Hemingway, Pascin and the Dark Girl

Jules Pascin, "Girl with a Doll" (ink/watercolor)

"Look," Pascin said. "if you think I'm in love with canvases, I'll paint you tomorrow in water colors."

"When do we eat?" her sister asked. "And where?"

"Will you eat with us?" the dark girl asked. 

"No. I go to eat with my légitime." That's what they said then. Now they say "my régulière." 

"You have to go?" 

"Have to and want to."

"Go on, then," Pascin said. And don't fall in love with typewriting paper."

"If I do, I will write with a pencil."

"Water colors tomorrow," he said. "All right, my children, I will drink another and then we eat where you wish." 

"Chez Viking," the dark girl said. 

"Me too," her sister urged. 

"All right," Pascin agreed. "Good night, jeune homme. Sleep well."

"You too." 

"They keep me awake," he said. "I never sleep."

"Sleep tonight." 

"After Chez Les Vikings?" He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dôme. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil with a higher grade of manure. (103-4)

—Ernest Hemingway, "With Pascin at the Dôme" from A Moveable Feast (1964)

Metonymy, Taishun

"I know what to do with the play now.I have an idea. I think if everyone--"

So I used to date this girl who's a painter. 

Now, you know what people always say. "Don't get too involved with artists. Finally they are just unbearable" or "The more beautiful their art is the messier they will be"--those are kind of the phrases. But you know what's interesting? In my case, certainly the gap is there--I mean, that supposedly irredeemable gap between art and life--but somehow I just enjoyed it. I really did! I mean, Dog, how I loved to watch her struggle with pieces and pieces of paper torn from her scrapbooks, getting the room all dirty and herself all moody just to get the touch of a stroke right. . . And the point is--despite all this messiness and awkwardness during the process--at the end of the day, it still did not prevent me from admiring her works or being touched by them, y'know? In fact, not only wasn't the charm--this "aura" or "mana" as they call it--diminished in the slightest from her final pieces, but, on the contrary, I've always felt that something more--something magic even--was being added up to them and that, exactly because I was there in almost every aspect of her life, this something belonged to me alone, y'know? It's like, among the seven billion people in this crazy world of ours, I am the only one who actually witnesses her secret mutation from the scruffiest to the purest, from the most quotidian of life to the most earth-shattering of art, y'know?

And finally I remember thinking to myself that, perhaps, that's the point of art, and perhaps that's why we cannot but keep creating it. It's not life itself--it can never be life itself, it always falls short--yet neither is it simply not life. Rather, I'd imagine what matters is this infinitely close yet minutely distant connection we create between art and life, see? It makes you think. It gives you an idea of man's potentiality and transformation. 

It's this very gap between "the chaos of life" and "the beauty of art" that shows us what, as finite human beings, we aspire and are capable of.