La Vie en Rosé

The art of Natalie D’Arbeloff, which often combines image and text, has a directness and simplicity that may at first sight appear childlike. But it’s quite the reverse. For all its immediacy, it’s both subtle and profound, adult in the best as opposed to the X-rated sense. It comes from someone who knows the world and herself. Perhaps “knows” is too strong. The person who has “seen it all” can be cynical and jaded. Natalie is the opposite. Having met her face to face, I have the sense that she and her art are at one in their mission to radiate a joyous sense of wonder at this world, and the opportunities to make a significant mark upon it.

La Vie en Rosé is a short book. She calls it an illustrated novella. I think of it as a fable with a happy ending. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it started as part of a game between a group of bright people. In the case of Mary Godwin, as she was then, the players included Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she married, and Lord Byron. Cold weather prevented the outdoor activities they’d hoped for on a holiday beside Lake Geneva, so a game was devised. Each of them would write a ghost story. In Natalie’s case it was an online group and the game was a form of “Consequences”. Each in turn must write a 250-word story. Its opening line would be the closing one of the previous story. The one she was given was:

We gulp what is here and ours and nobody’s and nothing’s

You can read about it in her words here. I’m guessing that this line put her in mind of drinking and nihilism. So she created a recovering alcoholic expatriate Englishwoman living in a French village, married to a fashionable English poet, supporting him, arranging his lecture tours. The situation is unstable: we see it unravelling before our eyes. At a party he leaves his glass of rosé with her so as to flirt with the teetotal hostess, and whatever that may lead to. He’s devilish-handsome and it wouldn’t be the first time. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, says Byron. She gulps down the wine he’s so thoughtlessly left her guarding. Three years dry, now ready to drown in an instant. The wine inside her wants company, more of the same. After her long drought, she pours it down her throat from the bottle. Will she, like many a captive wife, merely punish herself, or will she break free of the two tyrants in her life? We know not. She flees the party, accosts a passing village priest, the reclusive Père Lafitte.

I imagine that it was around this point that the 250 words prescribed by the game ran out, perhaps with her drunken words to the priest as she grabs his arm, “Get me to a nunnery!”

Be that as it may, her characters came to life, refused to end it there. Readers wanted to know what happened & so did Natalie. She’s an artist who’s fond of having dialogues: with herself, or the angel Gabriel. She even got herself a reporter’s notebook and interviewed God, producing the best best comic book I’ve read. Perhaps her entire oeuvre may be seen as a dialogue: with herself, divinity, the reader and viewer.

To continue: the priest shudders at being accosted by a drunken woman, out in the street at night. It would be enough of an ordeal for him in the safe haven of a confessional booth. He’s not an outgoing man.

Père Lafitte was used to silence, he craved it as others crave communication . . .

But an unlikely relationship develops between the spurned wife resolved to start anew and a priest who has dreams of his own, dreams not incompatible, it needs to be said, with his ordained and celibate status.

I said it was a fable. It’s a fable about daydreams, and whether they should be realized in concrete form. The character of the priest is well-realized, his bleak solitary life with a few consolations—the bottle of good cognac he keeps in a cupboard for moments of need, the book he ritually reads at bedtime (Exploits Étranges et Extraordinaires), his secret garden. In certain ways, I see myself in him. At any rate, I recognize him as a real person, especially when he says:

I do not need to make my dreams come true.

(Some of us do say this. I do, daily, as I ponder whether I need to, want to, am prepared to, make the effort to, convert intense experience into written form. I’m sure Natalie must hesitate too, before sacrificing her ease on a new and demanding project.

Susan / Suzanne is equally real: a woman striving for her own independent life, no heroine, perhaps an allegory of Everywoman, lightly portrayed but real in her predicament, real in her quest to define herself.

from Trans-Siberian Prosody and Little Jeanne from France,
poems translated from Blaise Cendrars

Great is the author, in my estimation, who restricts herself to hints and nuances, who gives space to the reader to superimpose his own life-experience, to fill out the characters and situations. In a short novella or long short-story such a light sketching-in is a must. An inferior author or screenwriter will fall back on cliché. Not here. Yes, La Vie en Rosé could spawn a movie—though not with that title because it’s too close to La Vie en Rose about the life of Edith Piaf, named from a love-song she wrote. The mix of characters is reminiscent of an Iris Murdoch plot, but simple where Murdoch is convoluted and gothic. In Père Lafitte I see echoes of celibates in John Cowper Powys, a novelist who like Ms D’Arbeloff puts himself into each character, whose vividness shines from reflecting aspects of his soul.

I said it was a fable about dreams, and the possibility of their realization. Our author chooses a marvellous example from real life, the postman Ferdinand Cheval, who spent thirty-three years of his life building “Le Palais Idéal”.

a page from The Augustine Adventures, No. 3

Having visited Natalie and seen some of her prolific work accumulated over many decades, I glimpse her sympathy for this man who was never, unlike Père Lafitte, content with mere dreaming. His work was hardly recognized in his own lifetime. Natalie has long been recognized and respected but hasn’t achieved the dubious distinction of being fashionable outside a small coterie of connoisseurs. I’ve looked at some reviews she’s written of other artists’ exhibitions, posthumous or otherwise. Reading between the lines, I believe she rates her own work higher than some of what’s revered merely for the big-name, high-priced artist: rightly so. From what I have seen, her work is abundant, modestly-sized, consistently excellent, approachable and a million miles from kitsch. Perhaps there’s nothing there to make a big splash, but she’s made smaller splashes for decades and continues to do so. Her latest work is ambitious and impressive, but unlikely to cause more than a ripple. It’s a large-format a limited-edition book of poems decorated with her vinyl-cuts. I’ve seen her tiny studio with its press for taking proofs. The spirit of William Blake lives on.

Her word-portraits and humorous monologues are as deft and simple as her illustrations and paintings. I’m grateful to have obtained a tiny volume in the series The Augustine Adventures: small packages. It’s a beautifully- presented series, twenty pages each of black-and-white cartoons (A6, stapled). In “Number Three, Oct 1984”, the author’s alter ego, in conversation with a mirror, tries to deal with the absence of wider fame. This is something I dearly wish will be corrected in both our lifetimes.