Better to Be a Ghost

On Giorgio de Chirico's 'Hebdomeros'

Joan Miró, Dutch Interior (I), 1928, Oil on canvas

Giorgio de Chirico has languidly stumbled upon the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence and wonders if it might make for a nice streetscape. But in the process of turning recollection into painted object, he finds himself transmuting the piazza’s distinguishing forms. A wide-open square, when painted, becomes a compressed court; a Gothic temple becomes Hellenic; an imposing white marble effigy of Dante Alighieri, circa 1865, becomes a relic from antiquity. Here, apparently, was the birth of pittura metafisica: the object rendered and transcended, turned into a signifier of a world beyond plain sight. It’s there in the name. Meta-fisica, auguring its famous offspring, the sur-réel.

That was 1910. In light of its outsized cultural legacy, the fact that pittura metafisica was by 1919 absolutely and completely finished, at least in the sense that de Chirico saw it, underscores the strength of vision with which its founder was endowed. It underscores, too, the force of the disillusionment with modernity that effectuated de Chirico’s postwar disavowal of his early style. How ironic, of course, that posterity has come to consider de Chirico’s metaphysical period the very quintessence of modern disillusion, his forlorn landscapes and disassociated titles ­— The Nostalgia of the Infinite, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, The Enigma of Fatality ­— an exquisitely emblematic product of post-industrial, post-Romantic disenchantment, and a portent of the thousand-yard stare that the Great War would set into all of Europe’s once-wide eyes.

Another tantalizing irony: In the early 1920s, just as de Chirico was settling into a new, conservative mode of expression ­— a dulling approximation of the Old Masters, without, of course, the mastery ­— the hot-blooded Parisian Surrealists were coming to consider de Chirico a kind of spiritual father of the avant-garde. The market, too, had resolved similarly. Paul Guillaume, de Chirico’s first dealer, had arranged before the war to pay him a recurring stipend of 120 francs for the monthly production of six paintings. In the years after the war, Guillaume was selling these works for upwards of 40,000 francs each. A profit of ­— brace yourself ­— 2,000 percent. Let no one say art doesn’t pay.

Another profiting off de Chirico’s success: André Breton. A mouthpiece of Surrealism, but no acme of purity. While Breton, and by extension his followers, treated the coming of de Chirico like an oracle descending from the mountain, or, as Breton termed it, a “sentry” along the modernist path, he was recalcitrant about disclosing what you might call his fiduciary interest in the matter. Breton — never mind how — had come into possession of paintings that de Chirico had left behind in Paris when shipping off to Ferrara in 1915. Those that Breton hadn’t wound up with for free, he attempted to buy from rival dealers. It was a cornering of the market at any cost. De Chirico himself got involved when he agreed, at Breton’s behest, to paint a few innocent replicas from his metaphysical period. Breton would market these as early pieces or studies. Both would bank the cash.

In 1924, the arrangement imploded when de Chirico signed on with a new merchant, Léonce Rosenberg. Breton’s stratagem was imperiled. Cowered by financial concern and overcome with jealousy, Breton launched his fusillade. He began espousing the view that de Chirico, the sentry turned renegade, had in fact been intellectually and aesthetically bankrupt since 1917. The journal Breton ran, La Révolution surréaliste, poured out attacks of gleeful pugnacity upon a man they had considered mere months before as a kind of unofficial father figure, el jefe de la junta. By 1926, the terrain had been razed and de Chirico’s dissociation from Breton and Surrealism was complete. Yet Breton, in a not inconsiderable detail, continued to proudly hang de Chirico’s The Enigma of a Day in his apartment for the next 10 years. Should we be surprised? His trashing of de Chirico, and perhaps his initial praise, seems, looking back, like avarice with an aesthetic face. Retaining The Enigma of a Day was, if nothing else, the economic thing to do.

Which brings us to 1929 and the publication of Hebdomeros, a novel that appeared so surreptitiously and with such visionary force that it left many of de Chirico’s opponents stunned into awe-inspired silence. Breton was no exception. After tirelessly insisting on de Chirico’s aesthetic irrelevance, the success of Hebdomeros and Breton’s begrudging admiration for it caught him in an inconvenient contradiction. His resolution was to argue, with little persuasiveness, that de Chirico must have written Hebdomeros before the war. De Chirico, perhaps sensing his winning hand, personally sent a copy of the book to his former friend. The inscription read only two words: Très cordialement.

Hadn’t de Chirico left it all behind ­— Surrealism, metaphysics, real images of a world beyond? A decade post his modernist schism, not only had de Chirico written what could only be called a Surrealist novel, he had written the Surrealist novel. Nadja is interesting; Hebdomeros is something more.

The story, supposedly, recounts a lowly gamine’s outlandish journey from a floating Mediterranean village to the great cities of the Continent and back again. There is, supposedly, a baseline chronology to the novel. Just as de Chirico, supposedly, changed art history during a single revelatory afternoon in a Florentine piazza. With de Chirico, everything can feel like manufactured reality. If ever a painter reveled in his own mythology, this was he. “Maestro,” asked the writer Costanzo Costantini in a 1978 interview, “Do you believe in God?” De Chirico replied that he did not. “Is there nothing you believe in?” asked Costantini. Replied the painter: “I believe in Giorgio de Chirico. Isn’t that enough?”

De Chirico’s second wife, Isabella Far, illuminated her husband’s tendency to fawn over his own legend when, in an equally fawning monograph, she traced his feeling for poetry and myth back to his early years spent unconsciously absorbing the lore of his patrimonial land. Growing up in Greece put a man in relation to history. The ways in which this self-mythologizing shows up in Hebdomeros are too plentiful to enumerate; let us settle momentarily on the name. It’s a kind of Odyssean pun, loosely translated as “The Seventh Homer.” Yet over the course of 140 pages, the protagonist comes to resemble not so much a facsimile of the man born off the coast of Asia Minor 3,000 years ago, but rather a fantastical portrait of a man born on the shores of Greece’s Pagasetic Gulf in 1888.

Hebdomeros is a committed artist, a liberated individual, a soft-core misanthrope at once sympathetic to and highly suspicious of those around him. (Sound familiar?) He is, above all, a wanderer through time, a nomad who merges, or likes to imagine he merges, as easily into Parisian bohemia as he does the old port towns of ancient Hellenic myth. Often he merges into a memory he never even lived, gazing upon a dead bird on a table and recalling himself in a Brueghel-like scene, roistering with a pack of hunters at an inn. It’s a supposition no longer viable but one that the early 20^th-century modernists liked to make: that they belonged among, communicated with, and saw themselves in the great artists of the past.

The novel’s whirring engine, the thing that transports us from one scene to another, is a game of image associations that seem to replicate the oddities of memory. In one case, the sight of cockroaches crawling at the bottom of some empty pots evokes in Hebdomeros the memory of a fisherman he once knew. If it isn’t exactly Breton’s famous “psychic automatism” reflected in prose, Hebdomeros dances on a similar stage. Chronological freedom produces mnemonic freedom. A liquid movement horizontally, between hours, days, decades, and millennia, enables a liquid movement vertically, into and out of the protean depths of memory. In one instance, Hebdomeros is on a café terrace looking up into the night and seeing the Heavenly Twins, Pisces, Orion, and the Scales. Determined not to let such an enjoyable night slip away, he stays there, terrace-bound, gazing upward at the stars, thinking. By the next paragraph break, he has been wondering for a full 24 hours. Night has turned to day and back to night again. The reader, and Hebdomeros, are none the wiser. For Hebdomeros, time is a loosely flowing substance; leave it unattended and it melts like a Dalí clock.

It would all be just a dull mess of imagistic entrapments and labyrinthine recollections if de Chirico weren’t such a gifted writer. Let it be recalled that de Chirico was so constitutionally a painter that he referred to himself, not at all aggrandizingly, as Pictor Optimus. If he isn’t exactly Scriptor Optimus, he knows what a semicolon is and has a true writer’s sense of how to use it. This is where Hebdomeros separates itself from Nadja, the automatists, and even our nowadays would-be stylists who try to unleash their torrents of memory prose in predictable, mannered streams of consciousness, all commas and swerves and slippages in italics. De Chirico’s method is perhaps less automatic but more refined. The elongated sequences of atmospheric and completely unique imagery, which any de Chirico aficionado comes to expect, are buttressed by a writerly approach to syntax. Semicolons, the building up of images clause by clause, and paragraphs stuffed to bursting point with disorienting cut-scenes and rather jocose language that run for pages at a time. The effect, ultimately, is like that of a Tarkovsky film or the great haiku poets: there is a completely seamless shifting of tenses.

By now you’ll notice the paucity of detail about the plot of this book. Lest one accuse me of manufacturing my own form of reality, I should probably address the matter. What I have described thus far ­­— journeys into the bottomless maze of memory, page-wide platters of imagistic mille-feuilles ordered in the loosest of chronologies ­— more or less constitutes the bulk of what “happens” in this book, and if it strikes you that 150 pages of labyrinthine enigmatics might get grating, I am here to confirm, of course, it does. This is not a book for low-scorers on the openness test. It’s not a book for people who need audio guides when they visit the Met, or whose first instinct when faced with a Braque is to wonder whether he’s disassembled a guitar or a violin. Readers who enjoy tendentious “methodological” conversations about “decenteredness” and “the artist as practitioner” will probably get something out of Hebdomeros. The rest of us will, more often than not, get lost in the maze.

Which seems, on the balance of things, precisely the feeling de Chirico intended to convey. Jean Cocteau, who offered de Chirico the predictably elusive moniker le mystère laïc — apparently Pictor Optimus wasn’t sufficiently mythologizing — argued that every one of the mystère’s paintings was a rebuke to its viewer. DO NOT ENTER, they all say; WRONG WAY. His great metaphysical paintings have that vertiginous feeling, a sense that you’re slipping away from them, which is in part why they’re so irresistible.

De Chirico was himself the epitome of the fugitive spirit, caught between styles and fashions, lost in place and time. By the completion of Hebdomeros, he had moved, in his 41 years of life, between a grab bag of painterly aesthetics, at least eight different cities, and a gamut of languages. His peregrinations, beginning in Volos, had driven him westward to Germany, on to the old stones of Italy, the tawdry rapture of Paris in the waning hours of its Belle Époque, through the barracks of the Great War, the sette colli of the Tiber, and then back, almost inevitably, to the Seine, where he ended up writing Hebdomeros in French, which was, by some accounts, his third language — and by other accounts his fourth.

De Chirico liked to say his protector was Hermes, or his Roman equivalent Mercury, guardian of travelers. The same can be said for Hebdomeros, who stops suddenly at the image of Mercury “driving before him toward the darkness of sleep his flock of dreams,” a reference perhaps to Fragonard, Lorrain, or Millet, all of whom painted Mercury as a shepherd, and all of whom de Chirico admired. Both Hebdomeros and his creator are wanderers wading through the past, led by a sacred obligation they do not control.

Of course, the thing about journeys is that they must, inevitably, come full circle. Hebdomeros ends with a kind of sweeping and overstuffed homecoming scene, an endless stream of familial reminiscences as Hebdomeros rejoins his motherland. Is this happening in his memory, in his imagination, or in the real world? That de Chirico went six decades without Volos, from when he first left until he finally returned, might, to some, demonstrate the nourishing power of nostalgia; it might, too, suggest something about the creative imagination — the idea that picturing a moment could be better than living in it. It was reported that when he returned back to the shores of Volos in 1973, de Chirico stopped and said: “I will fall to the ground and weep.” Hebdomeros, if not so emotively, would echo the sentiment. “Better to return as a ghost,” he says, “than never at all.”

Elroy Rosenberg is an arts journalist from Melbourne, Australia, currently based in New York.