Claude Monet: A Private Life

1926, Giverny.

I am eighty-five years old and the garden is still outside the window, which is to say that the subject has outlived the body only by a margin so narrow that it would be sentimental to pretend not to notice it, and yet the margin is there, the pond still taking the sky into itself and giving it back altered, the willows bending and making of their reflection a second and more uncertain willow, the lilies thinning now with October but not yet gone, and because the garden remains in its place and because the eye, even corrected and betrayed and corrected again, still turns toward it by habit deeper than intention, I cannot permit the story of these last years to be told chiefly in the vocabulary of failure. The cataracts have done what cataracts do. They have stolen blue and altered red and made the edges of things proceed toward me through a veil. The body has done what an eighty-five-year-old body does. It has withdrawn its previous generosity without consulting me. The panels are in Paris and I have not seen them installed and will not see them. All of that is true. It is not all.

The donation to France was concluded in April of last year, the great Water Lilies panels given over to the state and installed in the oval rooms at the Orangerie according to the dimensions, the light, the architectural relation I fought for with Clemenceau across years of insistence, revision, impatience, and that old masculine pleasure in disagreement which is at bottom only another form of care when the thing argued over is large enough. He tells me the rooms breathe as they should, that the panels take the light from above and return it widened, that the visitor entering there is less in a gallery than in a condition, which is close to what I intended and perhaps better stated than I would have stated it. But intention is one thing, report another, and sight another still, and I have sight now only in the technical and compromised sense: after Coutela, after the spectacles, after the years of uncertainty in which colour itself had to be negotiated, distrusted, restored, tested, denied, taken back, and once more advanced like a piece on a board when the game had already turned obscure.

The uncertainty about the late panels is with me this autumn not because I doubt the work in the gross sense, which would be melodrama and unworthy of eighty-five years of labour, but because the question of whether one has gone quite far enough and not too far, whether compensation has remained true compensation and not become another species of invention, whether the eye’s betrayal has accidentally given the hand a new and not wholly illegitimate authority, is a question that does not flatten simply because one is old. Indeed it grows more articulate in age. Youth thinks work will settle the arguments around it. Age knows that the more serious the work the longer the argument lasts, and that continuation itself becomes a form of reply more exact than any declaration.

I write because I cannot go to the studio this morning and because not going to the studio, when it becomes frequent enough, acquires a quality that only writing can hold without making a scene of it. The body would not support the walk, so I have been told, and one does become at last practical about such things because the body is tedious in its demands and there is no art in refusing a fact merely because one dislikes its manners. Yet the practical submission of one morning must not be permitted to become, by accumulation and by the very softness with which it arrives, a narrative of renunciation. I have persisted too long and too visibly for that, and persistence, whatever the critics or doctors or the well-meaning say, is never without its own authority. The world adjusts more slowly than it ought. One continues in order to teach it the speed required.