Six Chronicles from Paris
(translated from the Spanish)
César Vallejo
to be published in Selected Writings by César Vallejo, edited by Joseph Mulligan (forthcoming, Wesleyan, 2015)
The Assassin of Barrès
M. Pierre Laval, the new Minister of Justice in France, has just prohibited the public from attending judicial hearings. Before that, slackers without money to pay for the theater or a dance hall could while away their boredom in the courtrooms, without it costing them much. A few minutes of waiting in the elaborate patios, some stamping of feet, some entreaties to the guards, and—in you go! A spectacle of great interest, these hearings, in which edifying nuances of the urban environment played out. There was the spectacle of criminals, judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and lawyers, on the one hand; the spectacle of the public, on the other; and, on a separate string, the spectacle of the public and the machinery of justice together. What more could one ask for? People came out completely satisfied. It didn’t cost them money. From a theater people usually come out dissatisfied because the spectator almost always believes, there in the esthetic-economical accordions of his heart, that those hours at the theater weren’t worth what he paid: it was too hot or the protagonist was bad or the decor insipid or the guy in the next seat was a spy or the usher was rude . . . By contrast, judicial hearings in Paris filled people with a perfect, unobjectionable, selfless emotion. One needn’t add the artistic range and intensity of each hearing: the tragedy, the drama properly called; sometimes, the comedy, the vaudeville, the comic sketch, and even the guignol farce, the burlesque, opera, even dance. Occasionally, for certain medico-legal demonstrations, movies were offered and the occult arts lent important services, inasmuch as the astrological world of fortunes was involved.
But suddenly here now M. Laval, who belongs to a revolutionary youth group in the French Parliament, like Herriot, like Jouvenel, like Lamoureux and others, comes to take away from us such an abundant spectacle, just out of fear that the law courts could turn into, for example, a school for delinquency. A majority of Parisians is left without entertainments. Life has gotten more expensive, since now many will have to pay for their fun. The theater and the cinema feel obliged to spill or to pretend to spill—which in this case is the same—more blood on the stage and the screen, in compensation for the blood that’s no longer seen in the courtrooms. Well, M. Laval may not know what he’s messing with.
Aside from these collective inconveniences in the prohibitive decree, each person suffers some particular resonance in turn. Among the old clients of the hearings I know a representative of a sleeper-car agency in whom that decree has not managed to destroy what we might call the judicial or, if you like, police habit. This brave initiate in the affairs of penal justice has begun to make intricate steps toward acquiring a collection of famous weapons, the kind that served great criminals. His belief is that the venture is feasible and that the collection could then basically serve the State, Science, Humanity.
In Paris everything is possible. All of a sudden, one thing happens and that’s that. A good proof of that is the conduct of this other type, strangely judicial or judiciable, whom you’re going to meet at once. A strangely judicial type, because he’s not, like the representative for sleeper-cars, a type classifiable in one or another judicial pigeonhole, rather he is inside of justice, without ceasing to be outside of it.
M. Ferand Scatel is a jurist at the Sorbonne who—how original!—takes a great interest in the life of America. I was with him yesterday, at the famous café Le Boeuf sur le Toit in Montmartre drinking an aperitif. A youth entered the room and stopped by to shake hands with M. Scatel. M. Delfau, as the lad is named, must be around 34: he is elegant, though lean and very nervous. It seemed to me I’d seen him before. It seemed to me I’d seen him precisely at a judicial hearing, since Delfau has a rather judicial air. If I haven’t seen him in a courtroom, as a spectator, I must have seen him on the stand, in a seat for the defense, in a police cordon, in a row of witnesses or on a bench for the accused. This friendship between Delfau, a judicial type, and Scatel, a lawyer, seemed perfect to me for they both had an air of hearings. There are friendships that go very well.
But, as I learned after, M. Delfau has never been a lawyer, a judge, a witness, nor a policeman, and not even a bailiff. M. Delfau has not been a criminal. Nor a spectator at hearings. His strange judicial atmosphere comes from a role that he’s played and that I can only qualify as rigorously judicial. M. Scatel, jurist at the Sorbonne, likewise can only qualify that role as judicial and not even as criminal. M. Delfau assassinated Maurice Barrès. But I think I’ve said a lot. M. Delfau himself is content to tell us, M. Scatel and me, while he sips his glass of amourette:
“I was supposed to have assassinated Barrès, the day he died of pleurisy. That is, I wasn’t going to assassinate him, but to punish him, as a judge punishes a criminal or as an executioner guillotines a condemned man.”
Readers will imagine our surprise at those words. But, as I said, in Paris everything is possible. M. Delfau talks to us at length:
“My action, unfortunately, only came down to letting him die on his own, like a doctor who lets a sick man die, or like a witness who lets an assassin be condemned, or a prosecutor who ardently demands capital punishment or a guard who, because he fell asleep, allows a serious stabbing . . .
“I’m not speaking as a lawyer who lets an accused man be condemned, nor as an accused man who does not defend himself because you (Delfau lowers his voice, looking at Scatel) are a lawyer and because maybe I am accusing myself before you:”
M. Delfau crosses his legs and adds in a dramatic tone:
“Barrès, though on his own, died at any rate; he was a bad writer, that is, a great criminal. The dadaists judged him at a literary hearing. But that wasn’t the main thing. Cocteau said of him that he made one think of the corpses swollen with honey by the Greek embalmers. But that wasn’t the thing either. Bad writers should be assassinated, as rulers are assassinated. We should assassinate bad poets, bad painters, bad sculptors, bad musicians, with greater reason than politicians. Already in Munich the famous actor Schlosser was murdered right when he was doing a disastrous job playing a role at the theater. In Tokyo, the same thing happened to Koyague the painter, in the middle of painting a portrait: Count Masakoru, who was posing, exasperated, for a canvas in which he was being mistreated, shot his revolver at the artist. I thought of assassinating Barrès for being a bad writer. I know they would have lynched me afterwards as a national response. I would have even turned myself in. Some want to assassinate Clemenceau in Paris and Mussolini in Rome. Why not, in Paris, assassinate Barrès and in Rome, D’Annunzio? . . . Bad literature is a great offense, not only for the State but for Humanity.
“For this great crime of being a bad writer, I thought of assassinating Barrès, that is, to punish him as a sanction of man to man! I thought to punish him the same day that he died of pleurisy. But I am consoled, at least, by having let him die on his own. In effect, Barrès was growing old and I let him grow old. Barrès suffered, throughout his legislator’s heart, the mockery of the free young voters, and I let him suffer that. Barrès happened to cough frequently and I also let him cough. Hours he had of treacherous winds, leaning out his windows over the Bois de Boulogne, and I let those winds lash him. Barrès happened to need death, while voluptuousness overflowed and his blood held council in democratic silences, and I left him with his blood, his voluptuousness, and his death. Because one must know that Barrès died from suffering a great shortage of death. It’s very important to know this. Barrès died from a lack of death.
“Contrary to what happens with most people who die from a lack of life, for Barrès it was the lack of death that killed him, which should not lead us to confuse him with the great men who also die from lack of death. Know that for great men, death from lack of death puts an end to that rarefied death, while for lesser men, who are even lower than most people, death from lack of death puts an end to an exuberant life, as with Barrès, for example. Christ and Judas are a good example of these two classes of death from lack of death. They are the great man and the lesser subject. Between the two are all the rest—you, me, and people in general who die from lack of life. These subtleties are very important. Paul Valéry thinks he is worth what he is lacking, since he possesses the clear and profound science of what he is lacking. So, a great spring of wisdom lies in the knowledge of what we are lacking: life or death, money or beauty, hate or love . . . ”
At the end of his explanations, M. Delfau adopted the terrible expression of a saint. He is the assassin of Barrès, the one who should have assassinated him. That’s what I thought from the first moment I met him: this lad is a strangely judicial fellow.
It is written that in Paris everything is possible. All of a sudden, one thing happens and that’s that.
[Variedades 958. Lima, 10 July 1926.]
Da Vinci's Baptist
Paris, August 1926
One time I read in Treinta años de mi vida by Enrique Gómez Carrillo an anecdote about the days when Oscar Wilde was around in Paris dreaming up Salomé. Those were days when "the king of life" used to talk about the Jewish princess in Nimrod's stormy plot of land in the forests of art, after the sweet Herodian piece. Remy de Gourmont, in particular, enjoyed talking with Wilde and seems to have helped the great Englishman[i] a lot concerning historical and Hertzian elucidations about the strange daughter of Antipas.
As a result of finding myself the other day with Leonardo da Vinci's Baptist, in the galleries of the Louvre, I remembered Gómez Carrillo's evocative pages and I've gone to look for him at his apartment on the rue de Castellane, eager to hear from his own lips, written in pure air, the aforementioned anecdote. But on the way I recalled that Gómez Carrillo spoke to me the other day of his upcoming vacation to Nice. In effect. His concierge answers me:
"He left for the Alpes Maritimes."
That's a pity. Because this John by Leonardo da Vinci tells me, in his voice of a virgin Florentine faun, how he was carried away to Oscar Wilde's sublime tragedy, just as he appears in his secular painting at the palace of the Tuileries. Wilde's Baptist undoubtedly comes from da Vinci's. One refers to the other and they both complete each other and harmonize into a single esthetic fullness.
As far as I know, no one before the Italian painter gave a more earthy spirit, a more human life to the historic figure of the Precursor. No one showed him grammatical gender in more expressive heroic lines. Within his Galilean racial mysticism, John stands out in da Vinci's canvas with a grace, a force, and a purpose of such chaste and natural sensuality that contemplating him produces a slight tingling on the skin. Contemplating him immediately inspires in us the feeling of an impossible tragic erotic nature. Beardless, barely adolescent, his long hair preened by the desert wind, he seems to throw his wild cascade of curls to bite the head of the crowd. That undulating hair, traced over his temples like famished teeth, will go straight to casting upon the ardent Salomé's breast the great shadowy mane of desire. One day Salomé will see those leonine curls and will no longer be able to live without caging them in the bars of her fingers. Oh, that hair biting the temples, even before the slingshots of light come crashing down upon the brow, a mere draft for the brow of The One at whose feet the Magdalene would come sobbing! Oh, that taciturn hair, suitable for the naked face that bends there, even with all its light, terrified!
The erotic suggestion of John begins in that carnivorous fleece. That fleece acts as a threshold to the wheat festival; to the sacred apple orchard of the thorax and the arms. And see that right arm, entirely naked. It starts at the armpit, then makes a turn that's almost absurd it's so smooth: bent upwards at the elbow, instead of making the vertex of strange protection.
A chilling and sulfurous fingertip thus raised? To brandish the index finger on high, in a sharp ferocious jab, that we think we feel in who knows what strange pore, the lowest of the flesh. A chilling and sulfurous fingertip! A germinal stamen! (Something of this gesture transmigrates to the arm of the Baptist in Rodin’s bronze.)
But look at the left arm. How it hides behind the other and how it insists on fading into the thorax, so subtly and wingedly, to the point that it is not missed. In the impression given off by the whole body, that arm near the heart is as if it weren't there. Before that embarrassed arm, which conceals and negates itself and defends his vivid nakedness, "Victor Hugo would be amazed." While the right arm, owner of the entire body, challenges desire face to face, here the left arm escapes, shields itself, resists, repels the supreme contact. The mere play of the arms is showing the tenor of the Baptist’s nature: an innocent, irreducible ferment of sexual passion. The layout of the terms is clear. The conflict of the arms synthesizes and presents the tragedy.
The conflict then spreads and reaches a climax. And if not, pay attention to the play of edges and tips throughout the whole figure. In the eyebrows, the nose, the closed smiling lips, the rim of the eye sockets, in the shoulders, and oh, in the savage index finger! A whole vivid cresting of axes. The whole tragedy in a nutshell.
The gust of earthiness in da Vinci’s John is such that it suggests direct similarities with Bacchus, by the great Florentine painter. Except that his Bacchus is a serene, pagan earthiness, without conflict, without tragedy, while in his Baptist the opposition of arrows is at its boiling point.
No other artist has offered a more natural and human version of the one before whom lions trembled. None has presented him in such a healthy and vital manner. Solario[ii] is missing the Jewish ethnic form. Luini[iii] lacks a tragic pulse, despite the haughty touch of the executioner’s hand, on holding the Baptist’s bloody head by the hair. Guerchin[iv] is the one who most rises to the level of da Vinci, with the disturbing Herod in his canvas. Da Vinci, without spilling a single drop of blood in his picture, without even showing Salomé, and the drunken stepfatherly crown, nor Herod, suggests to us better than any other painter the dance of love and death.
Only Oscar Wilde produced in literature something about John the Baptist as great as what the genius from Florence depicted in his canvas. Both versions recall each other and fit together in a marvel of predestination. Except that Wilde, no doubt, was inspired by da Vinci.
Does Gómez Carrillo know anything else about Wilde’s Salomé? I’ll wait till he comes back from the Alps.
[Variedades 968. Lima, 18 September 1926.]
[i] Vallejo mistakes Oscar Wilde’s nationality for English when it was Irish.
[ii] Cf. Andrea Solario’s painting, Salome with the head of Saint John the Baptist.
[iii] Cf. Bernardino Luini’s painting, Salome receiving the head of Saint John the Baptist.
[iv] Cf. Gian Francesco Barbieri di Guerchin’s Salome receiving the head of Saint John the Baptist.
The New Disciplines
Paris, July 1927
The war has given rise to a new structure for life in Europe. This cannot be denied. Whoever lives here a few years and absorbs the intimate European social atmosphere, has to confirm the existence of cultural forms and disciplines that are absolutely distinct from those before the war. Everything differs from the previous era: the economy, thought, sensibilities, fashion, and even worries and vices.
The young intellectuals of the new continent, to whom I address these lines especially, don’t know or know poorly the existence, quality, and reach of European culture d’après guerre (culture, yes, though it might only be an attempt or simply feeling around in the dark). Few are the men of America who really notice the new vital state of Europe. And that’s because such a phenomenon of renovation can only be known, in all its authenticity, by living long years in close contact with European life. Not many South Americans come to Europe to live in this way. Some are here as if they were not. Their daily life goes by as a continuation in Europe of South American life: their social dealings are solely with South Americans and Spaniards, they speak only Spanish, they read (when they read) only newspapers and books in Spanish; their conversations and topics turn around America or American things; their smallest acts are directed, in intention and motives, toward America; and even in the matter of shows, they seek and attend only Spanish theater, Indoamerican concerts, Andalusian dance, conferences about the homeland, and native oratory. Clearly, such people can be many years in Europe and it’s as if they were not. As for the rest, they pass through, traveling all over the old hemisphere in six or eight months and barely seeing anything, like at the movies or in Paul Morand, in order to bring back, on their return, only a rushed album of blurry images that haven’t passed through the retina and so, as a consequence, get erased before they disembark in Buenos Aires or Valparaíso. I know both classes of South Americans and, at any moment, I can point out intuitively a thousand examples of each of them. In the best cases, there are South Americans who live isolated in a single European social field, in the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, that is, in the areas least likely to reveal the new European spirit. Anyway, some people from America spend twenty or thirty years in Paris, walled up with books and newspapers, far from the living palpitating life of every day and with no connection to the warm circumstantial trance of individual psychology, these particulars truthful and infallible documents for penetrating the life of a society.
The new European structure for life is not what the young writers of America generally imagine. It is not Mistinguette, or Paul Morand, or the Black Bottom dance, or Margueritte, or fashionable literary schools, or Chevalier, or the Tour Eiffel. These things are just simple motifs for show, as cheap as they are gaudy, which the press and the boulevard artists exploit right and left, often from native and irremediable unawareness of those artists, and almost always taking full economic advantage to cheat the good impressionable visitors. Apart from the fact that all those clichés date from before the war. Chevalier and Mistinguette have been singing for forty years in Montmartre; Morand has been writing about bathrooms and bicycles for twenty years; the Tour Eiffel uses identical measures and the same distribution of forces as in 1899; butch women have existed since the years of Musset and George Sand; surrealism has existed, as André Breton himself declares, since Poe and his contemporaries, and, as for dance that aims for the grand-écart or die trying, the cake-walk was already a common dance back in the time of Debussy. So, none of this constitutes the new European life. America should know that Europe is getting worked up these days, in a way that’s more serious and deeper than what you’d imagine, to be reborn toward a life that is likewise purer and happier than before. The restlessness and yearning to be reborn are expressed and demonstrated in Europe by means of other phenomena that are not the banal and decadent numbers that I’ve just indicated. There are other manifestations of the new kind of European life. Others that my contemporaries in America know poorly or barely suspect.
One of the disciplines characteristic of the new European life is the feeling for order and method. Young people here have understood that life, to be successful individually and socially, must obey a rigorous discipline of order and method. Order and method in work, in leisure, in joys, in sorrows, in public, in private. Order and method in the tasks of the body and in the functions of the spirit. Order and method for sowing and for reaping; for dying and for living. Order and method for wrecking and for building. The romantic generation of Hugo and the ascetic one of France both lacked the feeling for order, the first because of an excess of faith in nature’s wisdom and in the natural destinies of life, and the other because of not having that faith. In every aspect, life d’avant guerre was messy, bataclanesque, to use a term current at the time. The irregular and anarchic habits of the bohemian were typical and representative. It was a sign of strength and spiritual aristocracy to shake off, as much as possible, every law, every rule. One had to break free of the yokes and even of oneself. People flaunted the disorder and the anarchy, like lovely personal qualities. Artists threw themselves into their work, blindly, taking it all the way. The myth of improvisation and the phobia of the scientific dominated in art as in other fields of life.
But the best among Europeans d’après guerre have reacted against this discipline. Like no other animal, man is a being of order par excellence. A schedule and a plan are now indispensable for every enterprise, material or spiritual, subjective or collective. The watch, once staunch enemy of the artist, is not missing now on the wrist of the poet and the aviator. An authentic geometrical inclination leads people to act and to manage—dancing in the Fantasio or crying before a tomb—by means of sketches and in view of maps and guides. Even sleep is adjusted now—on the right, to the hands of the watch, and on the left, to the needle of the compass. We understand now that order and method, far from slowing down and opposing freedom and the natural proportions of life, favor and encourage them. Beauty, says Paul Valéry, comes from difficulty. There is no construction possible without rules or a system, that is, without science. Because in man nothing should be blind.
One of the signs of the new European life, then, is the advent of the man of order and method and the disappearance of the bohemian and anarchic sort from the previous era. Raymond Radiguet’s work, its fullness of beauty, its constructive and organic finished spine, calls our attention for that reason. In this sense, Radiguet has been a new spirit, an authentic avant-gardist.
[Variedades 1017. Lima, 27 August 1927.]
Vanguard and Rearguard
It’s the fashion at film showings in Paris for each event to be made up of three distinct parts: an old or rearguard movie, a futuristic or vanguard movie, and a contemporary movie, according to the era in which they were made. The same program will have a film shot in 1906, for example, another shot in 1928, and another that’s also current but in which bold innovations are ventured.
The fashion appeared for the first time in the revolutionary theater of the Vieux Colombier, then repeated in the Cinema des Ursulines, in Studio 28, and finally in theaters on the grand boulevards and even in the suburbs. The original purpose was of a strictly technical order, seeking in the chronological confrontation of styles the springs of perfection or failure in the material. But it seems that this interest in a simple laboratory grew into a vast experimental attempt on the very eyes of the clientele. Now it seeks out the secrets of technique and, moreover, initiates the public to swing sharply, in a single soirée, between bad taste and good, between the perfect and the imperfect. The cinema thus achieves two correlative and concentric results: it perfects technique and it refines and crystallizes cinematic taste in the public.
A man who is not a film artist, nor a “director” or even a cameraman, and who watches from his seat the old, the futurist, and the contemporary films, can nonetheless relinquish his own role as customer or initiate and escape in this way to be the subject of the cinematic experience that we have been discussing. This man can counteract the cinematic bacillus and, without ceasing to be a spectator---which is not the same as a customer or an initiate---become simplified into a mere human being, without pro or con from the screen, without good taste or bad, and solely possessed by the central sentiment of the gaze upon things. How does it work in this free man, the confrontation between periods of cinema’s development and the life it expresses? . . .
This man, contrary to what happens to the customer or the initiate and to the very creator of the screen, doesn’t laugh too much at the old film, nor is he too amazed by the futuristic film, nor does he take much delight from the film of our current time. He finds that between the old, present, and future techniques, there is a calm ebb and flow, like the passage from one second to another on a clock face and not an abrupt syncope, like the brutality of Hindemith’s music or the sudden trance of twilight. He finds, as well, that between the life expressed by the old film, that expressed by the modern film, and that heralded by the futuristic film, barely a death or a life passes; but not an eternity.
It is often said that progress advances from shade to shade and not from color to color. The hours of every creation are counted by thousandths of thousandths of a second and not by centuries. The leap, which the old Latin wisdom so feared, is incompatible with the almost absolute continuity of the terrain. The rhythm of fashion itself, so quick and epileptic, abides by this same continuative law of movement. Between the enormous hat of the woman d’avant-guerre and the shortest toque worn today, the distance is only a female head, that is, practically nothing. Finding a greater difference between both hats would be to reduce the criterion of proportion to the volume or physical size of things.
The return to the ancient arts is proof that there was a leap in the process of technique and that the spirit withdraws and tries to rejoin the natural, continuing rhythm of creation. In the vanguard experiences of the current cinema, we see that the magic lantern, for example, again tries out its possibilities that were scorned and abandoned many years ago and from them it may be feasible, in effect, to extract great cinematic effects. Fernand Divoire believes, for now, that the magic lantern is perhaps, by its daring, synthesis of movement, and by the schematic simplicity of its expression, the true style of the future screen.
[Variedades. Lima, 16 June 1928.]
The Masters of Cubism
The Pythagoras of Painting
The greatest contemporary painter is a Spaniard from Málaga: Picasso. Next to Picasso and embracing a no less powerful artistic personality is another Spaniard from Madrid: Juan Gris. In Paris, the fame of both, at least among the elites of the vanguard, has helped in large part to impose the new painting which under the name of Cubism offers now figures so towering as Braque, Derain, Matisse, Marcoussis, whose works are being celebrated far and wide, that they can almost be considered classics already. I’ve just now finished reading an article by Sabord where he tells of his surprise on seeing how the cubist revolutionaries are starting to enjoy a popular and absolute consecration, as if they weren’t such revolutionaries. Every show of decorative models from Parisian shops is currently dominated by the motifs and drawings of Braque, Matisse, Gris, and naturally, Picasso himself. Generally, starting with the International Exposition of Decorative Arts in 1925, cubism has invaded the world of commerce to a resounding degree. Cubism has spread to furniture design, luxury goods, architecture, posters, the theater, etc. The famous and dazzling concert hall the Salle Pleyel has the most old-school polygons. The ads for the Cook Agency on locomotives haul along entire squads of geometry from les fauves. People get all caught up trying to locate the characters from Doctor Caligari among the truncated pyramids and the loony bin’s lack of perspective, etc, etc. The year 1923 marks the apex of Muscovite influence on decorative art in Paris. Upon this Russian prevalence of taste and heights followed the cubist prevalence of taste and depth, which has now reached its greatest scope. Okay, fine. To this irradiation of a new art, profoundly human and, above all, of its time, Picasso and Gris have contributed with ideas and works of the highest order. An overly patriotic Spaniard might claim that the current cubist prevalence in the Paris fashion industry is in the end a Spanish triumph, since cubism has Picasso and Gris for leaders.
But that’s not why one could think that cubism, on getting around and put within reach of commercial taste, is on the threshold of passing into the domain of the vulgar, that is, by that road it’s on the point of going up in smoke and disappearing, due to the superficiality and coarseness of its trajectory. The spread of cubism proves only that there breathes a broadly human content, a universal vitality. This spread is, at the same time, natural and logical. The great esthetic currents of history have had equal luck and the same consecration. The works of Picasso and his friends, like the marvels of the Renaissance, will pass into the category of celebrities, not for having descended to the majority of people but rather for having educated those people to the point of making them ascend toward the works and for enclosing there a cosmic rhythm. We must not forget that there is celebrity and celebrity. One thing is Paul de Kock and another is Victor Hugo.
Among the first creators of cubism, Gris has toiled away heroically. Hero against the recalcitrant public and hero against many sectarians of the school itself. Since his first paintings, Gris has shown a rigorous, mathematical sense of art, against the reigning celestinesque metaphysics. Gris paints in numbers. His canvases are real top-grade creations, brilliantly resolved. Beside other cubists more or less wavering from capitulation or disbelief, Gris preaches and carries out, from the dawn of the new esthetic, around 1908, an intransigent, red, vertical belief. Nothing of Bergsonism nor of empirical rationalism. Gris preaches and carries out a conscientious and scientific knowledge of painting. He wants the painter to know conscientiously what he is painting and to avail himself of a wise technique and vigilant practice, by which he may properly make use of his natural gifts. His work, in this way, is made of precision, of pure certainty, of Goethean infallibility. Without sinking in any narrow scholasticism. Gris always adjusts himself, like the sainted hermit Popes, to the severe and apostolic numbers. Because of that, the critics have called him the Pythagoras of painting and proclaimed him the initiator of what could be called “pure painting,” like the “pure poetry” of abbé Brémond. Such appreciations spring up of their own from the serene contemplation of his work, where he strictly practiced the doctrine upheld, shortly before his death, in his conference at the Sorbonne.
Gris has been perhaps the most rebellious painter in Paris. He was not the sort of artist who compromises out of hunger, or love of fame, or out of “lousy doubts,” as Apollinaire would say. Gris is always Gris, against aces and queens, even against time and against himself. And through this rigorous spirit of artistic austerity and through the scientific possession of his creative forces, without unconfessable fog or elaborate and complicit mysteries, Juan Gris will remain the most representative painter of our time.
[Variedades 1069. Lima, 25 August 1928.]
The Youth of America in Europe
Paris, December 1928
Let us specify, once more, that America lacks a cultural home of its own. Does a Latin American spirit exist? Let us specify again that this does not exist nor will it exist for a long time yet. The first condition for bringing it about and creating it must come out of our sincere conviction that it does not exist, nor is it even glimpsed. The first step toward an original culture---that is, a vital culture---consists of creating the awareness that we still do not possess it. Let’s try, then, to create in America the austere and rigorous awareness that we lack our own spirit and culture. Let’s take charge of the need for this awareness which is not a confession of more or less empirical vulgar humility, but rather the first scientific and, if you like, technical act in an effective creative evolution. Let us conceive of that awareness which in Cartesian terms could be called methodical or provisional awareness; let’s try to engender it and make it count as the only point of departure for our reason for being. To achieve that, let’s put into play all the destructive means against all the illegitimate traces and simulations of culture that sustain our continental pedantry. The surrealist movement—at its purest and most creative—can help us in this cleansing of our spirit, with the healthy and tonic contagion of its pessimism and desperation. Our state of spirit demands an active pessimism and a terrible creative desperation. Pessimism and desperation. Such are, for the present and to begin with, our first acts toward life. We haven’t created anything. We have not even begun. We lack hope as much as bitterness, horizons as much as darkness. Our trouble lies not in a specific crisis of politics, economics, religion, or art. Our trouble resides in the fact that we haven’t created anything, not truths nor errors, nor have we tried anything. Our case lies in chilling vital desolation.
In America the question is not understood in this way. The best intellects—most of them—start from another notion and another sentiment. A vulgar and exaggerated optimism, a facile and pedantic smugness, constitute the common base of every effort, whether sincere or simply for show, toward a Latin American culture. Whenever we’re faced with the spirit of foreign societies, we are inclined in advance to find a constant balance of values—in facts or immediate perspectives—in our favor. A comfortable and foolish parti pris disposes us to always come out winning in these assessments. That is the humorous case of the Catherine Wheel in “The Remarkable Rocket” by Oscar Wilde. It’s about one of the most disastrous forms of mistaken faith with its sudden slope toward indolence and inaction.
Other times, such optimism does not derive from a confrontation between foreign ways and our own. Most often, optimism arises from the individual and zoologically egotistical pretension of those who play the role of intellectual leaders of America. A frequent and well-known phenomenon can serve us as proof of this prodigiously foolish and alarming pedantry. When young intellectuals from America come to Europe, they don’t come to honestly study foreign life and culture, but rather to “triumph.” They bring in their suitcases some books or canvases made in America and, barely do they arrive in Paris, no other wish stirs them but to “triumph.” Let the newspapers deal with them so they can return as soon as possible to their native land, tell their friends and fellows that they “triumphed” in Europe. They embark on the voyage from America to foreign lands, drawn not by life’s concerns and by the healthy yearning for knowledge and perfection, but thinking about the return by steamship, carrying in their suitcase a few books with prologues by more or less questionable literary eminences, or an album of press clippings. They don’t come to learn and to live but rather to get flustered and to return. They come with their feet but they stay put with their skull and thorax.
Not long ago, a sculptor came and, eight days after his arrival in Paris, had a show of his work.
“You can’t imagine,” he told me in a heroic tone, “what this show cost me. The thirty pieces on exhibit I did in the few days that I’ve been in Paris. It’s a tremendous effort. I haven’t even had time to see the Eiffel Tower . . .”
“And who obliged you to do this show, so suddenly like that and right after arriving in Paris?” I asked him rather intrigued.
“No one. But I promised myself. You have to work, work, work . . .”
And you have to “triumph,” the sculptor meant to tell me.
They return, in effect, “triumphant” and celebrated. In their person and in the case of every one of them, what returns to America strengthened and consolidated is the sick continental optimism.
[Mundial 450. Lima, 1 February 1929.]
(translated from the Spanish)
César Vallejo
to be published in Selected Writings by César Vallejo, edited by Joseph Mulligan (forthcoming, Wesleyan, 2015)
The Assassin of Barrès
M. Pierre Laval, the new Minister of Justice in France, has just prohibited the public from attending judicial hearings. Before that, slackers without money to pay for the theater or a dance hall could while away their boredom in the courtrooms, without it costing them much. A few minutes of waiting in the elaborate patios, some stamping of feet, some entreaties to the guards, and—in you go! A spectacle of great interest, these hearings, in which edifying nuances of the urban environment played out. There was the spectacle of criminals, judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and lawyers, on the one hand; the spectacle of the public, on the other; and, on a separate string, the spectacle of the public and the machinery of justice together. What more could one ask for? People came out completely satisfied. It didn’t cost them money. From a theater people usually come out dissatisfied because the spectator almost always believes, there in the esthetic-economical accordions of his heart, that those hours at the theater weren’t worth what he paid: it was too hot or the protagonist was bad or the decor insipid or the guy in the next seat was a spy or the usher was rude . . . By contrast, judicial hearings in Paris filled people with a perfect, unobjectionable, selfless emotion. One needn’t add the artistic range and intensity of each hearing: the tragedy, the drama properly called; sometimes, the comedy, the vaudeville, the comic sketch, and even the guignol farce, the burlesque, opera, even dance. Occasionally, for certain medico-legal demonstrations, movies were offered and the occult arts lent important services, inasmuch as the astrological world of fortunes was involved.
But suddenly here now M. Laval, who belongs to a revolutionary youth group in the French Parliament, like Herriot, like Jouvenel, like Lamoureux and others, comes to take away from us such an abundant spectacle, just out of fear that the law courts could turn into, for example, a school for delinquency. A majority of Parisians is left without entertainments. Life has gotten more expensive, since now many will have to pay for their fun. The theater and the cinema feel obliged to spill or to pretend to spill—which in this case is the same—more blood on the stage and the screen, in compensation for the blood that’s no longer seen in the courtrooms. Well, M. Laval may not know what he’s messing with.
Aside from these collective inconveniences in the prohibitive decree, each person suffers some particular resonance in turn. Among the old clients of the hearings I know a representative of a sleeper-car agency in whom that decree has not managed to destroy what we might call the judicial or, if you like, police habit. This brave initiate in the affairs of penal justice has begun to make intricate steps toward acquiring a collection of famous weapons, the kind that served great criminals. His belief is that the venture is feasible and that the collection could then basically serve the State, Science, Humanity.
In Paris everything is possible. All of a sudden, one thing happens and that’s that. A good proof of that is the conduct of this other type, strangely judicial or judiciable, whom you’re going to meet at once. A strangely judicial type, because he’s not, like the representative for sleeper-cars, a type classifiable in one or another judicial pigeonhole, rather he is inside of justice, without ceasing to be outside of it.
M. Ferand Scatel is a jurist at the Sorbonne who—how original!—takes a great interest in the life of America. I was with him yesterday, at the famous café Le Boeuf sur le Toit in Montmartre drinking an aperitif. A youth entered the room and stopped by to shake hands with M. Scatel. M. Delfau, as the lad is named, must be around 34: he is elegant, though lean and very nervous. It seemed to me I’d seen him before. It seemed to me I’d seen him precisely at a judicial hearing, since Delfau has a rather judicial air. If I haven’t seen him in a courtroom, as a spectator, I must have seen him on the stand, in a seat for the defense, in a police cordon, in a row of witnesses or on a bench for the accused. This friendship between Delfau, a judicial type, and Scatel, a lawyer, seemed perfect to me for they both had an air of hearings. There are friendships that go very well.
But, as I learned after, M. Delfau has never been a lawyer, a judge, a witness, nor a policeman, and not even a bailiff. M. Delfau has not been a criminal. Nor a spectator at hearings. His strange judicial atmosphere comes from a role that he’s played and that I can only qualify as rigorously judicial. M. Scatel, jurist at the Sorbonne, likewise can only qualify that role as judicial and not even as criminal. M. Delfau assassinated Maurice Barrès. But I think I’ve said a lot. M. Delfau himself is content to tell us, M. Scatel and me, while he sips his glass of amourette:
“I was supposed to have assassinated Barrès, the day he died of pleurisy. That is, I wasn’t going to assassinate him, but to punish him, as a judge punishes a criminal or as an executioner guillotines a condemned man.”
Readers will imagine our surprise at those words. But, as I said, in Paris everything is possible. M. Delfau talks to us at length:
“My action, unfortunately, only came down to letting him die on his own, like a doctor who lets a sick man die, or like a witness who lets an assassin be condemned, or a prosecutor who ardently demands capital punishment or a guard who, because he fell asleep, allows a serious stabbing . . .
“I’m not speaking as a lawyer who lets an accused man be condemned, nor as an accused man who does not defend himself because you (Delfau lowers his voice, looking at Scatel) are a lawyer and because maybe I am accusing myself before you:”
M. Delfau crosses his legs and adds in a dramatic tone:
“Barrès, though on his own, died at any rate; he was a bad writer, that is, a great criminal. The dadaists judged him at a literary hearing. But that wasn’t the main thing. Cocteau said of him that he made one think of the corpses swollen with honey by the Greek embalmers. But that wasn’t the thing either. Bad writers should be assassinated, as rulers are assassinated. We should assassinate bad poets, bad painters, bad sculptors, bad musicians, with greater reason than politicians. Already in Munich the famous actor Schlosser was murdered right when he was doing a disastrous job playing a role at the theater. In Tokyo, the same thing happened to Koyague the painter, in the middle of painting a portrait: Count Masakoru, who was posing, exasperated, for a canvas in which he was being mistreated, shot his revolver at the artist. I thought of assassinating Barrès for being a bad writer. I know they would have lynched me afterwards as a national response. I would have even turned myself in. Some want to assassinate Clemenceau in Paris and Mussolini in Rome. Why not, in Paris, assassinate Barrès and in Rome, D’Annunzio? . . . Bad literature is a great offense, not only for the State but for Humanity.
“For this great crime of being a bad writer, I thought of assassinating Barrès, that is, to punish him as a sanction of man to man! I thought to punish him the same day that he died of pleurisy. But I am consoled, at least, by having let him die on his own. In effect, Barrès was growing old and I let him grow old. Barrès suffered, throughout his legislator’s heart, the mockery of the free young voters, and I let him suffer that. Barrès happened to cough frequently and I also let him cough. Hours he had of treacherous winds, leaning out his windows over the Bois de Boulogne, and I let those winds lash him. Barrès happened to need death, while voluptuousness overflowed and his blood held council in democratic silences, and I left him with his blood, his voluptuousness, and his death. Because one must know that Barrès died from suffering a great shortage of death. It’s very important to know this. Barrès died from a lack of death.
“Contrary to what happens with most people who die from a lack of life, for Barrès it was the lack of death that killed him, which should not lead us to confuse him with the great men who also die from lack of death. Know that for great men, death from lack of death puts an end to that rarefied death, while for lesser men, who are even lower than most people, death from lack of death puts an end to an exuberant life, as with Barrès, for example. Christ and Judas are a good example of these two classes of death from lack of death. They are the great man and the lesser subject. Between the two are all the rest—you, me, and people in general who die from lack of life. These subtleties are very important. Paul Valéry thinks he is worth what he is lacking, since he possesses the clear and profound science of what he is lacking. So, a great spring of wisdom lies in the knowledge of what we are lacking: life or death, money or beauty, hate or love . . . ”
At the end of his explanations, M. Delfau adopted the terrible expression of a saint. He is the assassin of Barrès, the one who should have assassinated him. That’s what I thought from the first moment I met him: this lad is a strangely judicial fellow.
It is written that in Paris everything is possible. All of a sudden, one thing happens and that’s that.
[Variedades 958. Lima, 10 July 1926.]
Da Vinci's Baptist
Paris, August 1926
One time I read in Treinta años de mi vida by Enrique Gómez Carrillo an anecdote about the days when Oscar Wilde was around in Paris dreaming up Salomé. Those were days when "the king of life" used to talk about the Jewish princess in Nimrod's stormy plot of land in the forests of art, after the sweet Herodian piece. Remy de Gourmont, in particular, enjoyed talking with Wilde and seems to have helped the great Englishman[i] a lot concerning historical and Hertzian elucidations about the strange daughter of Antipas.
As a result of finding myself the other day with Leonardo da Vinci's Baptist, in the galleries of the Louvre, I remembered Gómez Carrillo's evocative pages and I've gone to look for him at his apartment on the rue de Castellane, eager to hear from his own lips, written in pure air, the aforementioned anecdote. But on the way I recalled that Gómez Carrillo spoke to me the other day of his upcoming vacation to Nice. In effect. His concierge answers me:
"He left for the Alpes Maritimes."
That's a pity. Because this John by Leonardo da Vinci tells me, in his voice of a virgin Florentine faun, how he was carried away to Oscar Wilde's sublime tragedy, just as he appears in his secular painting at the palace of the Tuileries. Wilde's Baptist undoubtedly comes from da Vinci's. One refers to the other and they both complete each other and harmonize into a single esthetic fullness.
As far as I know, no one before the Italian painter gave a more earthy spirit, a more human life to the historic figure of the Precursor. No one showed him grammatical gender in more expressive heroic lines. Within his Galilean racial mysticism, John stands out in da Vinci's canvas with a grace, a force, and a purpose of such chaste and natural sensuality that contemplating him produces a slight tingling on the skin. Contemplating him immediately inspires in us the feeling of an impossible tragic erotic nature. Beardless, barely adolescent, his long hair preened by the desert wind, he seems to throw his wild cascade of curls to bite the head of the crowd. That undulating hair, traced over his temples like famished teeth, will go straight to casting upon the ardent Salomé's breast the great shadowy mane of desire. One day Salomé will see those leonine curls and will no longer be able to live without caging them in the bars of her fingers. Oh, that hair biting the temples, even before the slingshots of light come crashing down upon the brow, a mere draft for the brow of The One at whose feet the Magdalene would come sobbing! Oh, that taciturn hair, suitable for the naked face that bends there, even with all its light, terrified!
The erotic suggestion of John begins in that carnivorous fleece. That fleece acts as a threshold to the wheat festival; to the sacred apple orchard of the thorax and the arms. And see that right arm, entirely naked. It starts at the armpit, then makes a turn that's almost absurd it's so smooth: bent upwards at the elbow, instead of making the vertex of strange protection.
A chilling and sulfurous fingertip thus raised? To brandish the index finger on high, in a sharp ferocious jab, that we think we feel in who knows what strange pore, the lowest of the flesh. A chilling and sulfurous fingertip! A germinal stamen! (Something of this gesture transmigrates to the arm of the Baptist in Rodin’s bronze.)
But look at the left arm. How it hides behind the other and how it insists on fading into the thorax, so subtly and wingedly, to the point that it is not missed. In the impression given off by the whole body, that arm near the heart is as if it weren't there. Before that embarrassed arm, which conceals and negates itself and defends his vivid nakedness, "Victor Hugo would be amazed." While the right arm, owner of the entire body, challenges desire face to face, here the left arm escapes, shields itself, resists, repels the supreme contact. The mere play of the arms is showing the tenor of the Baptist’s nature: an innocent, irreducible ferment of sexual passion. The layout of the terms is clear. The conflict of the arms synthesizes and presents the tragedy.
The conflict then spreads and reaches a climax. And if not, pay attention to the play of edges and tips throughout the whole figure. In the eyebrows, the nose, the closed smiling lips, the rim of the eye sockets, in the shoulders, and oh, in the savage index finger! A whole vivid cresting of axes. The whole tragedy in a nutshell.
The gust of earthiness in da Vinci’s John is such that it suggests direct similarities with Bacchus, by the great Florentine painter. Except that his Bacchus is a serene, pagan earthiness, without conflict, without tragedy, while in his Baptist the opposition of arrows is at its boiling point.
No other artist has offered a more natural and human version of the one before whom lions trembled. None has presented him in such a healthy and vital manner. Solario[ii] is missing the Jewish ethnic form. Luini[iii] lacks a tragic pulse, despite the haughty touch of the executioner’s hand, on holding the Baptist’s bloody head by the hair. Guerchin[iv] is the one who most rises to the level of da Vinci, with the disturbing Herod in his canvas. Da Vinci, without spilling a single drop of blood in his picture, without even showing Salomé, and the drunken stepfatherly crown, nor Herod, suggests to us better than any other painter the dance of love and death.
Only Oscar Wilde produced in literature something about John the Baptist as great as what the genius from Florence depicted in his canvas. Both versions recall each other and fit together in a marvel of predestination. Except that Wilde, no doubt, was inspired by da Vinci.
Does Gómez Carrillo know anything else about Wilde’s Salomé? I’ll wait till he comes back from the Alps.
[Variedades 968. Lima, 18 September 1926.]
[i] Vallejo mistakes Oscar Wilde’s nationality for English when it was Irish.
[ii] Cf. Andrea Solario’s painting, Salome with the head of Saint John the Baptist.
[iii] Cf. Bernardino Luini’s painting, Salome receiving the head of Saint John the Baptist.
[iv] Cf. Gian Francesco Barbieri di Guerchin’s Salome receiving the head of Saint John the Baptist.
The New Disciplines
Paris, July 1927
The war has given rise to a new structure for life in Europe. This cannot be denied. Whoever lives here a few years and absorbs the intimate European social atmosphere, has to confirm the existence of cultural forms and disciplines that are absolutely distinct from those before the war. Everything differs from the previous era: the economy, thought, sensibilities, fashion, and even worries and vices.
The young intellectuals of the new continent, to whom I address these lines especially, don’t know or know poorly the existence, quality, and reach of European culture d’après guerre (culture, yes, though it might only be an attempt or simply feeling around in the dark). Few are the men of America who really notice the new vital state of Europe. And that’s because such a phenomenon of renovation can only be known, in all its authenticity, by living long years in close contact with European life. Not many South Americans come to Europe to live in this way. Some are here as if they were not. Their daily life goes by as a continuation in Europe of South American life: their social dealings are solely with South Americans and Spaniards, they speak only Spanish, they read (when they read) only newspapers and books in Spanish; their conversations and topics turn around America or American things; their smallest acts are directed, in intention and motives, toward America; and even in the matter of shows, they seek and attend only Spanish theater, Indoamerican concerts, Andalusian dance, conferences about the homeland, and native oratory. Clearly, such people can be many years in Europe and it’s as if they were not. As for the rest, they pass through, traveling all over the old hemisphere in six or eight months and barely seeing anything, like at the movies or in Paul Morand, in order to bring back, on their return, only a rushed album of blurry images that haven’t passed through the retina and so, as a consequence, get erased before they disembark in Buenos Aires or Valparaíso. I know both classes of South Americans and, at any moment, I can point out intuitively a thousand examples of each of them. In the best cases, there are South Americans who live isolated in a single European social field, in the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, that is, in the areas least likely to reveal the new European spirit. Anyway, some people from America spend twenty or thirty years in Paris, walled up with books and newspapers, far from the living palpitating life of every day and with no connection to the warm circumstantial trance of individual psychology, these particulars truthful and infallible documents for penetrating the life of a society.
The new European structure for life is not what the young writers of America generally imagine. It is not Mistinguette, or Paul Morand, or the Black Bottom dance, or Margueritte, or fashionable literary schools, or Chevalier, or the Tour Eiffel. These things are just simple motifs for show, as cheap as they are gaudy, which the press and the boulevard artists exploit right and left, often from native and irremediable unawareness of those artists, and almost always taking full economic advantage to cheat the good impressionable visitors. Apart from the fact that all those clichés date from before the war. Chevalier and Mistinguette have been singing for forty years in Montmartre; Morand has been writing about bathrooms and bicycles for twenty years; the Tour Eiffel uses identical measures and the same distribution of forces as in 1899; butch women have existed since the years of Musset and George Sand; surrealism has existed, as André Breton himself declares, since Poe and his contemporaries, and, as for dance that aims for the grand-écart or die trying, the cake-walk was already a common dance back in the time of Debussy. So, none of this constitutes the new European life. America should know that Europe is getting worked up these days, in a way that’s more serious and deeper than what you’d imagine, to be reborn toward a life that is likewise purer and happier than before. The restlessness and yearning to be reborn are expressed and demonstrated in Europe by means of other phenomena that are not the banal and decadent numbers that I’ve just indicated. There are other manifestations of the new kind of European life. Others that my contemporaries in America know poorly or barely suspect.
One of the disciplines characteristic of the new European life is the feeling for order and method. Young people here have understood that life, to be successful individually and socially, must obey a rigorous discipline of order and method. Order and method in work, in leisure, in joys, in sorrows, in public, in private. Order and method in the tasks of the body and in the functions of the spirit. Order and method for sowing and for reaping; for dying and for living. Order and method for wrecking and for building. The romantic generation of Hugo and the ascetic one of France both lacked the feeling for order, the first because of an excess of faith in nature’s wisdom and in the natural destinies of life, and the other because of not having that faith. In every aspect, life d’avant guerre was messy, bataclanesque, to use a term current at the time. The irregular and anarchic habits of the bohemian were typical and representative. It was a sign of strength and spiritual aristocracy to shake off, as much as possible, every law, every rule. One had to break free of the yokes and even of oneself. People flaunted the disorder and the anarchy, like lovely personal qualities. Artists threw themselves into their work, blindly, taking it all the way. The myth of improvisation and the phobia of the scientific dominated in art as in other fields of life.
But the best among Europeans d’après guerre have reacted against this discipline. Like no other animal, man is a being of order par excellence. A schedule and a plan are now indispensable for every enterprise, material or spiritual, subjective or collective. The watch, once staunch enemy of the artist, is not missing now on the wrist of the poet and the aviator. An authentic geometrical inclination leads people to act and to manage—dancing in the Fantasio or crying before a tomb—by means of sketches and in view of maps and guides. Even sleep is adjusted now—on the right, to the hands of the watch, and on the left, to the needle of the compass. We understand now that order and method, far from slowing down and opposing freedom and the natural proportions of life, favor and encourage them. Beauty, says Paul Valéry, comes from difficulty. There is no construction possible without rules or a system, that is, without science. Because in man nothing should be blind.
One of the signs of the new European life, then, is the advent of the man of order and method and the disappearance of the bohemian and anarchic sort from the previous era. Raymond Radiguet’s work, its fullness of beauty, its constructive and organic finished spine, calls our attention for that reason. In this sense, Radiguet has been a new spirit, an authentic avant-gardist.
[Variedades 1017. Lima, 27 August 1927.]
Vanguard and Rearguard
It’s the fashion at film showings in Paris for each event to be made up of three distinct parts: an old or rearguard movie, a futuristic or vanguard movie, and a contemporary movie, according to the era in which they were made. The same program will have a film shot in 1906, for example, another shot in 1928, and another that’s also current but in which bold innovations are ventured.
The fashion appeared for the first time in the revolutionary theater of the Vieux Colombier, then repeated in the Cinema des Ursulines, in Studio 28, and finally in theaters on the grand boulevards and even in the suburbs. The original purpose was of a strictly technical order, seeking in the chronological confrontation of styles the springs of perfection or failure in the material. But it seems that this interest in a simple laboratory grew into a vast experimental attempt on the very eyes of the clientele. Now it seeks out the secrets of technique and, moreover, initiates the public to swing sharply, in a single soirée, between bad taste and good, between the perfect and the imperfect. The cinema thus achieves two correlative and concentric results: it perfects technique and it refines and crystallizes cinematic taste in the public.
A man who is not a film artist, nor a “director” or even a cameraman, and who watches from his seat the old, the futurist, and the contemporary films, can nonetheless relinquish his own role as customer or initiate and escape in this way to be the subject of the cinematic experience that we have been discussing. This man can counteract the cinematic bacillus and, without ceasing to be a spectator---which is not the same as a customer or an initiate---become simplified into a mere human being, without pro or con from the screen, without good taste or bad, and solely possessed by the central sentiment of the gaze upon things. How does it work in this free man, the confrontation between periods of cinema’s development and the life it expresses? . . .
This man, contrary to what happens to the customer or the initiate and to the very creator of the screen, doesn’t laugh too much at the old film, nor is he too amazed by the futuristic film, nor does he take much delight from the film of our current time. He finds that between the old, present, and future techniques, there is a calm ebb and flow, like the passage from one second to another on a clock face and not an abrupt syncope, like the brutality of Hindemith’s music or the sudden trance of twilight. He finds, as well, that between the life expressed by the old film, that expressed by the modern film, and that heralded by the futuristic film, barely a death or a life passes; but not an eternity.
It is often said that progress advances from shade to shade and not from color to color. The hours of every creation are counted by thousandths of thousandths of a second and not by centuries. The leap, which the old Latin wisdom so feared, is incompatible with the almost absolute continuity of the terrain. The rhythm of fashion itself, so quick and epileptic, abides by this same continuative law of movement. Between the enormous hat of the woman d’avant-guerre and the shortest toque worn today, the distance is only a female head, that is, practically nothing. Finding a greater difference between both hats would be to reduce the criterion of proportion to the volume or physical size of things.
The return to the ancient arts is proof that there was a leap in the process of technique and that the spirit withdraws and tries to rejoin the natural, continuing rhythm of creation. In the vanguard experiences of the current cinema, we see that the magic lantern, for example, again tries out its possibilities that were scorned and abandoned many years ago and from them it may be feasible, in effect, to extract great cinematic effects. Fernand Divoire believes, for now, that the magic lantern is perhaps, by its daring, synthesis of movement, and by the schematic simplicity of its expression, the true style of the future screen.
[Variedades. Lima, 16 June 1928.]
The Masters of Cubism
The Pythagoras of Painting
The greatest contemporary painter is a Spaniard from Málaga: Picasso. Next to Picasso and embracing a no less powerful artistic personality is another Spaniard from Madrid: Juan Gris. In Paris, the fame of both, at least among the elites of the vanguard, has helped in large part to impose the new painting which under the name of Cubism offers now figures so towering as Braque, Derain, Matisse, Marcoussis, whose works are being celebrated far and wide, that they can almost be considered classics already. I’ve just now finished reading an article by Sabord where he tells of his surprise on seeing how the cubist revolutionaries are starting to enjoy a popular and absolute consecration, as if they weren’t such revolutionaries. Every show of decorative models from Parisian shops is currently dominated by the motifs and drawings of Braque, Matisse, Gris, and naturally, Picasso himself. Generally, starting with the International Exposition of Decorative Arts in 1925, cubism has invaded the world of commerce to a resounding degree. Cubism has spread to furniture design, luxury goods, architecture, posters, the theater, etc. The famous and dazzling concert hall the Salle Pleyel has the most old-school polygons. The ads for the Cook Agency on locomotives haul along entire squads of geometry from les fauves. People get all caught up trying to locate the characters from Doctor Caligari among the truncated pyramids and the loony bin’s lack of perspective, etc, etc. The year 1923 marks the apex of Muscovite influence on decorative art in Paris. Upon this Russian prevalence of taste and heights followed the cubist prevalence of taste and depth, which has now reached its greatest scope. Okay, fine. To this irradiation of a new art, profoundly human and, above all, of its time, Picasso and Gris have contributed with ideas and works of the highest order. An overly patriotic Spaniard might claim that the current cubist prevalence in the Paris fashion industry is in the end a Spanish triumph, since cubism has Picasso and Gris for leaders.
But that’s not why one could think that cubism, on getting around and put within reach of commercial taste, is on the threshold of passing into the domain of the vulgar, that is, by that road it’s on the point of going up in smoke and disappearing, due to the superficiality and coarseness of its trajectory. The spread of cubism proves only that there breathes a broadly human content, a universal vitality. This spread is, at the same time, natural and logical. The great esthetic currents of history have had equal luck and the same consecration. The works of Picasso and his friends, like the marvels of the Renaissance, will pass into the category of celebrities, not for having descended to the majority of people but rather for having educated those people to the point of making them ascend toward the works and for enclosing there a cosmic rhythm. We must not forget that there is celebrity and celebrity. One thing is Paul de Kock and another is Victor Hugo.
Among the first creators of cubism, Gris has toiled away heroically. Hero against the recalcitrant public and hero against many sectarians of the school itself. Since his first paintings, Gris has shown a rigorous, mathematical sense of art, against the reigning celestinesque metaphysics. Gris paints in numbers. His canvases are real top-grade creations, brilliantly resolved. Beside other cubists more or less wavering from capitulation or disbelief, Gris preaches and carries out, from the dawn of the new esthetic, around 1908, an intransigent, red, vertical belief. Nothing of Bergsonism nor of empirical rationalism. Gris preaches and carries out a conscientious and scientific knowledge of painting. He wants the painter to know conscientiously what he is painting and to avail himself of a wise technique and vigilant practice, by which he may properly make use of his natural gifts. His work, in this way, is made of precision, of pure certainty, of Goethean infallibility. Without sinking in any narrow scholasticism. Gris always adjusts himself, like the sainted hermit Popes, to the severe and apostolic numbers. Because of that, the critics have called him the Pythagoras of painting and proclaimed him the initiator of what could be called “pure painting,” like the “pure poetry” of abbé Brémond. Such appreciations spring up of their own from the serene contemplation of his work, where he strictly practiced the doctrine upheld, shortly before his death, in his conference at the Sorbonne.
Gris has been perhaps the most rebellious painter in Paris. He was not the sort of artist who compromises out of hunger, or love of fame, or out of “lousy doubts,” as Apollinaire would say. Gris is always Gris, against aces and queens, even against time and against himself. And through this rigorous spirit of artistic austerity and through the scientific possession of his creative forces, without unconfessable fog or elaborate and complicit mysteries, Juan Gris will remain the most representative painter of our time.
[Variedades 1069. Lima, 25 August 1928.]
The Youth of America in Europe
Paris, December 1928
Let us specify, once more, that America lacks a cultural home of its own. Does a Latin American spirit exist? Let us specify again that this does not exist nor will it exist for a long time yet. The first condition for bringing it about and creating it must come out of our sincere conviction that it does not exist, nor is it even glimpsed. The first step toward an original culture---that is, a vital culture---consists of creating the awareness that we still do not possess it. Let’s try, then, to create in America the austere and rigorous awareness that we lack our own spirit and culture. Let’s take charge of the need for this awareness which is not a confession of more or less empirical vulgar humility, but rather the first scientific and, if you like, technical act in an effective creative evolution. Let us conceive of that awareness which in Cartesian terms could be called methodical or provisional awareness; let’s try to engender it and make it count as the only point of departure for our reason for being. To achieve that, let’s put into play all the destructive means against all the illegitimate traces and simulations of culture that sustain our continental pedantry. The surrealist movement—at its purest and most creative—can help us in this cleansing of our spirit, with the healthy and tonic contagion of its pessimism and desperation. Our state of spirit demands an active pessimism and a terrible creative desperation. Pessimism and desperation. Such are, for the present and to begin with, our first acts toward life. We haven’t created anything. We have not even begun. We lack hope as much as bitterness, horizons as much as darkness. Our trouble lies not in a specific crisis of politics, economics, religion, or art. Our trouble resides in the fact that we haven’t created anything, not truths nor errors, nor have we tried anything. Our case lies in chilling vital desolation.
In America the question is not understood in this way. The best intellects—most of them—start from another notion and another sentiment. A vulgar and exaggerated optimism, a facile and pedantic smugness, constitute the common base of every effort, whether sincere or simply for show, toward a Latin American culture. Whenever we’re faced with the spirit of foreign societies, we are inclined in advance to find a constant balance of values—in facts or immediate perspectives—in our favor. A comfortable and foolish parti pris disposes us to always come out winning in these assessments. That is the humorous case of the Catherine Wheel in “The Remarkable Rocket” by Oscar Wilde. It’s about one of the most disastrous forms of mistaken faith with its sudden slope toward indolence and inaction.
Other times, such optimism does not derive from a confrontation between foreign ways and our own. Most often, optimism arises from the individual and zoologically egotistical pretension of those who play the role of intellectual leaders of America. A frequent and well-known phenomenon can serve us as proof of this prodigiously foolish and alarming pedantry. When young intellectuals from America come to Europe, they don’t come to honestly study foreign life and culture, but rather to “triumph.” They bring in their suitcases some books or canvases made in America and, barely do they arrive in Paris, no other wish stirs them but to “triumph.” Let the newspapers deal with them so they can return as soon as possible to their native land, tell their friends and fellows that they “triumphed” in Europe. They embark on the voyage from America to foreign lands, drawn not by life’s concerns and by the healthy yearning for knowledge and perfection, but thinking about the return by steamship, carrying in their suitcase a few books with prologues by more or less questionable literary eminences, or an album of press clippings. They don’t come to learn and to live but rather to get flustered and to return. They come with their feet but they stay put with their skull and thorax.
Not long ago, a sculptor came and, eight days after his arrival in Paris, had a show of his work.
“You can’t imagine,” he told me in a heroic tone, “what this show cost me. The thirty pieces on exhibit I did in the few days that I’ve been in Paris. It’s a tremendous effort. I haven’t even had time to see the Eiffel Tower . . .”
“And who obliged you to do this show, so suddenly like that and right after arriving in Paris?” I asked him rather intrigued.
“No one. But I promised myself. You have to work, work, work . . .”
And you have to “triumph,” the sculptor meant to tell me.
They return, in effect, “triumphant” and celebrated. In their person and in the case of every one of them, what returns to America strengthened and consolidated is the sick continental optimism.
[Mundial 450. Lima, 1 February 1929.]