Twentieth Interview, Jean Charlot, November 28, 1970, John Pierre Charlot

JPC:

Could you tell me when you started reading Claudel’s plays as opposed to his poems?

JC:

I think the only thing I had read when I met him was L’Annonce faite à Marie. I think it’s the only thing.  There was some intriguing news in the papers that I used to see about L’Échange, I think, L’Ôtage,1 and so on.  They were played at the Théatre du Vieux Colombier, if I remember, and I was interested in the Théatre du Vieux Colombier as being, I would say, progressive, we could say.  I had gone there and seen plays, but not by Claudel.  And it was a small stage, and they didn’t have too much money, and they did things a little bit on a shoestring.  And up to then I had been accustomed to more éclat in the presentation of plays with the Comédie-Française and so on, classics, and it was a revelation for me to have those plays that depended entirely on the actors and the acting rather than the accessories.  But I have never seen L’Annonce faite à Marie on the stage.  I just read it.

JPC:

I’d like to talk a little bit—some of the stories I remember you told me about him.  What did he say about Saint-John Perse?2

JC:

Well, he said nothing about Saint-John Perse.  I said something, and it was rather silly, but for some reason he didn’t mind it.  I said that I had read something by this guy, I didn’t even know the name, I think it was Périple,3 a very long poem, and that it was a blend of Claudel and Gustave Flaubert.  And for some reason Claudel thought that was amusing.  I suppose nobody had been naïve enough to say such things.

JPC:

What was the story about you and the fish, the sturgeon, at the restaurant?

JC:

Well, I don’t think we have to go into the smallest things, but as I went with Claudel around, and I was obviously a junior, they had to invent some sort of reason for me to be seen with him, like I was a sort of a shadow.  Well, I couldn’t be a bodyguard because I wasn’t strong enough for that or sportive enough for that.  So first they would think I was an interpreter, then they thought I was a sort—I wouldn’t say social advisor—but somebody who could get him out of social jams, if need be.  And when we went to the restaurant that was Voisin, and we were with Agnes Meyer, the same woman, the wife of Eugene Meyer, who wrote since a book, which I haven’t read, called A Friendship, a relationship to Claudel when he was in the United States.  So there was Agnes Meyer, Claudel, myself, and there was always a swarm of people, not only waiters, but butlers, maîtres de, major-domos, and whatnot, around him when he went somewhere to give him good service.  So the most important among those fellows, I suppose perhaps headwaiter then—Claudel just looked at the menu, which was, of course, so large that nobody could read it, and said, “Well, what is there special today?” And the headwaiter said “We recommend the coulibiac.”4  So Claudel said, “What’s a coulibiac?” And I didn’t think twice; I should have kept my mouth shut.  But my father from time to time asked for some Russian things or had people give him some Russian foods, and one of the things received from time to time, I suppose from Russian friends or that we even had taught our French cook to do, was coulibiac .  A coulibiac is a very nice, you could say fish pie, with rice and sturgeon.  The orthodox coulibiac is sturgeon and rice in a pie crust.  So I said immediately, because it was familiar to me, I said, “Well, it is a sturgeon pie.”  And the headwaiter turned green.  He really was very unhappy, and he said, “Oh, you must excuse us, but today we did not have sturgeon.  We had only salmon.”  And so I had an aura of knowing, at least with the headwaiter.  And that’s the story of the coulibiac.

JPC:

You know, some of these little stories are very interesting.  Didn’t he tell you once that before his conversion, everything was very clear to him and then after his conversion everything got confused again?

JC:

No, sir.  In fact, I don’t think we ever spoke of his conversion.  He told me once something about before his conversion, which made an image—he liked to make images.  In that sense he really had a visual sense, which so many word men do not have.  And he said that at that certain time and as he was, he was living with that woman, I don’t remember the details.  He said, “If I had died then, I would have gone plumb to hell!”  And saying it, he meant it, and it was rather an impressive thing.

JPC:

There were some people, apparently a lot of his, you know, literary critics have pointed out that his religion isn’t really orthodox Catholicism at all or isn’t the normal kind.  Or they at least have tried to show that.  Did you have that impression or not, that he had some sort of odd, unorthodox side?

JC:

Well, I really am not a theologian, Johnny, and I wouldn’t know from that point of view, but it was obvious that he had taken a decision which was a rule of thumb, so to speak, by which I wouldn’t say that he confused the visible Church with the invisible Church, but that by obeying all the dictates and all the modalities of the Church on earth, he would thus enter the Church in Heaven.  He had a special reverence for the forms, the liturgical visibility, so to speak, of the Church, and that is in his books, in his plays, and so on.  That is, the Pope is the Pope, he’s the Head of the Church, and if you treat him as well, God, let’s say, then it’s just as good, that is, if it’s good for you.  And the only thing we can grasp, that we can put our hands on, is the present Church on earth with all its strange, shall we say, formulas, and costumes, and so on; that is the thing that we have to cling to to get to the Church in Heaven.  It may be irritating, perhaps, for people who would be, shall we say, of a mystical temperament.  Claudel was not.  He had to hang on something physical, something material.  And that way, of course, I am sure, he made his salvation and became a deeply religious man.  We spoke from time to time of things like meditation.  I think we both attempted and failed to be mystical in that sense.  And he was telling me once that he had attempted the Jesuit discipline, that he had read the exercises of Loyola.  Loyola had a whole series of exercises.  I said, “You know, we can’t do that ourselves because we are artists.  Loyola says that first you have to imagine that you are in Bethlehem, that you are in the crèche, and then you have to imagine yourself the different details of the crèche and so on before you start your meditation.”  He said, “Well, I’m so interested being in the crèche, I don’t go further.”

JPC:

What were his relations with Maritain?  Did they ever meet with you?  Were you ever all together in America?

JC:

Well, we were at the same time in America, but we certainly were not all together in America.  There was a slight reluctance on the part of Maritain to meet Claudel, and Claudel was not searching for Maritain.  Of course, Maritain came in as an exile.  He had, in fact, left not only what money he may have had, but all his manuscripts in France, and he started from scratch in New York, truly as a refugee with the—his two women, his wife and her sister.  And for some reason I found myself in charge of finding an apartment and so on, and we would go to places, and of course, when we asked what the rent was, he couldn’t afford it, so we went to smaller places and so on.  And we found one that was pretty good.  It was what they call those Pullman apartments.  That is, it wasn’t pleasant; it was possible.  He refused to take it because it wasn’t close enough to a church, and he said it was indispensable for Raïssa to go every morning to Mass, and it would be too long a walk.  Eventually he found something; I think eventually he got helped, some sort of help which allowed him to have a place with a little more windows than first the one that he could have afforded.  But he was poor, he was exiled, and of course, Claudel was on top of the world.  If there had been the least affinity between them, shall we say as writers, they would, of course, have looked for each other and met each other.  But actually there was a curious reluctance somehow.  I know Maritain, when he spoke of Claudel, never spoke of him, well, with warm friendship, and I don’t think that Claudel ever once mentioned Maritain.

JPC:

I got the impression from Raïssa’s book that they sort of didn’t resent, but they might have been happier had Claudel not been converted before they were.  I had the impression they felt the Roman Catholic revival started a little bit with them, and he, Claudel, was outside of it.

JC:

Well, that’s about it.  I mean there was a certain coolness.  The only tie between the two is that I showed Maritain some of the drawings for the Apocalypse, and what interested him most is that he saw in them a strain of Léon Bloy.  Of course, Maritain was very close in memory to Léon Bloy and respected and revered him as his spiritual father, so to speak.  And I was interested in his own analysis of my drawing.  He said, “Maybe you think it’s Claudel, but I think myself it’s a blend of Claudel and Léon Bloy.”  And I hadn’t told him, of course, that I had read and admired Léon Bloy.  But I think he was right.

JPC:

Claudel was about the only one of the French people in the States who appreciated your work.  Besides to good taste, to what do you attribute that in him?  Was he just not so much in the world of Parisian art that he succumbed to it?

JC:

Well, I can’t remember any French people I knew in New York, really, or any French people that would look, even, at my pictures.  There was nothing there.  I don’t know why.  When I was in Mexico, however, there was a nice little group of people with the French Consul there, and I tried to warm them up to our art and to Mexican art.  And there was especially the Secretary to the Consul.  It wasn’t, of course, a very high thing; even being Mexican Consul wasn’t very high in diplomacy.  But that man was very cultured, very learned, and he was a great admirer of Proust.  At that time not so many people—around nineteen, the early twenties—would be admirers of Proust, but he was.  And I took him, for example, to see the frescoes that Orozco had just completed or was just completing on the third floor of the Preparatoria patio.  I was real excited by those things.  They remain for me the best of Orozco.  And I took that Frenchman with me and showed him those things, and he looked at them, and I knew that he knew his, not only literature, but art, at least from a Frenchman’s point of view.  And then afterwards, when we left, he said, “Well, it’s striking, of course, but I wonder what they would have said about it in Paris?”  I think if I had known Frenchmen in New York, I think it would have been the same thing: the “What would they say in Paris?”  Of course, the Paris of that time was, I think, very exciting art that was going on, that was taking shape, and it is understandable that somebody would limit themselves to that striking movement of modern art in Paris, but that made them blind to what was going on outside Paris.  I think even now there is a great misunderstanding of Mexican art because people think of it as propaganda art, and so nobody as yet, even now, has written about the art quality of Mexican art; it’s always the propaganda qualities.  Now even though my art was perhaps less obviously propaganda than the one of Rivera or the one of Orozco, there was nevertheless in it a quota of, well, admiration, acceptance, and so on, of problems—the poor, the Indian, and so on—that would be repulsive to a Frenchman who would have been an art critic.  I had a few of those people, now that I think of it, not that they lived in New York, but that came and passed through New York, and I would invite them to my studio, and it was very rare when they were even interested in what I was doing.  I think perhaps the closest to somebody interested would have been Father Couturier.  Father Couturier, well, for a while nearly lived with us.  And we were the place where he would repair for meals when he didn’t have any meal of his own and so on at the beginning of his stay in New York.  And he was nice enough, and he posed for three or four portraits by myself.  But as soon as he was free of saying that he liked my pictures, and he had a way of saying it which was noncommittal, I mean saying, for example, “C’est bien chiffonné,” when he saw the first portrait I made of him, which I couldn’t translate, but it can be taken that it is well knitted, something like that.  Then he would immediately go back to his loves, and his loves were Braque and Picasso and Picasso and Braque.  So there was a gulf that could be bridged by friendship, but not really the appreciation of my art.

JPC:

Why was Claudel different from the others?

JC:

Well, he didn’t understand art for art.  That is, in his own work, he would have been most unhappy if people had admired it for any literary qualities.  Even in his own poetry, if people had admired it as poems, he would have been most unhappy.  The worst expression I have seen on his face was when somebody would go to him—and that happened so often—and said, “Oh, M. Claudel, you are a poet!”  And he would look shattered, like somebody was telling him he had a sickness of a sort, because his poems were simply to express things that he considered important, and those things of importance had nothing to do with art for art.  And I think that he found in my pictures, in my paintings, something similar.  I tried at times to do pictures that we could call art for art.  I tried to do, let’s say, flower pieces, and I’ve never been able to do something that I couldn’t infuse with some sort of humanism, something important from the point of view of man and even the problems of man.  I think Claudel naturally entered into that point of view, and we could say that he liked my paintings because in a way I was not painting because I was a painter, but because I had things to say that I thought of importance.

JPC:

It was Claudel who arranged the printing of that book in the series Les Peintres Modernes.

JC:

Well, that is part of a collection, and the collection had already twenty-five or thirty numbers, that is, small monographs on a painter.  When mine was introduced, yes, it was Claudel.  He used or reused the piece that he had written for my show at the John Becker Gallery, and in a way made a little bit of a surprise of it. Obviously he gave it to the publishers and had it published, and his son Pierre brought to me the finished book.  And I was pleased, of course, to find suddenly I had a monograph published in Paris.  It was entirely Claudel’s doing and it made a very nice surprise, I must say.

JPC:

Let’s speak about the Apocalypse drawings.  Could you tell me your mode of working together about those drawings?  How did it all come about?

JC:

Well, we started with that little piece for The Forum.5  I think that was the first part of the text of the Columbus that was published, and that was about the Mexican gods, and that was successful, so we graduated, so to speak, from that to the Columbus, the illustrations of the Columbus.  And those, of course, were published by Yale.  It was a question of complete collaboration; that is, Claudel would tell me, of course, in words exactly what he was thinking, what he would want.  Sometimes he would sketch.  I showed you a few of the sketches he made to make his words more visual.  And I would send him sketches.  He would reject some of them.  There is a number of drawings that I had made that were rejected by him.  And after we published the Columbus, we went to that enormous manuscript; at the time it certainly was an enormous affair.  It was called “À travers les vitraux de l’Apocalypse,” “Through the Stained Glass of the Apocalypse.”  And it may be the same text that was published later on, À travers l’Apocalypse,6 but it seems to me that the published text is much, much smaller than the one I had in hand.  So we decided to do that thing, which would have been perhaps four or five volumes, and the drawings that I made were done so they could be cut in wood.  At the time we had the idea that the drawings could be sent to Japan, and they could be cut in bois de fil, in wood, by some Japanese craftsman.  Well, that’s about it.  I made the drawings then in ink, so they could be cut in wood, and at the time, as a precaution, because I thought perhaps there would be some problems of layout and so on, I traced the drawings on tracing paper, just a line, a pencil line.7  I did that for the seventeen books, seventeen chapters, if you want, with the exception of the two first ones.  That idea of tracing came to me only later, so I don’t have here any tracing of the drawings that I did for the two first chapters.  There may have been thirty, thirty-five drawings there of which I have lost track.  And that’s it.  The drawings are in the Claudel Foundation, I suppose.  They were given to Paul, and Paul must have given them to Pierre.

Some sort of text of the Apocalypse has been published without illustrations, and I don’t know if we’ll ever put together text and illustrations.  I think that the people who revere Claudel and write about Claudel and fill up the Claudel Bulletins with anecdotes miss a point there because the drawings are not really mine.  I’m sort of a mouthpiece or handpiece for Claudel, who was a man that was very visual.  He liked to translate things in visions, shall we say.  And people who know my work, who can compare that series on the Apocalypse with my own work know very well that I was working with him and that there is more Claudel than Charlot in those drawings.  So it would be worth a study of the drawings as an original, shall we say unpublished work by Claudel, and I think there would be very rich rewards.

JPC:

But how did it go?  Did he say, “I want a big figure here, and I want a small figure here.”  Did he lay out the drawings in some detail?

JC:

Yes, he did.  He was very interested in spattering, for example, Latin and Greek and whatnot in his things, and you recognize in the drawings some numbers and some Greek letters and whatnot, and all those things are not in my own bagage, so to speak.  It was Claudel’s.  And there were visions—rather difficult—when you put it into words.  For example, I had to put, let us say, the Crucifixion inside an Omega.  The Omega was actually a circular church, and it opened up, and the faithful entered through the door of the church and so on.  Those things are very lovely as word visions.  They become mighty difficult when you have to make actual drawings of them.  At the time, though, I was passing much of my time, my mornings, when I could, at the print department of the Metropolitan Museum.  William Ivins was the curator there, and I had a very close friendship with him, really.  I loved him dearly, and he opened the collections for me.  He would let me handle the prints and so on.  And somehow those beautiful, big books, incunabula, especially German of the end of the 1400s, were sort of a revelation to me of the way you can illustrate a book as if the page was an architecture.  And of course, the text in those old types, in black types, go so much as one with the woodcut.  And so I dreamed of something like that for the Apocalypse, and I put for you there on your table a series of woodcuts, Ars Memorandi, I think, which is of that period and which is extraordinary in its nearly surrealistic result.  The Ars Memorandi was just for people who couldn’t read, and by looking at the picture, they could remember the text of the Gospel.  That’s all it is.  So it is hieroglyphs or picture writing, but when you put it all together, you get very strange results.  And we thought, Claudel and I, that those illustrations for the Apocalypse could be something like that.  And the result is, well, again, I would say baroque or surrealistic, whatever you want.  That was exactly the genre that he wanted to give to the illustrations, and my own role was that of a moderator, I would say, and I arranged the drawings so that they would still have a sort of physical sanity, a sort of architectural quality to fit on the page of the future book.

JPC:

You once said that you provided the geometry and he provided the baroque.

JC:

Well, that’s about the same thing that I have been saying now.  It was interesting because it forced both of us a little bit outside of our limitations,  And I was forced into more, shall we say lyricism than I would have on my own, and Claudel perhaps was forced into more solidity of plastic, of art than he would have otherwise.

The people that he worked with before, José Maria Sert,8 for example, which had been one of his best friends among the artists, were a little doubtful as artists though they did grand things.  Sert could decorate cathedrals and so on.  He did, in fact, the Rockefeller Center when Rivera’s pictures were destroyed there; the frescoes were destroyed at Rockefeller Center.  José Maria Sert was chosen to decorate the Center, and he did it with that enormous dash of his, which is absolutely the opposite, at the opposite pole from Rivera.  I liked Sert.  He was a grand conversationalist.  He was a little bit of a cynic, and he would tell me how he had learned his craft of painting with a man who was a faker.  He said it was the greatest faker that ever was, that he could fake any picture by any Old Master, and that there was only one thing that he couldn’t fake, by his own admission, that was the whites of Titian.  And he said, “I’m proud of my master.  His pictures are in all the great museums of the world.”  And Sert admitted that he himself was a little bit of a faker too, that he was putting together those Old Masters and getting those magnificent-looking pictures.  Though he was a very agreeable man, I think that his art has a little bit of that quality of fakery.  And Claudel perhaps was not refined enough at the time with his eyes to make the difference in Sert between the fake and the genuine, or perhaps simply he was such a friend that he didn’t want to see it.  But I was there in a circle that was dubious, I would say, from the point of view of the plastic arts.  And I think that the Apocalypse, however baroque, and so on, however Claudel it is, I still manage in it some good help as far as art goes.


↑ 1

Paul Claudel, L’Annonce faite à Marie (1912); L’Échange (1899); L’Ôtage (1911).

↑ 2

Saint-John Perse (1887–1975) was a poet associated with Claudel and other writers connected to the Nouvelle Revue Française group in the 1920s.

↑ 3

Unidentified.  Possibly, Saint-Jean Perse, Pluies (1943).

↑ 4

Kulebiaka or koulibiaka.  Charlot is using the French word.

↑ 5

Paul Claudel, “The Gods Churn the Sea,” The Forum 82 (August 1929): 95 ff.

↑ 6

Paul Claudel, Au milieu des vitraux de l’Apocalypse (1966).

↑ 7

Bound in two volumes and titled  “Claudel–Apocalypse, Charlot Sketches, 1932,” these drawings are in the JCC.

↑ 8

Catalan-born José Maria Sert’s (1874–1945) murals at the Rockefeller Center include American Progress, installed in 1937 behind the information desk, and Time, painted on the lobby’s ceiling.  Diego Rivera’s controversial mural in the Center’s lobby, Man at the Crossroads, painted in 1932–1933, was ordered destroyed by the Rockefellers in 1934.