The Blue House of Marc Chagall

Polyhedral, the tumble-down logs running vertical, horizontal, higgle-piggledy, the blue house looms as large as a temple, filling the right foreground of the painting. In the distance is a fantasy village of minarets and castles, the ancient city of Vitebsk where Marc Chagall, who came into the world as Moishe Shagal, grew up.

The windows in the house are open, containing the same freakish mix of rectangles, trapezoids, and squares. The door is ajar; there is a figure just inside, half-hidden, crouched over something, perhaps a cooking pot. On the threshold other half-bent figures hover, cast in lumpy shadows upon the mustard-colored ground. The scene, whispering of poverty and privation, evokes Chagall’s own childhood as the eldest of seven surviving children, his father struggling to eke out 20 roubles a month hawking herring, his mother selling dry goods from the family's home. It is a world in which Jewish children are not allowed to attend Russian schools or universities, a time when Jewish boys might be conscripted into the Czar’s army or killed in a pogrom. And yet the scene is without menace, as if the boy Moishe Shagal were stationing himself in that house and saying, Even though life is hard, there is radiance and magic, and that radiance and magic can never be stolen from me.

“La Maison Bleue,” was painted outside in a single sitting in the summer of 1917. Chagall and his wife Bella Rosenfeld had escaped from the tumult of St. Petersburg, recently renamed Petrograd, to the countryside around Vitesbsk. Months earlier, after a minister from Kerensky’s provisional government had resigned, Chagall had written to his father: “the country is heading for a general slaughter, famine, the collapse of the front, where half the soldiers will perish…mobs will roam the countryside with rifles…I will not live to see it, and I hope neither will you…”

But Moishe Shagal, or Mark Zakharovich Shagalov as he was known to Russian officials, would live to escape not just the Bolshevist Revolution of October 1917, the burning of Vitebsk, the depressions of Europe, but also the rounding up of Jews in Vichy France, the gas chambers of Dachau and Auschwitz and Treblinka.

I remember the first time I saw a Chagall painting—in the Museum of Modern Art as a student at Sarah Lawrence College, back in the middle seventies. I was young and earnest then, and had long conversations with my then-boyfriend, George, about the meaning of Chagall’s work. There were several Chagalls hanging among Monet’s Water Lillies and Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans, but the work that captivated me was called, “I and the Village.” Why is the cow’s head transposed to look like a woman’s face, I wondered. Why is a female figure milking the cow inside the cow’s head? Why is the couple in the distance upside-down? Why do noses look like moons and moons like noses? “I and the Village,” seemed to be rendered in another language, and I wanted to translate it, find the hidden correlate between symbol and sense, metaphor and meaning.

Time passed, bringing the usual up-endings. I left the home I shared with George and began a life with Len, whose imagination and life experience seemed as crowded and surrealistic as a Chagall canvas. Born a Jew but recently baptized a Catholic, Len held degrees in medicine and philosophy. He had been analyzed by Eric Fromm, and was working on a multi-volume study in philosophy which would unify the languages of art and science. I believed that he was the glass through which I would finally see the universe clearly.

I followed him through all the museums of New York, and some years later, when he was awarded a teaching post at the University of Leuven in Belgium, through the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Art in Bruxelles, the Louvre and the Centres Pompidou in Paris, through the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

We bought EuroRail passes and rode trains from one European capital to another, tracking down Chagalls, Breughals, Memlings, Della Robbias and Michelangelos. We played games of chess speeding through the Ardennes, through fields of lavender in the south of France, through vineyards outside Siena and Gubbio. In Vienna, we visited the homes of Ludwig van Beethoven, and in Munich, we took a suburban train thirty minutes from the city center to a village called Dachau.

Dachau. One of the most heinous of all the concentration camps and yet it had been so scrubbed and sanitized that it had become harmless, historically inconsequential. It reminded me of one of the civilian conservation camps created by Roosevelt in the 1930s. There were rows of new pine-planked bunks and neatly piled army regulation blankets and bare, pillowcase-less lozenges with gray-and-white-striped ticking. Prison uniforms hung upon hooks. There were tin cups, plates, knives and forks. Everything was suffused with an outdoorsy, summer-campy air, as if the Germans had merely been treating the Jews to a crash course in rural education.

But what shocked me most was not to be found in any cordoned-off display or carefully recreated diorama or series of black-and-white photographs in the museum. As the morning rain and fog gave way to the palest flags of noontime sunshine, groups of German schoolchildren gathered at outdoor picnic tables and opened up thermoses full of tea and coffee, taking out sandwiches and munching on potato crisps.

“Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love.” The quote was from Marc Chagall and I stumbled across it many years after that day at Dachau. It was a wintry morning at the end of March 1985, just three months after Len’s passing, and I was a long way from accepting that I would never see him again. I couldn’t read newspapers or magazines; the goings-on of the world seemed trivial, made me vaguely angry. And yet there was an old man with merry eyes and a shock of white hair on the front page of "The New York Times," living and dying in a French village called Saint-Paul, leaving this world just three years shy of his hundredth birthday.

I turned the pages of the newspaper, inhaling the details of Moishe Shagal’s long life. Born in what is now Belarus, Chagall had lived in Paris, in Berlin, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Manhattan, finally returning to France, the country that had given him his name and artistic start. Chagall had taken up new addresses, the obituary writer said, the way Picasso took up mistresses, drifting across continents and capitals, searching for a place to call home. The Stalinist government had repudiated him; the Nazis had called him degenerate; a handful of art critics in America had called him derivative. Still, he keep painting, stopping only for a few months after his first wife, Bella, died.

Twenty-six years after that end-of-March day in 1985, my dreams haunted by the fading faces of the dead, my footsteps as uncertain as the upside-down girl in "I and the Village," I turn on my laptop computer every morning to glimpse "La Maison Bleue" which covers my screen.

Its radiance fills me like prayer.
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Wallis Blue

“Whatever happened to Wallis and Edward,” my son asked, “I mean after he had abdicated?” We had just celebrated our son’s seventeenth birthday by taking him to see the “The King’s Speech,” which is about the constitutional crisis in Great Britain attendant upon Edward VIII’s abdication and the accession of his younger brother, Bertie, who overcame a speech impediment to become George VI.

“Were they happy together? He gave up everything for her. Did he have regrets?”

I confessed that I was no Duke and Duchess of Windsor maven. I knew some gossipy details, most of which I’d gotten second-hand from my mother, who was a girl of eleven in 1936 and would have been much affected by what H.L. Mencken called “the biggest news story since the Resurrection.”

My mother never referred to Mrs. Simpson as the Duchess of Windsor but always by the heavy-baggage, tri-partite Wallis Warfield Simpson, her voice erupting in a spitting, dyspeptic rage, which somehow made me think of Adolph Hitler ranting about the Jews.

Wallis had many failings, according to my mother, the first of which was that she was not pretty. Why this could be construed as a fault, I never quite figured out. Given that my mother was pretty herself—she had been a model in New York before her marriage--you would think she would have had more compassion for those less blessed in the looks department. But in the shopworn Keatsian manner, my mother equated truth and beauty: Wallis Warfield Simpson’s mannish looks served as an embodiment of her inner ugliness and duplicity.

“She had the morals of an alley cat,” my mother said, explaining that Wallis was divorced not once, but TWICE. Long before Wallis had started carrying on an adulterous affair with the Prince of Wales, she had “stolen” second husband Ernest Simpson away from his first wife, not long after Wallis had divorced HER first husband.

“She was a gold digger,” my mother continued, explaining that Wallis was descended from an old Southern family that had fallen on hard times after the Civil War, and that she thought nothing of manipulating men to get what she wanted. But if she was so plain, what was her power? How did she get the most powerful man in the western world to fall in love with her?

There was no ready answer to this question, but it came up often at our dinner table when I was a child, with my father never failing to point out that Wallis must have been “some piece of work” in the bedroom, that she had supposedly picked up certain “techniques” in China in the 1920s, and that once she tried these tricks on poor Edward, he was a goner.

“Honestly, what drivel you talk!” my mother said, kicking him under the table and shooting him a look that could have boiled an egg.

My parents’ differing opinions about the Windsors spoke volumes about their own irreconcilable differences, which would lead, some years later, to their divorce. To my father, Edward’s giving up the throne “for the woman I love,” as Edward put it in the famous radio speech delivered on December 11, 1936 showed existential courage, proving that the heart abides by its own laws, and that these supercede duty to country and family.

Divorced once before he met my mother, my father didn’t see a problem with Mrs. Simpson's divorces; it simply meant that she had been “around the block,” that she wasn’t a virgin ("and no one," he said, "could lock her up for that"). Mrs. Simpson embodied the tough-minded heroine who gave convention the middle finger, who followed her heart.

Who were Wallis and Edward, or W.E., as they referred to themselves in their pre-abdication correspondence? Why did they evoke such passion from people who had never met them? Wallis was so famous that “Time” Magazine named her woman of the year for 1936, the first time the publication had ever given that honor to a woman. The Duchess of Windsor also had a color named after her, “Wallis Blue,” a pale tourmaline shade that matched her eyes and was coined by the Parisian couturier, Mainbocher, who designed her wedding dress.

Obsession with the Windsors continues, decades after they have been laid to rest side-by-side in Frogmore cemetery at Windsor Castle, Wallis’ stone still missing the HRH title that her royal in-laws stripped her of in 1937 (changing the English constitution to do so). Madonna is rumored to be making a movie about the lovers, claiming that both have been pilloried by history. English Heritage recently considered installing a blue plaque on the apartment building in the West End of London where Mrs. Simpson lived in the 1930s. The government-sponsored agency finally vetoed the plaque for Bryanston Court because of Mrs. Simpson’s alleged Nazi past.

Was the Duchess of Windsor really a Nazi? I don’t remember her politics coming up at our family dinners, but any Nazi association would certainly account for my mother’s antipathy to Mrs. Simpson. My mother had lost her first love, Harold, a Norwegian flyer, who was stationed in England during the war and who perished somewhere over the English Channel; she never shared any of the details with me, only that it happened during the summer of 1943, that she had been a girl of 18, that one day the tissue-thin blue airmail letters he had written to her stopped coming, that she had been so distraught she hadn’t been able to go east to college, and that she’d taken to her bed for months.

Perhaps, in some inexplicably convoluted manner, my mother attributed the senseless death of her beloved Harold to the shallowness and self-centeredness of people like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. (In 1937, Wallis and Edward made a much-photographed trip to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Wallis was also rumored to be the mistress of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister to London, at the same time as she was seeing the King. Von Ribbentrop, who was later hanged at Nuremberg in 1946, supposedly sent Mrs. Simpson 17 carnations every day to express his gratitude for the seventeen times she had slept with him.)

“Answered prayers cause more tears than those than remain unanswered,” wrote St. Theresa of Avila, whom Truman Capote quoted in his last, unpublished novel. (Capote often partied with the Windsors when they came to New York in the nineteen sixties.) According to two biographies of Mrs. Simpson, Wallis did not want Edward to abdicate, and hoped to remain the King’s mistress while staying put in her marriage. “I intend,” she wrote to her aunt, “to keep them both.”

But the King’s slavish devotion to her (she called him “the Little Man” but his passion was hardly diminutive) proved as unstoppable as Hitler’s desire to annex all of Europe. “How can a woman be a whole empire to man?” she confided in bewilderment to her uncle. Years later, she said that it was not possible to “abdicate and eat it,” and that she would rather be “the mistress of a king, than the wife of the Governor-General of The Bahamas.” (Churchill had posted the Windsors to the Bahamas in hopes that they would not interfere with the war effort.)

“You can never be too rich or too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor is meant to have said, a maxim that she had stitched onto throw pillows in the living rooms of her homes in France and New York. Thanks to the largesse of Great Britain as well as the French government (the Windsors leased their Paris home in the Bois de Boulogne for decades for only a nominal fee), the Duke and Duchess were very rich. They spent their days shopping for the 100-plus dresses the Duchess purchased each year (when asked in an interview how he passed the time, the Duke confided that he had spent his morning helping the Duchess pick out a hat), with time out for the Duchess to have the tiny layer of fat on her tummy massaged, and the Duke to putter in his gardens.

There was a song that my father used to play on the phonograph in his study in the declining years of his marriage to my mother. The song was by Peggy Lee and it was a moody mix of melancholy and gaiety: “Is that all there is? Then let’s keep dancing…”

When I think of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, together and together and together in their rooms of Wallis blue, I think of that song.

Blue Meds

In the mornings, I swallow pills that cover nearly every hue in the color spectrum: there are oyster shell calcium tablets (green), fish oil supplements (yellow), a multivitamin/multimineral (indigo), a probiotic acidophilus capsule with “14 billion good bacteria” (speckled white, like an egg from a free-range hen).

And let’s not forget the meds: one half-tab of Adderall (cyan blue) and one half-tab of the antidepressant Citalopram (coral pink). The blue meds are a mixture of four amphetamine salts, which I take for attention deficit disorder. (I can be as hyper as a horse that’s been left in the barn all winter, as distractible as a two-year-old motoring from block to block.) ADD is probably the reason I haven’t been able to settle on a career—one week, I contemplate starting a dog-walking business (I’d call it “Who Let the Dogs Out”), and the next I fantasize about working as a clown in a hospital.

But ever since I started taking my precious blue meds (about a year ago), I’ve made steady progress in my off-again-on-again career as a writer. I haven’t earned a dime recently, which makes me worry that I will end up with no teeth living under a bridge, but until then, I’m a happy graphophiliac, writing for my local paper on topics ranging from AIG (where I used to work in corporate communications, years before AIG was called a P.I.G. by the New York Daily News) to the inauguration of Barack Obama to the 123rd anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death (which, if you’re dying to know, is May 15th, 2009).

I looked up Amphetamine on Wikipedia and found that it was first synthesized by a Romanian, Lazar Edeleannu, in Berlin, Germany in 1887. He called it phenylisopropylamine (don’t ask how to pronounce that); apparently, it was one of a series of compounds from the plant derivative ephedrine, which the Chinese had been using for five millennia to treat a host of ailments. (I always knew that the Chinese were smarter than us westerners.) Amphetamines didn’t come into common use until 1929 when American pharmacologist Gordon Alles was searching for an artificial replacement for ephedrine, and tested it on himself. Then the drug company, Smith, Kline and French, got into the game in the mid-1930s and made a bundle marketing it under the trade name Benzedrine.

Amphetamines were the drug of choice for the military during World War II (both the Allies and the Germans liked how the drug lessened combat fatigue as well as increased alertness). It was also the favorite substance of Adolph Hitler, who received daily shots from his doctor of “vitamultine” a combination of methamphetamine and essential vitamins. (I was shocked to discover that der Furher and I liked the same drug; it’s creepy to think that he, too, might have had ADD…)

For nearly the past four decades, amphetamines have been a controlled substance in the United States, which means that my doctor can’t call or fax in the prescription to the pharmacy, but must sign a specially designated form which I must personally surrender to the pharmacist each time I renew the prescription, all of which makes me feel like a Nazi war criminal at Nuremberg whenever I slink into my local CVS.

Sometimes I cut the pills in quarters to make them last longer as well as to reduce their nasty side effects (tachycardia, diarrhea, dizziness, palpitations, arrhythmia--if you read everything on the print outs that accompany each orange vial, you’d be tempted to flush the pills down the toilet). But I am willing to shoulder the risks because my cyan-blue, double-scored meds make me feel, for the first time in my life, confident and hopeful. My blue meds make me believe, in the words of George Eliot (who did not have ADD), that “it’s never too late to be what you might have been.”