Twenty-Fifth Interview, Jean Charlot, June 12, 1971, John Pierre Charlot

Could you tell me something about your relation to the poets in Mexico?  Did you meet them before Rivera and Siqueiros arrived?

Well, I think that there were a different kind of poets.  The ones you have probably in mind were the Estridentistas, which were the modern group, but there was a group of more conservative people.  One of them was Jaime Torres Bodet,1 and he was already quite high in the government, something that corresponds to Minister of Culture or something, and then later on, he was named to the United Nations and became one of the first heads of UNESCO, for example.  Now with those poets who were part of the establishment, the relation was simply that some of their bureaus were in charge of some of the jobs that were given to the painters, and if we met them, we usually met them behind their official desk.  On the other hand, there was the group of the Estridentistas, who were people about our age and not yet settled.  Later on they would settle and in their turn become part of the establishment.  For example, Maples Arce,2 who is usually considered the head or the founder, if you want, of Estridentismo, later on had a rather complete career as an ambassador in different countries.  But for the moment they were young people, most of them practically unemployed as we were, because the employment we had would give us very little money.  And they had, some of them, I think, had grown up with some of the people, mostly Fermín Revueltas.  Perhaps Revueltas had the easiest entry into the group of the poets because his brother, among other things, was a well-known musician, so he came in quite differently from people who had had in their past mostly, let us say, a military post with the Revolution, or no post at all.  And Revueltas was very handy helping and doing pictures for the poets.  The poets are the people who would publish those little magazines that never lasted very long.  The best known one now is Irradiador.  Irradiador was the organ of the Estridentista poets, and I think it is the Number One who had a cover that was one of the pictures of Revueltas.  It had not been done for the cover.  It was an easel painting, but it had caused, before my time, I would say, a little scandal, because it represented sort of a still life, and there was a menu on the table, and the menu said, “Merde pour les bourgeois” in French.  So people thought that was a satirical statement, which of course, it was, and he became a friend of the nonconformists.  My own relation was very slight.3  I’ve already told it to Stefan Baciu,4 who is writing now a serious history of Estridentismo.  The poets wanted what they would call fantastical, or what seemed to them fantastical, pieces of art as illustrations for their magazine and also to further the scandal that their words could not start.  And for example, I did one of the very few what we could call pure abstract or psychological abstract things that I did—because in my early days I had Cubist things that could be considered abstract—but that one was a psychological portrait of Maples Arce.5  He had asked me specifically to do it that way so we have in there some broken lines, some letters of the alphabet with his name scattered over, so on and so forth.  It’s a woodcut, incidentally, and he used it somewhere, somehow.  But even the things that I considered directly within my work and that seemed to me to further the idea of art for the people were considered by the poets—I suppose they didn’t know too much about the plastic arts—were considered like things that would also scandalize, and so they would use them as illustrations in the magazine.  They would plaster them on the walls of the café where they got together, Café de Nadie, and I remember a reportage, for example, on the Café de Nadie in which it says that the walls show some Estridentist cartoons by Charlot.  Well, the Estridentist cartoons are some, what I considered very good and very serious woodcuts of Mexican types, but anyhow for good reasons or bad reasons, there was a tie between the group of the painters and the group of the poets.  I did some covers for two of their books, List Arzubide’s book of verse, Esquina,6 and Maples Arce’s Urbe,7 and I illustrated both books.  And I think that’s about it.  We had good will towards each other.  I don’t think I ever read in great detail the things I was illustrating, and I don’t think the poets understood in great detail what we were doing, but there was a tie between the young men who were bent, certainly, on changing and changing as much as possible the order of things.

Did you like what you read of their poems?

Frankly, I wasn’t paying too much attention.  There was a terrific concentration in those early days of mural painting on the things that we were doing, and of course, it was very hard physical work, done in extreme poverty, so to speak, and we had very little time for anything else.  I don’t remember any painter, let’s say, going to concerts or even reading books, I would say.  We were really creating something, I mean, some people have called it a Renaissance, and by experience I know that that takes all one’s strength.  As far as I am concerned, the relation to the poets was one of friendship and to help them in the fix they were in because we ourselves were in a fix of our own.

You know, it interests me that they were having kind of a surrealist thing and Dada and Apollinaire, and this was kind of against the very constructive impulse of the artists.  I mean, you were heading towards simplicity, lisibilité, and they were, if you want, going towards a kind of deliberate mystification.  Did that ever create any problems for you, that you really had two different aims and styles in view?

You mustn’t use surrealist.  The term isn’t correct.  You can use Dada, if you want.  It was, in a way, a creative movement.  That is, there was very little written that had reached Mexico about the Dada movement, and it’s one of those examples of things that are in the air, so that they happen in different places at the same time.  So they were in absolute good faith, and they enjoyed, of course, what they were doing, and it wasn’t exactly a mystification because there was danger.  That is, they certainly were considered as revolutionary poets, shall we say, and revolution in Mexico was still a thing that could be of life and death.  It wasn’t a question of style; it was a question of importance, and by destroying, if you want, or thinking that they were destroying a certain social order, there was danger.  It wasn’t just the pleasure of annoying the bourgeois.  So even though what we were doing was very different, because the things we were doing were so close to architecture and so on that we didn’t feel, we didn’t want, in fact, to do fantastic things—we wanted to do things that would stand on their four feet, so to speak, and we wanted things that were clearly lisible to the people—nevertheless, we both, the poets and the painters, were doing things that were new and things that were a definite danger for us in the Mexico of the time, the social order or social disorder of the time.  There were some exceptions.  There was, you could say, a third group of people who were very close to us or thought they were very close to us, usually members of the Communist school.  There was a fellow who did some verses which Rivera, when he was in the mood, put on his frescoes, wrote himself with his own hand in his frescoes as an accompaniment or an explanation to his early frescoes in the Ministry of Education.  And one of those things, I remember, was a little poem that said, “Comrade miners, instead of mining the gold and passing it on to the rich, why don’t you keep it for yourselves?” and so on, so forth.8  Now the man who had brought Rivera to Mexico was Pani.  Pani at the time was the Secretary of the Treasury and was not happy with that idea of discombobulating the economy of Mexico, so he asked Rivera more or less politely to erase the poem.  Rivera really had no choice, because however little money he was getting would have even gone if he had not obeyed Alberto Pani.  But that was the type of thing.  I don’t even know if the things were ever printed otherwise than in hand sheets that were passed on in the streets.  But somebody eventually will discover or rediscover those poets to the people.  That particular fellow, I don’t remember his name, perhaps I don’t know, but he was known as the “Poet in Overalls.”  And he did run around in overalls to signify the fact that though he was a poet, he was also a plebeian.  Of course, we were all plebeian; we didn’t have any money.

Were these people more interested in the folklore angle?  I know that the Estridentistas didn’t seem to have any interest in folklore.  Lola Cueto’s husband did those masks, but they are of a more Aztec inspiration.9  But did you prefer that second group that were more poets of the people?  Were they more sympathetic to you?

Well, they were more around us.  They usually hang around the foot of the scaffolds and so on, and for a while, I thought I was going to do a portfolio with this particular Poet in Overalls, that he would do the captions, the text, as short poems, while I would illustrate it with street types.  In fact, I did do lithographs of the street types in preparation for the portfolio, and nothing really came out of it.  But it shows certainly that there was an easier relationship; that is, I don’t think I asked—I waited for him to ask me to do something.  The idea was a collaboration, which it wasn’t with the Estridentistas—not a true collaboration; it was just a gesture on our part for friends.

You brought some books of French poems to Mexico.  I believe you brought the Rimbaud.  Can you tell me which other books you brought and if you showed them to the Mexican poets?

No.  The Rimbaud is really from the time of my military life.  I had some small books, small-format books, that I took with me after the war, in the war and after the war in the Occupation of Germany, but they were, of course, for myself, and I don’t think that I ever publicized them in any way.  There was in Mexico a very intense business about literature and poetry, but most of it was very much like painting, things that were closer to the end of the nineteenth century in intent than what I had known in Paris.  In spite of everything, in Paris, being Parisian, I had understood my moment, which was one of great interest, corresponding with the Cubists and so on.  And when I went to Mexico, I had physically the feeling that I was suddenly around 1890, and I enjoyed all that.  I thought it was wonderful that those people were so disconnected from what was going on in Paris, and I wasn’t thinking at all of being an apostle of what I considered contemporary literature.  I just enjoyed all the things they were doing.  In the same way, I thought that the Impressionism that they were doing in the 1920s was very good as far as painting goes.  There was just an extraordinary décalage in time.  So I was, of course, writing at the time.  I wrote rather heavily, as you know, and poetry and whatnot at the very time that I was doing the paintings, but that had no circulation whatsoever.  In fact it never had any circulation, though it may in the future, fifty years after I did those things.

But you do not recall ever having shown any books of poetry to any of the poets or anybody else who could have got them?  You never lent anything out?

I think that I am not the man who did that.  Rivera, when he came, was much more, we could say, garrulous than I was.  He liked to talk, had wonderful, long conversations, café style or Parisian-café style, with the younger painters.  He was very desirous to give of his own, to give of his own knowledge.  And in Paris, he really had been an absolute part of the Cubist movement.  You find him in the French books on early Cubism as a very important part, so that he had been a colleague with, perhaps not Picasso and Braque, but with Juan Gris, Metzinger,10 and so on, or poets like Apollinaire.  In fact, one of the things he did because he, too, wanted to be nice to the Estridentistas was for one of the numbers of their magazine to write a calligramme, which is based, of course, on the Calligrammes of Apollinaire, but is very much his own.  I think that it’s quite an interesting thing.  There are a few poems, in fact, by Rivera that he wrote when he was in Italy.  I have some here and a calligramme that he published in the Estridentista magazine, and so on, and they are all quite interesting things.  I think he would be… If anybody would be the bridge between contemporary Parisian literature and the poets, it wouldn’t be myself.  It would be Rivera.

It’s important to find out whether you did anything along these lines.  That is, you don’t recall a single instant where…?

No, I really don’t think so at all.  I was quite mum about my own literary works and quite mum about what I knew of contemporary French literature.  But again, I mean it’s very simple: Rivera wasn’t and he was quite willing to impart his knowledge to people in the same way that he imparted to them his knowledge of Cubism and so on.

But how did it come about that you published that series, that set of poems in Contemporáneos, that’s around 1929 or 1930.11

Well, that’s an entirely different moment of my life.  I was speaking of the early days in Mexico.  From the time that I went to Yucatán and received American money as an archeologist, I cooled off, so to speak.  We were not any more—in fact, all the group found more or less different ways of being more bourgeois in the six, seven years that had passed than at the beginning.  And the poems were then published by the conservative group I was speaking of, Torres Bodet; I think, that magazine was published by Torres Bodet, who published some of his works in it, and the Estridentistas had no entry in that particular magazine.  It was a magazine, I think, actually published with money from the government by people who were conservative.  There was a sort of aura to the fact that I was writing in French, so that they thought it would be nice to put some French things in it.  I don’t remember how they knew I was doing those things, but I let them have those verses, which are contemporary with the publication—but the only thing of mine published contemporary with its writing.

See, I’m interested because there is a book by a Mexican poet, not one of the better known ones, I think slightly younger generation, but he says in his dedication of it to you, his informal dedication, that he admires you, “also as a poet,” so I thought your poems might have gotten around to some people in Mexico.

Well, I would be awfully surprised, but they are two completely distinct periods.  I think the publication in the conservative magazine is ’27, and I left in ’28 for the States, and circumstances were quite different.  The Revolution was ended, the mural revolution in a way was ended because Rivera more or less was the one who was doing the big things at the time, and the group had dispersed, one way or another.  What I was talking of was the early days, the early days when things were not jelled yet.  And if that dear poet knew anything of mine, it’s probably things he had read in that little magazine, I suppose.

What do you think now of the influence of Vida Mexicana12 on, say, the poetic—I know we’re going to talk later about its influence on the artistic thing, but it had a little bit of poésie concrète.  Did you ever hear that discussed at all?  Or you really never spoke at all about poetry with your poet friends?

I can’t remember anything about poetry.  Sometimes we would walk in the street, and Maples would start reciting, and I know that the friends around would shush me up because while he was reciting, I wanted to go on talking, and they told me it wasn’t done.  But there was really no such thing for me, anyhow, as what would correspond to conversation in a Paris café.  I know that there was a group, and that they went to the café and had talks together, but I really never went with them.

What do you think today about the illustrations you did for Maples Arce, the Urbe?

Well, I think they are very good.  I think there I managed both to do something that would please him—that is, that would look to him Estridentistas, which was his style—and at the same time to use woodcut, wood carving in a very simple folksy way without false complications.  I like very much that series of woodcuts, not because they are modern in the sense that Maples would have said they were modern, but in the sense that they are so logical in cutting the wood.

He asked you to do those illustrations?

Yes.

And you did them on wood, and did you have a good publisher who printed them and put them in the book?

Well, I don’t know if he was good, and I never met him.  And when the book came out, I was nearly desperate because the first picture that one sees is a little seal that represents what would have been perhaps a Mexican flapper on the front page.  And so I said, “Why did that go in?  That isn’t my drawing.”  And Maples said, “Well, that’s the publisher’s seal, and he wanted it on the front page.”  So that spoiled the whole book for me.

Were there any other problems with the book?

No, no problems whatsoever.  The only problem would have been to read it.

Orozco complains in several places about the fact that the poets who said they were friends of the artists didn’t protect or speak up for the artists when the frescoes were destroyed and they were being strongly attacked.  Is this true?

I can’t remember the passage itself, but Orozco was very easy to get disgruntled and annoyed at people.  He had, however, a very good reason there, because when his pictures were destroyed, the students had been egged on by an article that was published by, that was written by Salvador Novo,13 I think in El Universal Illustrado.  And Novo was a very close friend of Rivera, and obviously Rivera had asked Novo to write that article definitely as anti-Orozco because people were beginning to speak of Orozco in the same bracket, so to speak, with Rivera.  And Rivera was quite a Machiavellian guy, and so without appearing himself, he delegated Salvador Novo to write against Orozco, and of course, the results were rather horrendous, and Orozco later on had to repair all the walls that had been not only scratched, but things had been thrown against them, and so on.  So in the case of Orozco, in that case, he certainly had a very good reason to say that the poets, because Salvador Novo was one of the main littérateurs among the young, had done him false.

But did you feel that the poets acted well through that episode?

You can’t speak of the poets in general.  I mean, I had the same thing with a man called Renato Molina.14  Renato Molina and Novo were always around.  Rivera in this case had sicced Renato Molina on me when I finished my big fresco, the first one, because of the same reason.  He was afraid that I would rise up in the world, and he wanted to keep me down.  So it just shows that those people didn’t have too much conscience, and I don’t know if Molina was a poet.  He was more of a newspaperman.  But Novo definitely was a poet, a littérateur, and became in fact extremely well known as a writer in Mexico later on—and still did those jobs for Rivera, of course, thinking that he was breaking a lance in pro of art, which he wasn’t certainly by going against Orozco.

But did any of the poets stand—do you recall any of the poets defending the painters?

Well, I think the poor poets were very much towards us as we were towards them.  I mean, we did help each other when we could, but I don’t think that in good faith, they could have been very unhappy about frescoes being destroyed.  That was outside the realm of their understanding, and we were good for what I would call small scandals.  For example, those so-called caricatures of mine as a decoration for the cafe where they got together, but I don’t think that they had any concept that the things we were doing were of true importance, either for the future or for the nation, and so on and so forth.  They were interested in their own stuff; we were interested in our own stuff.  I think that if the poets had been attacked, let us say the Estridentistas had been attacked by other critics, we probably would not even have read the criticisms anyhow, and if we had read them, we would have thought that there were two people there of different opinion about poetry, but I don’t see that we could have taken in good faith sides with any one of them.

Did you ever meet Azuelas15 or Octavio Paz or any of the other people who are pretty big now?

No.  I like very much Azuelas as a writer.  I think he’s done wonderful things.  Perhaps his writings that date of the Revolution are the closest thing in words to the things that we were trying to paint at the time.  But I didn’t meet him.

Octavio Paz?

No, I don’t think I met him either.

How about the man who wrote El Indio?16

Well, if you don’t know his name, why would I answer?

I know that you like that book.  It’s Torra y something or other, I’m not sure.  Well, I wanted to ask you: Leal in his memoir on the early days says that he met you through people at the Bellas Artes, so I think it’s very important to know something about your relationships with the people at the Bellas Artes.  Now as I remember, you said that you just went over there to look at their library, look at the things they had, and then you left there your Via Crucis.  But were there any people you were particularly close to like Don Lino Picaseño?

Well, Picaseño was in charge of the library, so every time I went there to look at books, Picaseño was the man who would look for the books for me.  There wasn’t any complicated mechanical things or computerization, and so on.  You described what you wanted, and then the librarian would look for it.  Of course, I went there often, and he knew me.  In fact, as I think I told you before, when I gave the book to the Bellas Artes, I put Picaseño’s name on the first page, so that when he left the job, he took the Via Crucis with him.  And it stayed there long enough so that the young people had seen it and rather admired it before they had met me, and maybe that is what Leal means when he says that he knew me through people in Bellas Artes.  But it was not only the library.  At the time in the same building, there was the collection of paintings, and I was extremely interested in the old, colonial paintings in Mexico.  I’ve always been looking for roots—go and search in the past—and much of my time was either with the Museum of Archeology or with the museum of paintings in San Carlos, so that I was known, certainly, in the corridors of the school.

Do you recall anybody else that you knew there besides Picaseño?

Well, in my first trip, my first voyage, Picaseño was really the only person I knew there.  Then the second trip, Ramos Martínez, who was director of the school, I went to see him, and he was very nice to me.  I explained to you that before: he asked me to go and paint at his school in the open air in Coyoacán, and that is where I shared Leal’s studio.

Did you know anybody else personally at the Archeological Museum?

Not on the first trip.  On the second trip, I met a few people who were in charge of things there and so on.  They probably, I would say, the archeologists had a better understanding of what the muralists were doing than any other group, because the painters as such—not speaking of the group of muralists, but the painters as such—were doing things so very different, easel painting, paintings of flowers, paintings of ladies, that we were very far away from them.  There was no way of getting together with the established painters, but the archeologists recognized, I would say, the things we were doing—quite a number of things that they knew and that they knew very well in the archeological items: not only the big sculptures, but I think perhaps maybe the codices—those sort of squatty figures in Aztec codices, which were in fact for my art one of the very sources of my art since Paris where I had known the codices of my Uncle Goupil. So there was there a rapport.  I don’t think we ever talked very much together about it, but it was easier to talk with the archeologists than it was with artists.

It interested me that in your first fresco, which could have given itself to a very archeologically exact representation, you deliberately didn’t do that.  That is, you kind of fantasized, if you want, about Aztec costume.

Well, it isn’t exactly a fantasy.  What it is—and it’s a rather complicated idea—is that I was working in a building—the Preparatoria was built around 1750 or so—so I looked for the idea that the colonial painters of the 1750s had of Indians, Indian manners, Indian costumes.  And you can still find, in fact I saw it when I was there in ’67, in the museum, the very eighteenth-century colonial paintings that were a basis for my fantastic indumentaria and so on for the Indians.  Now, of course, even now I consider that’s a little complicated, but I thought that I would get a better tie between the building and the pictures if I didn’t flaunt the modern idea of archeology and instead tried to find the colonial spirit in relating the Conquistadors to the Indians.  The wheels of feathers, for example, on the heads of the people are copied directly from those paintings in the Academy.

In 1920 and 1921, there were some shows, some exhibitions, painting exhibitions at San Carlos.  Did you exhibit in them, or did you see those shows, and if so, what did you think of them?

No, I was completely detached, I would say, from exhibitions in my first trip.  I have to make a difference between the two trips.  In the second trip, I think the first things that I showed were in a show that Dr. Atl put up, 1922, I think.  And there I showed some of those big heads, The Man with the Cigarette, and so on, that I had just done in Coyoacán.  That was my first show of things in Mexico.  Then the cigarette man went to New York, I think in ’23, with a group of Mexicans that Walter Pach17 had asked them to show at the Independents, and I sent that Man with the Cigarette.  And then much later on, when I was living in New York—it must have been ’34, ’35, or so—there was an anniversary of the Independents, and they asked each of the artists that had shown in those very early days to send one of their contemporary pictures and one of the pictures they had shown.  So that the Man of the Cigarette was shown again together with one of my pictures of the thirties in New York at the time.  But as far as Mexico goes, I think those big heads were about the only thing that I showed in Mexico in the early twenties.

Somebody mentioned someplace, and I forget where, that you taught French in Mexico.  Did you ever do that?

Well, I can’t say that I remember.  Oh, no, I didn’t.  I taught drawing.  I had, well, one of my jobs, which I never used really as a job, was one of those things that Vasconcelos found so he could give a little money to the muralists with some sort of a political reason.  I think I was Inspector of Drawing in the schools of Mexico City, the Distrito Federal, Federal District, Mexico City, but I never actually did anything about it.  I just received something like six pesos a day or something, which was one way of living.  So that was a sort of a pretext.  But on the side I did get a few jobs teaching some small children drawing, I remember, and in the French colony I gave some lessons of painting at least to one person.  That’s about it.

Did you have any good students or anybody who went on to do something later?

No, there was nothing that even I could consider as promising.

I wanted to ask you about that—who was that famous archeologist for whom Goitia worked a while?  Did you know him, the fellow who restarted Mexican archeology?

Antonio Caso.18  Caso was a very wonderful fellow, and he was doing at the time a big thing, I think in three volumes, on Teotihuacán, and it was nearly an idea of genius to ask Goitia to do pictures of contemporary Teotihuacán without strings attached.  He just knew that Goitia was living so close to the people himself that what he would do would have ethnological value, and those things that Goitia did are really of great worth.  The book is both archeological and ethnological, and goes from Prehispanic Teotihuacán to today.  It was a very important book to suggest to people that they shouldn’t think of past or present, but try to follow in time what happens to people as people, something that I greatly admire.

Did you ever meet him or read his things?  Did he ever influence you in any way?

Well, I don’t know how he could influence me, but I made a portrait of him, which was a pencil drawing that is published in Mexican Folkways, one of the Mexican Folkways; very badly reproduced, but it’s a portrait of him.

So you were that close to him, at least.  I mean I’m interested in how close you got to the archeological doings before you went off to Yucatán as a real archeologist.

There was definitely an affinity, shall we say—I told you that already—between the group of archeologists and the group of muralists.  It was easier to talk with them, and I think they understood better what we were doing than any other group.

Did any criticisms come from them about the fact that you didn’t in your first fresco do things that were archeologically accurate?

No, of course not.  I am sure that they knew very well what I was doing.  I mean, a colonial building and colonial knowledge of Prehispanic things was a very obvious thing when you know about it, and they did know about it.

Was it at this time, that is, early at the beginning of your second trip to Mexico that you started having those soirées with your mother at your apartment?

Well, I don’t know what you are talking about, but I’m game.  I don’t think we had any soirées because the apartment was nearly one-room apartment, I think, and there wasn’t place for much in there.  I think what has been written about it is just simply that French was spoken, and that seemed to people very elegant and cultural.  But some people did like to come.  I told you that Rivera loved to come and speak French.  It was a pleasure for him because he felt closer to all the things that he had left in Paris.  And my mother was a very nice hostess and put people at ease, however strange or even horrible they may have been.  And she was, of course, part Mexican, and it was easy for her to know what it was all about.  I have some letters of hers about the Revolution, for example, which show how, I wouldn’t say pleasant, but how easy it was for her to get into the Mexican milieu, of which after all she was a part.  But it wasn’t the Mexican in her that people saw, of course, because that was taken for natural, but it was that—what for some people was an extraordinary refinement of French Parisian manners and so on.  And I think our poor revolutionary friends who were all the time in the rough because the members of the Communist party, for example, were not terribly refined, sort of enjoyed the little atmosphere that without any accessories we managed to give in the place we lived in.

Edward Weston speaks about there being wonderful parties there with some generals showing their wounds and others shooting out lightbulbs.

No, that wasn’t in our place.  That was in other people’s places.  It wasn’t big enough in our place to shoot lightbulbs.  And it would have been too expensive for us.

Did your mother do French cooking and things for people?

Well, a little bit, sure.  I mean, we brought in what we knew, and what we knew was Paris, and Paris for some people was a very, shall we say, exquisite experience.  Of course, that was a non-Parisian’s point of view.

I just have a couple of little details here that I would like to ask you.  You mentioned in passing once that your father had a brother.  Could you tell me what you know about him?

Well, I think he was a half-brother, and I know very little about him because he never came; he wasn’t part really of our family.  That is, he was in a way an uncle, but one that we never saw.  I would saw him sometimes on the stairs going up or down in my father’s office, but that was all, so I can’t tell you anything about it.  I just remember that he was, I think, a half-brother, not a full brother.

Do you remember his name?

Well, I would with a little thinking.  Just now I don’t.

It was Charlot, though?  The last name was Charlot?  [JC nodded]  Tell me about St. Lydwine.19  That’s one person that we haven’t spoken about before.  You read the Huysmans book, and then you started reading her herself?

Now there is somewhere a footnote, I think, in Huysmans, or else I read it in a magazine, that The Visions of St. Lydwine had been published, and so I went—there was the address; it was somewhere on the Quai, I think.  So I was extremely young and had very little money, but I would go there.  And it was published, I think, in five volumes or so, and I couldn’t buy the five volumes, and the gentleman who was the publisher, even though he was the man who received the clients—obviously it was a small publishing firm—understood and was nice enough to sell me whatever volume I wanted, for which I was very grateful.  And then, I did read, not the whole thing, I think—I never bought all the volumes—but all I could of it, as I was, for example, in the subway going from one place to another and so on.  And I think she has been quite an influence maybe even on the, well, shall we say climate of my devotion.

Can you tell me in what ways she has influenced you?

Well, she has interesting things about Heaven that are quite physical.  She has, for example, the actual, if I remember rightly, menu of the dinners that are given by the Holy Trinity, and the shape and color of the plates, and so on.  She and that other girl, the German girl, Emmerich, both have a very physical approach to mysticism, and that’s the only thing I could understand, because when you get into metaphysics, I can’t follow.