Justified by
genius
Jane Gardam
MATISSE'S WAR by Peter Everett Cape, £15.99, pp. 332
Ican never get straight whether Picasso said, 'There is only Matisse,' or 'There is only one Matisse.' Peter Everett has 'one'. And one according to this novel would seem to be quite enough.
This is an account of a swarm of killer ants that surged across Parnassus between 1939 and 1945, passing over the feet of the aging, bewildered gods. Bonnard is living quietly with his wife, 'surrounded by his radiant paintings'. Picasso is a sort of dark bull blundering about in a cave — 'I am a piece of shit on the Nazis' heel' impotent to do more. The painter of `Guer- nica', rescuer of paintings from the Prado during the Spanish Civil War, he is also the man who let Spanish refugees die from lack of transport to France when on the same road.
And there is Matisse in his palatial Paris apartment, 'Art personified', 'Le monstre sacre' at the height of his glory, attended by the Russian exile Lydia Delectorskaya who is said `to have no sense of herself as sepa- rate from him'. As the jack-boots march in and the swastika is hung (crooked) on the Arc de Triomphe and the Jews begin to melt from the streets into the cattle-trucks, Matisse continues his ceaseless, dreaming monologues about the nature of art. He is apparently dying from cancer of the stom- ach (he lived until 1954 and died from a heart attack) but is 'ripe and serene'. The novel asks, does genius permit the disregard of evil? Is it possible, as Picasso asks in a letter, `to go on trying to make art in wartime'? Or should you simply stay still so that the ants don't bite?
They did sting Matisse's family. His son, wife and daughter all worked for the Resistance. His wife was Arnelie, she of the glorious pre-war hats, the beautiful, disillu- sioned mouth and accusing eyes in 'Femme au Chapeau' who divorced him when she could no longer take his self-congratulatory infidelities. She worked with great bravery against the Nazis with their daughter, Marguerite, and faded and died. Mar- guerite, the sturdy orange schoolgirl with her back to us on the balcony of 'La Sieste Collioure', was tortured and nearly killed by the Gestapo, escaping miraculously from a train on the way to Ravensbruck. Her torturer told her that her father knew of her plight but unfortunately had made no enquiries. Matisse is said to have become 'very cold' when he was informed, saying, 'How strange it is she is unknown to me.' Remembering his dead wife he says, 'I feel the joy of every brushstroke that went to make that pyramid of festive colours.' 'The feather trade killed myriads of poor birds,' says Bussy. 'Yes — there were milliners everywhere,' says Matisse.
As with any historical novel, even one so passionately researched as this one and set so recently that there is a mass of authority, we can't assume that every bit of dialogue is 'true'. But the layers of paint are well applied and build a confident portrait; and, although there are hints that the sainted Lydia did get sick of him, or at any rate homesick — 'About now the Russian storks are leaving for India', she says once — Matisse does seem to have basked in almost universal homage. Even his daugh- ter's torturer, even Louis Aragon and his novelist wife Elsa who were both imprisoned and nearly died in the Resis- tance, accepted his greatness (Elsa a bit warily) and Aragon was to become an authority on his work and author of Henri Matisse, Peintre de France, in 1947.
Everett constructs the novel by setting Matisse's life against Aragon and Elsa's as they write in holes and corners around Vichy France as they can, always on the run, always afraid that Elsa's Jewishness will be discovered and that Aragon's next sabotage attempt will be his last. They suffer in winter in a mountain but where fragile Elsa nearly dies; yet in 1944 they are almost jaunty as they go off to meet up with the RAF parachuting sten-guns into France for the invasion. Elsa's later account of this wins her the Prix Goncourt. Elsa is eternally loving and giving and will comfort anyone, even an unknown man in a cinema in the afternoon — but 'Aragon and I are Petrarch and Laura', she says.
Yet, at the end of the war, it is they who are spent and lost, sickened by vengeful France — there is a horrible account of the death of Pierre Laval by eager firing squad — and Matisse is still sitting in his perpetu- al light. 'How is Elsa these days?' asks someone. 'Oh — older, you know. Rather peevish.'
Marguerite comes home to push her father around in a chair. 'Don't worry, father. People will forget the war. They will need the light of your paintings.'
Elsa notices that in the ecstasy of the great panels of `La Danse' the dancers seem to be dancing together, but each one is really alone.
This book is not easy to read. The narra- tive is as reductive as Matisse's brush- strokes and needs some concentration. The idea of letting Aragon and Elsa exist in the imperfect tense and Matisse (The Big I Am!) to be ever in the present is a clever one and gives variety and relief; and the paintings are beautifully evoked.
Incidentally, this arresting book deserves a better binding. My copy is three weeks' old and half the pages are already falling out. All the characters in Matisse's War would find this shabby.
To order a copy of this book at the special discount price of £12.99, call The Spectator Bookshop on 0181 964 9640.
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