Excerpts

There are many tales, mostly untrue, about the friendship between the artists Chaim Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani. My favorite involves a boat race. This was in 1917, when you could stand in the streets of Paris and feel the muffled percussion from the guns on the Western Front. German zeppelins were often seen overhead. The black-market price of a pack of Caporals or a couple of kilos of coal was extortionate; a pot-au-feu cost fifteen sous. At night the streetlamps were dimmed, the avenues empty, the shop windows X'd over with bomb tape. The cafés were closed before curfew and the galleries shuttered. What remittances the impoverished artists may have received from abroad were no longer crossing the border. They ate, when they ate, thin gruel at fly-by-night canteens. In the face of such general dreariness, the irrepressible Tuscan Modigliani, convinced that he knew just the thing to lift the spirits of the bohemian quarter, proposed a regatta. The artists would construct their own vessels from scrounged materials, then race them in the Seine between the pont Louis-Philippe and the viaduc d'Austerlitz. The winner would receive the prize--a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild filched from the cellar of the Café du Dôme--from the hands of the notorious Kiki, Queen of Montparnasse. I can imagine the scene: painters and sculptors waiting to compete in their jerry-built boats on an afternoon the poet Max Jacob has declared the most glorious in the history of the world. The sunlight is unfiltered nectar; the soft-blowing April wind wears velvet gloves. The Fauves Vlaminck and Derain, however, are observing with disapproval the reflections of the Beaux Arts facades on the surface of the river: their prismatic shimmering is too much like an Impressionist palette. Moïse Kisling and Ossip Zadkine, both in uniform, are there on leave from the Front. Apollinaire is present as well, invalided with the injury to his outsized head that, along with the Spanish flu, will take his life on Armistice Day. Cyclists have abandoned their velós and booksellers closed their stalls along the quai des Célestins to watch the proceedings. Lovers on the banks disentwine and onlookers crowd the parapets of the pont Marie. The art dealer Zborowski, wishful as ever, is on the promenade collecting wagers and distributing receipts: the smart money is on Brancusi's hand-carved scull The Flying Romanian. Picasso's contribution is The Neversink , a gaily painted Cubist contraption rocking dangerously in its berth, already on the verge of disproving its name. By contrast, the bark of Fernand Léger, on whose person you can still catch a whiff of the gas from Verdun, appears to be relatively seaworthy. So does Diego Rivera's rubber dinghy (dubbed La Cacafuego ), despite the heavy freight of its passenger. Tsuguharu Foujita's Vixen , a flat-bottomed outrigger powered by a Singer sewing machine, rides the current with a tactical finesse. Maurice Utrillo has borrowed a porous coracle from a child. It founders directly upon launching so that the melancholy painter has to be fished out of the river with a grappling hook. A languid Raoul Dufy has entered a scow with a crenellated tower that will be truncated by the first bridge it passes under. Max Jacob has tarted up his punt to look like an argosy. There's the wallowing Raft of the Medusa haphazardly piloted by the potted Russians Kikoïne and Krémègne. Modigliani himself is seated imperially in an enamel bathtub, his red cravat floating behind him in the breeze, the tub harnessed to a troika of canvasback ducks. Utrillo's mama, Suzanne Valadon--ex-acrobat and former mistress of, among others, Toulouse-Lautrec--is wearing a hat like a hanging garden. She puts twin pinkies to the corners of her lips and lets loose the shrill whistle that is the signal for the race to begin. Predictably, Brancusi's scull shoots out ahead of the others, though for a time Foujita's Vixen keeps pace with it. The Russians and Rivera ply their oars for all they're worth, but it's clear from the outset they're no match for the front-runners. The sculptor Lipchitz relaxes in the stern of a barnacled fishing dory, while his wife shows herself remarkably adept at trimming the sail. But unfortunately, the wind offers little in the way of propulsion. The pug-faced writer Blaise Cendrars makes some headway in the driver's seat of a Fiat runabout mounted on twin pontoons, but his single arm--the other was blown off during the attack at Champagne--restricts him to rowing in circles. Meanwhile, having been thus far neck and neck with The Flying Romanian , Foujita begins to fall behind, and so decides to ram Brancusi amidships with the prow of his boat. It's at that point that Modigliani, making wonderfully steady progress in his duck-drawn tub, takes the lead. Cheers go up from the embankment as the handsome Italian, arms folded and smiling serenely, cruises upriver past the tip of the île Saint-Louis. But Modi, as his friends call him, has a secret advantage. He's had a vision, as when has he not? Between his consumption of absinthe, opium, and hashish, his days are a series of hallucinations only occasionally tainted by reality. This particular pipe dream involved a Viking longboat towed by swans, outdistancing in competition the inferior vessels of all the other artists-turned-mariners-for-a-day. In the end it had been easier to corral ducks than swans, and a smut-blighted bathtub was more readily available than the longboat. Then he confided in his young friend, the Litvak painter Soutine, his plan for ensuring his victory: To assist the ducks in propelling his vessel, a length of rope attached to the tub would be fastened at the other end to a deep-sea diver, who would haul it faithfully forward from the bottom of the Seine. The always anxious Soutine was not unaccustomed to the Italyaner's wild fancies, but this one took the knish. He'd yet to finish shaking his head over the absurdity of the scheme when Modi informed him that he would have the honor of being that diver harnessed to the tub. "I can't swim!" was his despairing response. It wasn't the first time he'd been inveigled by his friend into playing the part of his accomplice in some compromising circumstance. There was the night he'd accompanied Amedeo to a building site to steal blocks of limestone for his massive sculptures, the morning Modi had conscripted him into acting as his second in a farcical duel. And so on. Why, when Chaim wanted only to be left alone to paint his bruised fruit and dead animals, did he continue to allow the crazy Tuscan to entice him away from his easel? The answer was one he could not even admit to himself: that he adored his only friend this side of idolatry; and adoration, outside of art, was a thing that didn't come naturally to Chaim Soutine. So, with grave misgivings, he went along with Modi to meet his acquaintance--Modi had many acquaintances--in his cobbled-together rescue cabin near the pont Mirabeau. This was Gaston Babineaux, salvage diver and unlikely art lover, who brought up suicides and murder victims from the river for the prefecture of police. The grizzly old water dog agreed to the loan of his scaphandre de plongeur , the ponderous rubber suit with its copper helmet and weighted boots, in exchange for an original Modigliani. He even volunteered to keep abreast of the diver's progress, following him along the embankment with the portable respirator. Then, seeing how Modi's companion had begun to tremble, he assured him there was nothing to worry about, except maybe a phenomenon known as "the squeeze." "That's when your air hose is punctured and the negative pressure sucks your flesh and soft tissues up into the helmet. There was this diver I knew got so much of himself sucked into his helmet they buried the helmet instead of a coffin." Seeing how Chaim had turned the green of moldy cheese, old Babineaux let go a guffaw that infected Modi as well. "Chaim," he said, trying to control his laughter, "think of a knight donning his armor to go into battle." Thus did Chaim Soutine, late of the shtetl of Smilovitchi in the Russian Pale of Settlement, find himself toiling along the murky bed of the River Seine. Many obstacles litter his path: wine bottles, suitcases, skeletal umbrellas, sculpted faces fallen from a bridge pier, artillery shells from previous centuries, a wheelchair--they come only briefly into focus in the turbid water, then fade away. The breathing gas pumped into his helmet from the surface supply tastes of disinfectant and smells like burnt hair. It's delivered through a valve operated by gnashing his teeth, which releases the flow of the oxygen-helium mixture until his aching jaw has to let go. Then he panics a breathless few moments until he's able to bite down again. The diving costume to which he's confined weighs eighty-six kilos; the heavy boots kick up clouds of silt as he forges doggedly forward. The rope round his waist, looped at its other end through a hole in Modi's tub, further impedes his advance. The lead counterweight at his chest is shaped like a heart. How, wonders Chaim in his discomfiture, did I let the meshugah Italian talk me into this? Still, when not oppressed to near delirium by his immersion in this alien element, he experiences an occasional buoyancy that contradicts the fear. After all, Chaim is no stranger to claustrophobic confinement. Hadn't he spent days penned in a chicken coop or locked in a dank coal cellar back in Smilovitchi? His punishment for having broken the Second Commandment by making pictures. The old leather-faced plongeur had called the air hose "your umbilical," and I like to think that, underwater, the painter might have entertained some unplumbed memory of being an infant again, suspended in amniotic impregnability. He might feel this despite the fierce dissent of his better instincts. Maybe he even remembers a tale he'd heard from his credulous mother about the Angel of Forgetfulness. He hates these bubbeh maysehs , these grandmother's tales, by which the shtetl folk increase the already overcrowded population of their rural ghetto with meddling demons and angels. In this fable the angel that watches over the child in the womb provides a light by which it can see from one end of the world to the other. The prospect includes the entirety of its life to come. But as soon as it's born the apprehensive angel tweaks the child under the nose so that it forgets everything. What's the point? wonders Chaim. But suppose that in the scaphandre the artist, like the child in the womb, has available to him the whole of his past and future. His life unfolds before the glass of his viewport, flickering amid a school of minnows that are swallowed up in turn by a big fish with a mouth like a bullhorn. Perhaps it's a function of the pressure on his brain of the tons of water above him and the artificial air in his helmet. Call it a species of rapture of the deep. But there it is now, the past--thinks Chaim, it should laugh with the lizards! What is there in the years that trailed behind him but hunger and ill use? And as for the future, he's had dire enough intimations of it while studying the subjects for his still lifes. "Chaim," Amedeo once asked him, indicating the gutted hare hanging from a hook in his studio, "what do you see in its entrails?" "What do you mean?" he replied. "Can you read them like an oracle?" Chaim harrumphed. "I see in them nothing but blood and kishkes," he lied, because he sometimes perceived in them more than he wished to see. He wishes the past had begun no earlier than an afternoon four years ago when he departed the third-class car at the Gare de l'Est. His first encounter with the pandemonium of the Parisian streets had unnerved him and caused him to duck back into the station, though there was no comfort in its milling crowd. Seeking sanctuary, he ignored the address in his pocket and accosted passersby with the single French phrase he'd learned, "Où est le Louvre?" Their answers were incomprehensible. But following some homing instinct, he schlepped his rope-strung suitcase through passages and arcades; he stumbled past mannequins in emporium windows, along an avenue of ivory-white houses with wrought-iron balconies that might have lined a boulevard in paradise--and there it was. Understand, Soutine had never before been face-to-face with a masterpiece. He'd only seen cheap reproductions and faded plates in the books of the small academy library in Vilna. Now, in those baroque, quarter-mile-long corridors, he came upon, unannounced, Titian's Entombment and El Greco's writhing, attenuated Christ on the Cross ; he approached without fanfare Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath and--God help him!--the Dutchman's magisterial Slaughtered Ox . He viewed Corot's Lady in Blue , the cascading folds of whose gown made him forget even to look for the Mona Lisa ; and a portrait in oil by Jean Fouquet of Charles VII, whose unhappy eyes penetrated his vitals like a cobbler's awl. He felt he might be close to a seizure and hugged the walls, frightened of the uniformed guards staring suspiciously at the threadbare Jew. He wanted to hide in the privy until the museum closed, then haunt the galleries by himself all night long, or for eternity. It was only by virtue of some cosmic error, Chaim decided, that the likes of him was allowed to enter such a place. Shaken to his toes from a surfeit of bliss, his ulcer flared, his left eyelid fluttered like an insect's wing. He had upon him only the meager pin money donated by a sympathetic doctor in Vilna. Nevertheless, for the first time in his life he hailed a motor-cab and gave the driver the scrap of paper with the scrawled destination: 2 passage de Dantzig, Montparnasse. This was the address of la Ruche, the Beehive, the octagonal artists' phalanstery fabricated out of a disassembled pavilion from the 1900 Universal Exposition. The same world's fair for which the Eiffel Tower had been built. The eccentric structure, whose cupola towered above the surrounding rooftops, had been financed by the beneficent sculptor Alfred Boucher, who lived with his pet donkey in an outbuilding on the overgrown grounds. The Beehive itself housed a disorderly warren of studios thronged with a ragtag assortment of gifted immigrants who had swapped the poverty of inhospitable nations for the more romantic poverty of the City of Light. No one there was especially happy to see Soutine. His reputation for being a temperamental nudzhe had preceded him among the Russians, some of whom had been his fellow students in Lithuania. They informed him that the swarming tenement was full up. The good-natured sculptor Miestchaninoff, however, agreed for some imaginary fee to share his studio, at least until the yokel from Smilovitchi was on his feet. A decade would pass before that was the case. Fanatically private despite their close quarters, Chaim hung a burlap curtain over his designated corner of the wedge-shaped studio. It was a blind corner unilluminated by the tall windows that gave onto the roof of the Vaugirard slaughterhouse, whose stench pervaded the apartments night and day. (Its butchers, with an inherent disdain for artists, would raid the Beehive's garden at night, lopping off the heads of sculptures with brickbats.) He painted in his long johns to preserve his only suit of clothes, itself already much the worse for wear. As always he worked in fits and starts, attacking the canvas during the fits like a berserker. In Vilna his teachers had tried to wean him from his unschooled early efforts. They'd humbled him with the examples of the Old Masters, stunned him into an apoplexy with images from Dürer and della Francesca. They hampered him with the rules of symmetry and linear perspective. Housebroken, he'd settled for attempting sober nature mortes in the manner of the Dutch, or two-dimensional, tempura portraits like those preserved on the walls of Byzantium. Still tentative during those first months in Paris, he painted in muted pigments: burnt sienna, yellow ocher, Van Dyke brown, and on audacious days a tincture of Prussian blue. But that was before he met Modigliani. Excerpted from The Village Idiot by Steve Stern All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.