Being Here Read online

  ‘Marie Darrieussecq reads the testament of Modersohn-Becker—the letters, the diaries, and above all the paintings—with a burning intelligence and a fierce hold on what it meant and means to be a woman and an artist.’ J. M. Coetzee

  ‘Being Here is a luminous tale about the courage of the lone female artist.’ Joan London

  ‘I love the way Marie Darrieussecq writes about the world as if it were an extension of herself and her feelings.’ J.M.G. Le Clézio, Nobel Laureate for Literature, 2008

  ‘Her gifts are dazzling.’ Observer

  ‘Preoccupied with what is both strange yet familiar, this clever novel, All the Way, is both personal and universal—and without the slightest trace of sentimentality.’ Libération

  ‘From Los Angeles to Cameroon, via Paris, Marie Darrieussecq’s novel Men is constantly on the edge of the fictional and the documentary. Romantic and creative passions merge with political and ethical visions…The character of Solange is the embodiment of a desire to grasp everything, in the intensity of the moment—and the same spirit animates Marie Darrieussecq’s writing.’ Magazine Littéraire

  ‘The issue of otherness is crucial, as is that of the couple. Are the characters a couple, or are they just the sum of one another? This novel, Men, and its romance is a surprise from Marie Darrieussecq, but she proves herself to be, as ever, a socially aware writer.’ Paris Match

  ‘There are few writers who may have changed my perception of the world, but Darrieussecq is one of them.’ The Times

  ‘The internationally celebrated author who illuminates those parts of life other writers cannot or do not want to reach.’ Independent

  Marie Darrieussecq was born in Bayonne in 1969. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was translated into thirty-five languages. She has written nearly twenty books. In 2013 she was awarded both the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix. She writes for Libération and Charlie Hebdo and lives in Paris.

  Penny Hueston has translated two novels by Darrieussecq, All the Way and Men, and Little Jewel by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano.

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  ‘Being here is wondrous.’

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

  I

  She was here. On Earth and in her house.

  In her house, three rooms are open to the public. Red velvet ropes cordon off the areas inaccessible to visitors. On a stool, there is a reproduction of her last painting, a bouquet of sunflowers and hollyhocks.

  She didn’t just paint flowers.

  A locked door, painted grey, led upstairs, where I imagined there were ghosts. Once I left the house, there they were, Paula and Otto, the Modersohn-Beckers. Not ghosts but monsters, dressed in period costume, so kitsch, at the window of their house of the dead, above the street, above the heads of the living. A pair of wax mannequins, a two-headed grotesquerie at the window of that pretty yellow wooden house.

  Let us not forget the horror that accompanies the wonder; the horror of this story, if a life is a story: to die at thirty-one with her work still ahead, and an eighteen-day-old baby.

  And her grave is horrible. In Worpswede, a village pickled in tourism. Like Barbizon, the French artists’ colony, but in northern Germany. Her sculptor friend, Bernhard Hoetger, left his mark with this monument. A huge pedestal of granite and brick: a half-naked reclining woman, larger than life, a naked baby sitting on her belly. As if the baby had died, too. But she did not die: Mathilde Modersohn lived to be ninety-one. The monument has been damaged by time, by the Worpswede wind and snow.

  This is what Paula Modersohn-Becker wrote in her journal on 24 February 1902, five years before her death:

  I have often thought of my grave…It must not have a mound. Let it be a rectangular bed with white carnations planted around it. And around that there will be a modest little gravel path also bordered by carnations, and then a humble wooden trellis, to support the abundance of roses surrounding my grave. And there will be a little gate in the front of the fence through which people can come to visit me, and at the back a little bench where they can sit quietly. It will be in our Worpswede churchyard, by the hedge near the fields, in the old section, not at the far end. Perhaps at the head of my grave there should be two little juniper trees, and in the centre a black wooden tablet with just my name, no dates, no other words. That’s the way it should be…And I shall probably want to have a bowl where people can put fresh flowers for me.

  The people who go to see her leave flowers between the baby’s knees. There are climbing roses, yes, and shrubs. At the centre of the epitaph, sculpted into the granite, the word GOTT stands out in capital letters. A German-speaking friend recognises a verse from the Bible, Romans, 8:28: ‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.’ For someone who never mentioned God, except when she read Nietzsche.

  Was it odd for her to think ahead about her grave, at twenty-six? Otto lost his first young wife: did the second young wife feel a moment of anxiety wedding this widower? ‘I put a wreath on the grave of the woman he once called his love.’

  Paula’s ‘premonitions’ have stamped her as a romantic figure: Death and the Maiden. In her early years, when she describes the pictures she is planning, she is unsure about painting dances or funerals, dazzling white and muted red…‘And if only now love would blossom for me, before I depart; and if I can paint three good pictures, then I shall go gladly, with flowers in my hair.’

  Paula is eternally young.

  Only a dozen photos of her survive. Small, slender. Round cheeks. Freckles. A loose bun, a part down the middle. ‘Like Florentine gold,’ Rilke was to say.

  Her best friend, Clara Westhoff, remembers their meeting in September 1898:

  She was holding a copper kettle on her knees. She had just had it repaired for her move out of home. There she was, sitting on the model’s stool, watching me work. The kettle was the same colour as her beautiful thick hair…in contrast to her sparkling, luminous face, and the pretty curve and fine lines of her nose.

  She raised her head, an expression of pleasure lighting up her features, and from the depths of her dark, shining eyes she would look at you with intelligence and joy.

  One Sunday in August 1900, the two friends are together, it’s evening, Paula is trying to read but keeps raising her eyes from the page. The weather is too lovely, life is too wonderful, they must go dancing. But where? The two young girls, in white, short-sleeved, high-waisted, ankle-length dresses, wander through the deserted village. The sky is red above Worpswede. The hill with the church dominates the flat countryside. A brainwave: they climb up to the bell-tower, grab hold of the ropes and ring the bells, the big one and the little one.

  What a scandal. The schoolteacher comes running and flees as soon as he recognises them: the two young ladies, the two artists! The vicar, out of breath, hisses, ‘Sacrosanctum!’ A small crowd gathers in the church. The Brünjes, who own Paula’s studio, come up with an alibi: ‘Fräulein Westhoff and Fräulein Becker? Impossible! They were in Bremen.’ Martin Finke, the farmer, swears that he would have paid to be there. And the little hunchbacked woman peeling potatoes in the scullery is tickled pink when she hears tell of the escapade.

  And there’s a letter from Paula to her mother, on 13 August 1900. She must love her mother to write her such wonderful, cheerful letters. Paula includes a charcoal drawing: she’s the little blonde figure, hanging on to the enormous bell, her biceps taut and her buttocks sticking out; Clara is the big dark-haired girl, hands on her hips, laughing her head off. One of them will marry Otto Mo
dersohn, and one will marry Rainer Maria Rilke. The painter will die young, and the sculptress will die in her old age, even more forgotten.

  Clara and Paula met at the drawing classes run by the strict Fritz Mackensen, in Worpswede. They will be best friends through their studies, their love lives and their misunderstandings. There is no sounder basis for a relationship than misunderstanding. See them speeding home on a sled from their classes. See them later in Paris, preparing five bottles of punch and two cakes, one almond, the other strawberry, for a student party. See them canoeing on the Marne, nightingales and poplar trees. See them in Montmartre, laughing as they resist a marauding nun who wants to convert them. See them hurtling down the paths in Meudon on the way to visit Rodin. See them again in Worpswede: through the eyes of the two men who want them, the painter Modersohn and the poet Rilke.

  In the Becker family, everyone writes to each other a lot. So we have hundreds of letters from Paula, as well as her journals and her childhood scrapbook. Paula is the third of the Becker siblings. There are six of them; a seventh, a brother, died as a baby. Father, mother, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, all of them write as soon as they are away from each other; it is a family duty, a ritual, a proof of their love.

  At sixteen, after leaving for England to stay with her Aunt Marie so she could learn how to run a household, Paula returns home early. She has started to draw, more seriously than anyone expected. Her mother encourages her and even takes in a lodger to pay for Paula’s classes. Although her father doesn’t disapprove, he recommends a profession—teaching. In September 1895, Paula graduates with a diploma of education.

  But she does not begin work as a teacher straightaway. Her uncle left her a little nest egg, so she sets herself up in Worpswede and throws herself into Mackensen’s classes, which have an excellent reputation. She paints bodies, learns how to do faces, hands. She notices deformities caused by poverty, without reducing them to anything sentimental. She paints what she sees. And later she will also paint Parisian bodies, and her own body. She likes strong contrasts; she sometimes highlights in black. She will become expressionist, which will not particularly appeal to the refined landscape painters of Worpswede.

  And neither will it appeal to the local critics when she holds her first exhibition, in 1899 at the museum in Bremen, with Clara Westhoff (whose sculptures are better received) and another of Mackensen’s students, Marie Bock. A certain Arthur Fitger feels sick in front of the pictures. He would like to speak about the paintings using ‘the vocabulary of pure speech’, but can only come up with ‘impure speech’, which he would rather not write, ‘outraged’ as he is by this ‘most regrettable’ exhibition, especially compared with ‘the true art treasury of the German people’. Carl Vinnen, a well-known local artist, in turn attempts to defend the decision of the museum, which had at least ‘chivalrously opened its doors to these poor women of Worpswede’.

  That year our poor woman reads Ibsen’s plays and Marie Bashkirtseff’s diary. She dreams of living, like her, in Paris. She does life drawing and painting in the village. And is invited to artists’ soirées held by Otto Modersohn or Heinrich Vogeler. Vogeler sings ‘negro songs’ and plays guitar; there is dancing, and Paula knows that her new green velvet dress suits her perfectly and that certain people can’t keep their eyes off her—she writes it in her journal before going to sleep.

  I don’t know what to call it. I don’t know if I should say falling in love.

  Paula Becker is sliding towards Otto Modersohn.

  First she saw his paintings at an exhibition in Bremen in 1895. She liked—nothing more—their ‘veracity’. Then when she sees him for the first time:

  All I remember is something tall, in a brown suit, and with a reddish beard. There is something soft and sympathetic in his eyes. His landscapes made a big impression on me—a hot, brooding autumn sun, or a mysterious sweet evening light. I should like to get to know him, this Modersohn.

  It is not easy for her to make friends in Worpswede. There is of course Vogeler, a charming painter scarcely older than she is, but Fritz Overbeck, another painter, gives her the cold shoulder. ‘Modersohn, on the other hand, I found immensely appealing. He’s pleasant and comfortable to be around, and he has a kind of music in his nature, which I can accompany on my little violin. His paintings alone endear me to him. He’s a gentle dreamer.’ His opinion matters to her. She often speaks to her father about this man who is eleven years older than she is. ‘He is like a man and a child, has a pointed red beard and gentle sweet hands, and is seventeen centimetres taller than I am…He has a serious, almost melancholic nature combined with a great capacity for cheerfulness.’ He is the spitting image of her father. In photographs, too, the resemblance—forehead, nose and beard—is such that they seem to be copies of each other.

  It is only in a letter to her mother that Paula mentions the wife, Frau Modersohn, ‘a small woman with an intuition for things and people, and with good natural judgment and sensitivity’. And although, for the sake of propriety, the letters from Paula to Otto are addressed to Herr and Frau Modersohn, just as she is leaving for Paris, on the pretext of returning a book, she writes to him alone, expressing her very dear wish to see him again.

  Paula has decided to spend Uncle Arthur’s endowment on studies in Paris. Her father is worried. Her journal, 5 July 1900, Worpswede: ‘Father wrote to me today and told me that I should look around for a job as a governess. All afternoon I had been lying in the dry sand on the heath reading Knut Hamsun’s Pan.’

  Nineteen hundred. The world is young. Knut Hamsun writes about birds and summer loves, blades of grass and huge forests. The brilliant author of Hunger is not yet the Nazi who will present Goebbels with his Nobel Prize. And Nietzsche has not yet been hijacked by the villains. It is possible to believe in the reign of the god Pan, in Nature and in the present moment.

  Nineteen hundred. Everything happens in 1900. Paula writes to her brother Kurt that, after years of slumber and daydreaming, she has blossomed. This development might have shocked the family, she says, but good will come of it. They will be pleased. They must trust her.

  Bremen to Paris, seventeen hours in the train. Paula shares a women’s compartment with a Mademoiselle Claire, a cabaret artist whose colleague standing in the corridor, ‘a young man with negroid features’, does not dare enter the compartment because of Paula. But beneath his ‘stern German gaze’, they do not stop chatting and singing.

  Clichés help to describe a complicated world. The French are frivolous and ‘blasé’, dirty and witty. By contrast, the Germans are honest and serious, clean and slow. Paula has enrolled at the Académie Colarossi, where her female Parisian classmates describe the work of Rodin, that living god, as joli, when the word should be beau. ‘They simply have nothing more serious to say.’

  Camille Claudel was a student at the Académie Colarossi, along with Jeanne Hébuterne, Modigliani’s lover. Here the students are allowed to paint naked models.1 The female models pose completely naked, while the men wear underpants. ‘Unfortunately,’ writes Paula to her parents, ‘all the models here are “posers”. All of them have a half-dozen “positions” for which they gradually manage to find takers.’ Paula paints a swaggering man with a moustache, strapped into white briefs, arms crossed, chin in the air: even naked he looks Parisian.

  She also takes anatomy lessons at the École des Beaux-Arts, which in 1900 has just opened its doors to girls.2 A lot of foreign girls are enrolled: American, Spanish, English, German, Russian. There is no equivalent in their own countries. Despite the headaches she gets from the cadavers (provided by the School of Medicine), Paula finds these classes incredibly valuable. In a letter to her parents, she says she finally understands exactly what a knee is. Their acceptance of her departure for Paris reveals just how open-minded they were. In 1900 Kathleen Kennet, an English student, wrote with some irony: ‘If you said a young woman of twenty had left to study art in Paris it was the equivalent of saying that she was irredeemably l
ost.’

  Nevertheless, Paula finds it ‘harder for women’. They are expected to paint charming little paintings, while the men are allowed to ‘play the fool’. And Paris is so beautiful and so degenerate! Filth everywhere, and the stink of absinthe, and faces like onions. Her father begs her not to walk around the Grands Boulevards at night. ‘It’s not a pretty sight there.’

  Her room is on boulevard Raspail. The dimensions: a bed length wide by a bed and a half long. Floral wallpaper. A fireplace, a paraffin lamp. Her neighbour is Clara Westhoff, who has come to study with Rodin. First purchase: a mattress. Second purchase: a broom. Clean everything, polish everything. For thirty centimes a cleaning woman will come every Sunday. Paula fashions herself some furniture with offcuts of wood and cotton covers. Flowers in Paris are incredibly cheap, bouquets of daffodils and mimosa, eight roses for fifty centimes! She finds a cheese shop where she can eat for one franc, but it is not a hearty meal. She gets thin. A bottle of red wine for sixty centimes is good for some iron. Her parents also send her some lozenges.

  The Louvre. Holbein. Titian. Botticelli’s huge fresco: the five young girls in flowing dresses banish her ‘heavy heart’. And Fra Angelico. Being with him in the company of saints. And outside, seeing the Seine, in the blue or golden mist. The acrobats on the embankments. The second-hand booksellers with their stalls wide open. Paintings by Corot and Millet at the art dealers. On the right bank, at the dealer Vollard, she wants to show Clara something: she flips confidently through the piles of canvases against the walls. Here, she says, a completely new vision: Cézanne.

  Paula walks everywhere. The omnibuses are enormous and drawn by a troika of horses. Other harnessing was in tandem, horses in single file—it’s so picturesque that she makes sketches of them. But the Parisians themselves provide the most flamboyant spectacle. ‘So many painters here in Paris look the way people used to think artists were supposed to look. Long hair, brown velvet suits, or wearing strange togas on the street, with enormous fluttering bow ties…Most of the female students do incredible things with their hair.’ And the Bal Bullier ballroom: students mixing with seamstresses and laundrywomen, large hats, silk dresses, open-necked blouses, and even bloomers!