October 29, 1986
Dear Mr Gol/d\berg,
In the July 1986 issue of Art in America you reviewed my most recent novel, What's Bred in the Bone, and I am obliged to you for the many kind things you say about it. The article has just come into my hands, as I have been away for several weeks, and there is a passage in it which interests me very much and I would be grateful if you could throw some light on it.
You speak of the letter that Papini published in Libro Nero in 1952 and say that it is `generally discredited' and later on speak of Papini's `barefaced bogus statements,' and suggest that I have been gullible in my use of the letter.
I assure you I took a great deal of trouble to investigate the matter of the letter, which first came to my notice in the writing of a well known English art critic who had accepted it as authentic. As the letter seemed a curious confession on Picasso's part, I made further enquiries and could find no evidence that Picasso had ever refuted the letter, or that Papini was other than a respectable interviewer and editor--to say nothing of his substantial reputation as a philosopher. I am curious, therefore, about the certainty with which you dismiss the letter and would be glad to hear from you with references which discredit it, other than the natural distaste of the art world for such a strange confession. I think that you have been unfair to me in omitting to mention that in my novel, directly following the letter, follows a conversation in which an art critic says about the letter very much what you have said yourself--but I understand, of course, that reviewers are obliged to read very rapidly.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Robertson Davies
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11 December 1986
Dear Mr Davies,
Your letter suggests that you are a careful man, but even a careful man, on occasion, may omit the d in Goldberg in a first draft.
I, too, occasionally nod. I simply assumed that your date of 1952 for the first appearance of the Il Libro Nero "interview" was accurate, but there are some who claim it's November 5th, 1951. This, of course, is pedantic nitpicking. What I can tell you about the Papini material is that it was generally discredited even at the time it first appeared (witness the enclosed [not included here] which I happened to run across at New York's Museum of Modern Art library the other day: it's from the periodical Arts, published in Paris, in the issue of 19 June 1952, no. 364, p. 9. You'll note from the text that Arts is hardly a left-wing rag whitewashing one of its pinko pals. Given the year of the publication--1951-1952--the politics of Papini are as potentially suggestive as the art politics involved). I think, by and large, Pierre Cabanne's statement on the Papini affair (vid. Le Siècle de Picasso, vol. 2, pp.202-3) represents the considered position of recent Picasso scholarship.
No, I don't believe that I was unfair to you in not mentioning Ross's statements in his conversation with Francis. (I certainly hope I wasn't.) As I recall, Ross tacitly accepts Papini's Picasso as genuine and argues extenuating circumstances, the artist down in the dumps. While I'm sure that even Picasso had his bad days (many of them according to Olivier, Sabartès, Gilot, Penrose, et al.), I don't believe that makes this relevant or the interview genuine. Perhaps your awareness of other possible interpretations of the "interview" would be
more persuasive (vis-a-vis modern art) if your (and our) sympathy wasn't so squarely with Francis as opposed to that solipsistic and obnoxiously ambitious smoothie.
The key problem that I find with the Papini business, however, is not its validity or lack of it (which we can leave to art historians) but the melodramatic way in which it's used. That Francis (hardly a bumpkin in aesthetic matters) would take Papini at face value and instantly, out of a sense of betrayal, give up his quest to become a modern painter is to me unconvincing. All he would have to do (though, of course, this is more time-consuming fictionally speaking) is look at Picasso's work and stop thinking of him as THE MASTER. Had he studied the man's art half as hard as he did that of Harry Furniss he could hardly have dismissed him as a cynical quack, an Iberian money-making machine. In any event, would you yourself care one whit less for Lear (assuming you have a partiality for beards) if some "respectable editor" turned up an interview with Bill in which he called himself nothing more than a public entertainer compared to those heavyweights Holinshed, Spenser, and Higgins?
As I said in my Art in America review, I did indeed enjoy the cornucopic pleasures of your novel, which I read very very slowly. That, alas, is the way I write, too; otherwise this note would have reached you much sooner.
Happy holidays!
Cordially,
Gerald Jay Goldberg
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These letters are in Gerald Jay Goldberg's UCLA archive.
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