There was a two-shelf, imitation walnut bookcase beside the desk that held about thirty books. Most of them were paperbacks, five policiers from the Serie Noire, three Simenons and two by Chester Himes, Pascal's Pensees, From Caligari to Hitler, Godard on Godard, an autographed copy of Samuel Beckett's Proust, and several paperback novels by French authors I had never heard of before. The hard-cover books were all well worn. A French-English dictionary and a French-German dictionary, in library reference size, a tattered copy of Heidi (in German), a boxed two-volume edition of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea (also in German), Les Fleurs du Mal, and an autographed copy of August Hauptmann's Debierue. I fought down my impulse to steal the autographed copy of Beckett's Proust, the only book in the small library! coveted, and scribbled the list of book titles into my notebook.
In addition to the books, there were several neat piles of art magazines, including Fine Arts: The Americas, all of them in chronological order, with the most recent issues on the top of each stack, arranged along the wall. I considered leafing through these magazines to look for drawings, but it would be absurd for Debierue, with his keen sense of order, to hide sketches in magazines.
In the center of the studio was a maple worktable (in furniture catalogues, they are called "Early American Harvest" tables), and this table, in a rather finicky arrangement, held a terracotta jar with several new camel'shair brushes in varying lengths and brush widths, four rubber-banded, faggoty bundles of charcoal drawing sticks, four one-quart cans of linseed oil and four one-quart cans of turpentine, all unopened, and a long row of king-sized tubes of oil paint in almost every shade and tint on the spectrum.
There were at least a hundred tubes of oil paint, in colors, and three of zinc white. None of the tubes had been opened or squeezed. There was a square piece of clear glass, about 12" x 12", a fumed oak artist's palette, a pair of white gloves (size 9 1/2), a twelve-inch brass ruler, a palette knife, an unopened box of assorted color pencils, and a heaped flat pile of clean white rags. There were other unused art materials as well, but the crushing impression of this neatly ordered table was that of a commercial layout of art materials in an art supply showroom.
Beside the table was an unpainted wooden A-frame easel and a tall metal kitchen stool painted in white enamel. There was an untouched 24" x 30' canvas on the easel. Bewildered, and with a feeling of nausea in the pit of my stomach, I climbed onto the high stool facing the easel and lit a cigarette. A single silver filament, a spider's let-down thread, shimmering in the brilliant light washing the room from the overhead fluorescents, trailed from the right-hand corner of the canvas to the floor. The spider who had left this evidence of passage had disappeared.
Except for the pole-axed numbness of a steer, my mind was too stunned for a contiguous reaction of any kind. I neither laughed nor cried. For minutes I was unable to formulate any coherent thoughts, not until the cigarette burned my fingers, and even then I remember looking at it stupidly for a second or so before dropping it to the floor.
Debierue's aseptically forlorn studio is as clear in my mind now as if I were still sitting on that hard metal stool.
I had expected something, but not Nothing.
I had expected almost anything, but not Nothing.
Prepared for attendance and appreciation, my mind could not undo its readiness for perception and accept the unfulfilled preparation for painting it encountered.
Here was a qualified Nothing, a Nothing of such deep despair, I could not be absolved of my aesthetic responsibility-a nonhope Nothing, a non-Nothing-and yet, also before my eyes was the evidence of a dedication to artistic expression so unyieldingly vast in its implications that my mind-at least at first-bluntly refused to accept the evidence.
I had to work it out.
The synecdochic relationship between the place and the person was undeniable. An artist has a studio: Debierue had a studio: Debierue was an artist.
Here, in deadly readiness, Debierue sat daily in fruitless preparation for a painting that he would never paint, waiting for pictorial adventures that would never happen. Waiting, the incredibly patient waiting for an idea to materialize, for a single idea that could be transferred onto the ready canvas-but no ideas ever came to him. Never.
