Braque who, in orchestrating them, would be merely taking
back what was their own. Besides, they need not have bothered their heads, since our line does not easily assimilate a foreign form and repels what would buckle it, as one says of a wheel.

And when I speak of my borrowing weapons, I am not speaking of my writing, but of skirmishes during which a sudden volte-face enables me to turn against the enemy the weapons that he was aiming at me.

I therefore advise young people to adopt the practice of beautiful women and to
care for their line
, to prefer the lean to the fat. And not to look at themselves in a mirror, but simply to look at themselves.

OUR MACHINE DISRUPTS ITSELF A LITTLE MORE
each day and each morning man wakes with a new impediment. I recognize this. I used to sleep right through the night. Now I wake up. This sickens me. I get up. I start working. It is the only means that makes it possible for me to forget my blemishes and acquire beauty at my table. This ‘writing-face’ being, when all is said and done, my true face. The other, a fading shadow. Quickly now, let me construct my features in ink to replace those that are leaving me.

This is the face that I am trying to establish and to embellish with the spectacle of a ballet, presented last night, the 25th of June 1946, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. I felt myself beautiful, thanks to the dancers, to the sets, to the music, and as this result entails a deal of artifice exceeding the creator’s approval, I propose to study it.

I have long been trying to make use, otherwise than in films, of the mystery of accidental synchronization. For music finds its response not only in each individual, but also in any plastic work with which it is confronted, if this work is of the same calibre. Not only is this synchronization a kind of family affair, embracing the action as a whole, but further what is more—and herein lies the mystery—it underlines its details to the great surprise of those who considered its use sacrilegious.

I already knew of this peculiarity through the experience of films, in which any music of quality integrates the gestures and emotions of the characters. It remained to prove that a
dance, set to rhythms suiting the choreographer, could do without them and gain strength in a new musical climate.

Nothing is more contrary to the play of art than a redundancy of movements representing notes.

Counterpoint, the skilled unbalance from which changes are born, cannot be produced when perfect balance engenders inertia.

It is from a delicate arrangement of unbalance that balance draws its charm. A perfect face proves this when one divides it and remakes it of its two left sides. It becomes grotesque. Architects knew this long ago and in Greece, at Versailles, in Venice, in Amsterdam, one may see how the asymmetric lines make for the beauty of their buildings. The plumb-line kills this almost human beauty. One knows the flatness, the deadly boredom of our blocks of flats to which man has resigned himself.

About a month ago, at a luncheon with Christian Bérard and Boris Kochno, the trustee of Serge de Diaghilev’s methods, I envisaged the possibility of a dance scene in which the dancers would practise to jazz rhythms, such rhythms considered as simple aids to work and being replaced later by some great work of Mozart, Schubert or Bach.
^*

The next day we set about carrying out this final plan. The scene would serve as a pretext for a dialogue in gestures between Mlle Philippart and M. Babilée, in whom I find much of the resilience of Vaslav Nijinsky. I decided to take a hand only in so far as to describe in detail to the scenic designer, to the costumier, to the choreographer and to the performers what I expected of them. I fixed my choice on Vakhévitch, designer, because he designs film sets and I wanted this high relief from which the cinematograph draws its dreams; on Mme Karinska, the wardrobe mistress, helped by Bérard, because they know stage optics better than anyone else; on Roland Petit, choreographer, because he would listen to me and translate me into that dance-language which I speak fairly well, but of which I lack the syntax.

The set depicts the studio of a most unhappy painter. This studio is in the form of a triangle. One of its sides would be the footlights. The apex closes the set. A post almost in the centre, a little to the right, rises from the floor, forming a gallows supporting a beam that crosses the ceiling from the prompt side to the opposite side. A rope with a slip knot hangs from the gallows, and the iron framework of a lamp, wrapped in an old newspaper, dangles from the beam between the gallows and the wall on the left. Against the right wall, its dirty roughcast starred with the dates of engagements, with drawings done by me, an iron bedstead with a red blanket and sheets trailing on the floor. Against the left wall, a wash-stand of similar style. In the left foreground, a door. Between the door and the footlights a table and straw-bottomed chairs. Other chairs are strewn about. One of them just under the slip knot, near the door. A glazed skylight in the steeply sloping ceiling shows a Paris night sky. The whole thing, due to harsh lighting, long shadows, the splendour, the squalor, the dignity, the indignity, will evoke the world of Baudelaire.