join the Communist Party. Braque denied him, as he also denied a second approach from none other than Simone Signoret (I feel a three-hander play coming on). Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He invests it, bombards it, mines it, assaults it – and each time the smoke clears, the castle is as solid as ever. Thwarted, he declares the site of no strategic interest anyway. Braque, he says, merely has ‘charm’. He tells him he has turned out to be ‘the Vuillard of Cubism’. He tells him his paintings are ‘well hung’. Braque replies that Picasso’s ceramics are ‘well cooked’. It is often the laconic,rather than the voluble, who win verbal battles. Picasso’s words frequently arise from not getting his own way over something unconnected with art; either that, or as a means of cheerleading the Picassoites. Braque’s words seem the more pondered, more to do with art, and therefore more deadly. Words like ‘talent’ and ‘virtuoso’ have an extra edge in his mouth. His replies culminate in the famous observation: ‘Picasso used to be a great painter. Now he is merely a genius.’ That’s to say, the public’s idea of a genius, someone protean and industrially productive, whose private life is also a publicised circus. They were not the first or the last ‘pardners’ to fall out, and to give the maliciously indifferent an afternoon of pleasure. But unlike some other fallings-out (that of Truffaut and Godard, for instance, which was rancorous and terminal), Picasso and Braque’s was complicated and continuing rather than ever final. And though Picasso might seem the more powerful, and certainly was the more famous, it was he who comes across as the supplicant, the more needy, in their dealings. It was Picasso who complained of being neglected and insufficiently visited; Picasso who took his new girlfriends to Braque for approval (and also, one suspects, to boast of his pulling power). And in their working lives it was Picasso who learned how to grind colour from Braque, and how to make his papiers collésstick; Picasso who was led to new challenges by Braque’s work (the Studiosof 1949-56 provoking the Las Meniñas variations) rather than the other way round; Picasso who suggested in the mid-1950s that the two of them go back to collaborating again as they had done half a lifetime previously – another invitation Braque declined. René Char called them Picasso and antiPicasso; but as Danchev’s biography goes on, they turn more into Braque and antiBraque. Braque slow, silent, autonomous, magisterial; anti-Braque mercurial, noisy, voluminous, virtuosic. Braque pursuing his own, known, ‘limited’ path; anti-Braque furiously metamorphic. Braque rural, domestic and uxorious; anti-Braque cosmopolitan, voracious and Dionysiac. It is not an either/or, more an and/also: there are different ways of being a genius, whether that word is loaded or not. Yet it is also salutary to flip the traditional order of expression and to write, as Danchev does, that Picasso’s ‘Braque period’ was ‘the most concentrated and fruitful of his whole career’. There is a danger of attributing sanctity to Braque. Jean Paulhan wrote that he was ‘reflective but violent’. He was hurtful to Juan Gris, refusing to be hung in the same

room; he once beat up his ex-dealer at Hôtel Drouot on what sound like fairly reasonable grounds. While decrying Picasso’s ‘duchess period’, his ball-going and fancy costumes, Braque was, in his soberer way, a pretty dressy fellow himself: on his rare trips to London, he headed not for the National Gallery but for the house of Mr Lobb the bootmaker. He had a taste for fast and expensive cars, both driving them and being

watched a Sunday Timesjournalist leap to his feet when he realised that the caller at the other end of the line was Lord Snowdon.) These are passing, and humanising, distractions. What struck many people who met Braque was the completeness, the integration of his personality, and the further integration of that personality with his art. Françoise Gilot said: ‘All of Braque was always there.’ Miró said he was ‘a model of

Two Poems by Robin Robertson

Manifest

Try to reconstruct me from the heraldry of the flesh, the thick blur of scar tissue, shreds of clothing, that burst vessel in the eye like a twist in a marble, those frost-feather wrinkles at the side of the mouth, the sagittal crest, the arteries’ complicated reds, flakes of semen, the blonde hair at the nape of the neck of either of my daughters, that cipher of birthmarks, saliva on the whisky glass, the weight of the brain, the weight of the heart, the bolus of the last meal, the trace of morphine in the nails and in the grey hairs of the chest, blood-string in the stool, gall-stones, an ankle-spur, the retina’s code, the death-mask, life-mask, the bowel’s gleet, the maze of fingerprints, ruined teeth, signatures of taint and septicaemia, the body’s hieroglyphic marks, its flayed accoutrements, this paraphernalia of clues; but you will never find me. Shall I tell you? Shall I tell you the secret? My whole life.

Answers

when mussels bud from every tree when the fox lies down with the goose when the sun and moon dance on the green and oranges fruit in the bramble bush

when all streams run together when all the streams stand still when the cuckoo calls in winter and water rolls back to the top of the hill

when herring swim the mountain lake when their feathers sink like stars when blackbirds fish the salt-sea wave and the rabbit picks at the buzzard’s heart

when seals come walking up from the bay and nightfall begins with the morning dew when daffodils open on Christmas Day and you see a crow as white as a dove I will return to you, my love, I will return to you

driven; like Picasso he had a uniformed chauffeur. He also enjoyed his food, though here a certain puritanism kicked in: on a tour of three-star Paris restaurants with the painter Humberto Stragiotti, he quite spoiled it for his companion by wolfing down his food far too quickly. Before taking his first transatlantic telephone call, Braque combedhis hair. An odd reaction – was it vanity or modesty? (Perhaps not so odd: I once

everything that is skill, serenity and reflection’. For the young John Richardson, visiting the painter’s studio for the first time, ‘I felt I had arrived at the very heart of painting.’ This, finally – and firstly – is where his authority comes from. Danchev’s biography has a rare and admirable concision; a proper awareness that Braque’s work is the only reason for being interested in his life; and a further aware

6 london review of books 15 december 2005

ness that such a life is in any case most lived while making the work. There is little gossip to be had around Braque’s existence, because he provoked and provided little (he came back from the First War with only one ‘war story’). Georges and Marcelle Braque, Danchev authoritatively assures us, ‘were completely faithful to each other for over fifty years’. (Duncan Grant could so little comprehend their coupledom that he decided it must derive from a shared passion for the sea.) When Mariette Lachaud joined the Braque household in 1930 at the age of 16 (her mother was the cook), you might think her future course would be a cliché. But as Danchev points out, she was ‘as chaste as she was devoted’, and graduated from ‘studio assistant to ministering angel and photographic documentarist – never to mistress’. This is, in fact, more biographically interesting than the usual tales and trails of artistic bed-hopping. A friend of mine long held as her two chief images of conjugalityEtruscan marital tomb-statues and the Avedon portrait of the Braques in old age – he seated, smiling, she resting against his shoulder. (A curious coincidence that the ceiling Braque painted in the Louvre – the only such commission he ever accepted – was for the Etruscan room.) Marcelle Braque was even more discreet than her husband, and left few traces; she was ‘a real woman of the people’, we are told; also cultured, religious and shrewd. She once warned Nicolas de Staël: ‘Watch out – you staved off poverty all right, but do you have the strength to stave off riches?’ We are told that she sewed Modigliani’s shroud. Perhaps there is no more to discover than Danchev tells us; but at times his biography could do with more of her reminding presence. There is also an unexplained lacuna in his account of Braque’s relations with his parents. One moment they are sending him off to Paris with their full blessing (and financial support) for his artistic life. The next, with Marcelle in the picture, we are inexplicably told of ‘another obstacle: Braque’s parents, above all his father, unmet and perhaps unreconciled’. Similarly, the aged Braque is suddenly described as ‘cancer-yellow’ without any indication if this is diagnostic or merely illustrative. Perhaps the biographer has so immersed himself in France that the discretion of its biographical tradition has leached into him. If so, it is an understandable tact in his subject’s presence. ‘The only thing that matters in art is what cannot be explained,’ Braque wrote. And: ‘How is one to talk about colour? . . . Those who have eyes know just how irrelevant words are to what they see.’ Further: ‘To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing.’ In the same way, to write a biography is to substitute the written life for the lived life, an awkward business at best, but possible, as here, as long as Braquean moral truth is at hand. The painter approached death as he had life: ‘always there’, in Gilot’s words; towards the end, he called for his palette, and Danchev touchingly lists the colours clinging to it. Braque died ‘without suffering, calmly, his gaze fixed until the last moment on the trees in the garden, the highest branches of which were visible from the great windows of his studio’. ∆
Straightforwardly enough, The Door begins with a door. In fact, it begins with ‘The Door’, a three-page prologue – a door into the novel – in which a woman recounts a bad dream. She is standing behind the front door of her apartment building and an ambulance crew is waiting in the street. The paramedics are eager to get in – someone in the building is desperately ill – but the door won’t open. The woman tries to scream, but her voice has gone, and at this point she wakes up. But the nightmare doesn’t end here, for the dream door is also a real door:

Once, just once in my life, not in the cerebral anaemia of sleep but in reality, a door did stand before me. That door opened. It was opened by someone who defended her solitude and impotent misery so fiercely that she would have kept that door shut though a flaming roof crackled over her head. I alone had the power to make her open that lock. In turning the key she put more trust in me than she ever did in God, and in that fateful moment I believedI was godlike – all-wise, judicious, benevolent and rational. We were both wrong: she who put her faith in me, and I who thought too well of myself.

The ‘someone’ in this passage is Emerence Szeredás, the proud and peremptory old spinster who keeps house for the narrator. For twenty years, the two women share each other’s company in a Budapest flat. The Door tells the story of their relationship, its tides of rapprochement and estrangement, and the growth of a tough, unaccountable love between two women of opposite tastes and sympathies. As the prologue intimates, the relationship ends in disaster, and so The Door becomes a tale of betrayal, with the narratorbidding for expiation and atonement. Above all it’s a confession: ‘I must speak out. I killed Emerence. The fact that I was trying to save her rather than destroy her changes nothing.’ Still, what is most remarkable about these feverish opening pages is how poorly they prepare us for what follows. The concentrated drama (‘In turning the key’, ‘that fateful moment’), the hysterical overstatement (‘I killed Emerence’), the note of public testimony (‘I must speak out’), the clotted, dreamlike ambience: almost everything in the prologue is foreign to the novel as a whole. For the most part, Magda Szabó’s book – a superbly controlled and involving work of art, first published in Hungary in 1987 – is sober and understated. Domestic routine – the preparation of food, the clearing of snow from pathways, visits to church, family jokes and squabbles – engrosses the narrative. The style is unhurried and anecdotal. The novel moves patiently, even ponderously, to the lento of a relationship measured in eras: ‘The truth is, for many years we mattered very little to her’; ‘Thus, as the years flew by, our relationship continued to strengthen.’ The narrator, who bears a close resemblance to Szabó herself, is a prominent Hungarian writer. As the novel opens, her career is picking up, having been ‘politically frozen’ for ten years. (Szabó spent years in obscurity, having been dismissed from her government post in the 1950s when it was discovered that she did not have a ‘suitable’ – that is, working-class or peasant – background.) Thanks to her rehabilitation,

That Time Liam McIlvanney

sonal – something more ‘characteristic’. When Emerence was younger, an aid parcel from Sweden reached her local church. Emerence was last in line when the gifts were being distributed, and in place of the useful woollens and cottons, she was given a sequined evening dress. The humiliation of this moment has never abated, and Emerence burns with unholy resentment: ‘Like the leader of some primitive tribe she flew her standard – a sequined evening dress– against the banner of the Lamb of God.’ With this wonderful image – the glitteringgown as an ensign of war – Emerence emerges as a character, a woman both utterly distinctive and thoroughly credible, both laudable and laughable. And while she retains flashes of her initial magnificence, Emerence is from this point on a woman of flesh and blood, with jealousies and fears, quirks and peccadilloes. The Dooris a book about work. We watch characters breaking sweat in everyday tasks: scrubbing floors, shelling peas, scribbling poems and novels. The friendship between the two women develops in lulls between labour. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that the friendship grows out of their labour, from the intimacy of working in the same confined space. Certainly, the two have little to say to one another; there is not much dialogue here. The Door also weighs the relative value of different kinds of work. For Emerence, only manual labour is worthy of the name: ‘Any work that didn’t involve bodily strength and use of the hands was loafing, little better than a conjuring trick.’ The image of the novelist as a disreputable

The Door by Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix. Harvill Secker, 262 pp., £15.99, October, 1 84343 193 9

Magdushka (she is named only once in the novel) has recently traded her one-bedroom flat for a larger apartment. Desperate to spend as much time as possible on her writing, she decides to hire a cleaner. A friend recommends Emerence, a vital old woman and local character, the caretaker of a nearby apartment block. The writer calls on Emerence and, in the first of a series of reversals and inversions, finds that it is she, and not the old caretaker, who is being interviewed. Can she provide references? Can she confirm that she and her husband are not drunkards or brawlers? Finally, Emerence accepts the job, but only on a trial basis. Magdushka and her husband will be put on probation, and if Emerence decides to accept the job for good, she will tell them what her wages are to be once she has gauged how slovenly they are. And so Emerence ‘enlists’ in Magdushka’s service. Since the old woman has existing commitments (she keeps house for other families and sweeps the district’s streets), her hours are irregular, but when she appears she works with heroic tenacity. She may show up at midnight and scrub floors until dawn. She lifts the heaviest furniture without complaint. But through all this she keeps her distance, and won’t even accept a cup of tea. Impervious to praise, indifferent to her employers, she appears to work from sheer compulsion. Magdushka becomes intrigued, preoccupied and finally obsessed by her zealous housekeeper. Who is this woman? What is her story? The novel is driven, in its opening stages, by Magdushka’s desire – which is partly a professional one – to understand her housekeeper, to know her as she might know one of her characters. This isn’t easy. Beneath her headscarf, Emerence is inscrutable: the buddha of Buda. She guards her privacy with remorseless vigilance. No one – not even her closest relative – is permitted to cross the threshold of her apartment; she receives all visitors in her porch. And yet, Emerence is not cut off from the community. Indeed, she is a neighbourhood shaman. She treats the district’s sick. She dispenses advice. All the gossip and news flows through her porch, which functions like a ‘telex centre’. It’s not a coincidence that she spends so much of the novel clearing snow from streets and pavements; Emerence keeps the pathways open, mediates community life. She is both visibly public and intensely private: everyone knows her, and nobody does. Stories about Emerence proliferate. Like Jay Gatsby, she is the focus of preposterous rumours. She is an American spy; she is a fence for stolen goods; she robbed and murdered local Jews under cover of the war. Magdushka may discount these outlandish tales, but she still can’t seem to reduce Emerence to normal human dimensions. When the narrator first encounters her, Emerence is boiling bedsheets in a massive cauldron,

her features reddened by the flames, a fairytale hag; and this storybook quality, this sense of belonging to myth or legend or folktale, constantly attaches to her. In everything she does, Emerence seems larger than life. She has the ‘strength of a mythological hero’. She has ‘dark powers’; she seems to vanish at will, ‘like a character in an epic poem’. She brings a ‘touch of magic’ to the simplest chore. She is a Valkyrie, a Medea, a Medusa. Or, if not a character from myth, she is a figure from the Bible. In her selfless dedication, Emerence is Martha. In her care of the sick she is ‘St Emerence of Csabadul’. Cradling a stray dog, she is an ‘absurd Madonna’. Venting her rage she is Jehovah. As the novel develops, this legendary Emerence slowly proves knowable. The mythic outline softens, and from being a rigid archetype – or a series of archetypes – she relaxes into personhood. She is novelised and humanised: in her attitude to the church, for example. Emerence never attends Sunday service and has always mocked the narrator’s piety. Magdushka strugglesto understand her attitude, and puts it downto a ‘Voltairean anti-clericalism’, but it turnsout to be something more interesting and per

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7 london review of books 15 december 2005