Jacqueline, My Friend

Jacqueline, My Friend Mary Ann Caws (bio) How I loved Jacqueline Lamba! When I first went to see this very beautiful and affectionate painter, I learned immediately that nothing about Jacqueline was general, it was all specific. She said instantly: “Don’t call me an artist, please: Je suis peintre. / I am a painter.” As long as I knew her, over many, many years, she was impassioned, involved, and never ever boring. That was, in fact, the one thing she was unable to bear: whatever and whomever bored her. I had first known Jacqueline when Yves Bonnefoy, a great and ennobling friend, had asked me to meet and interview her. So I went, with my first husband at the wheel (I am a narcoleptic, and sleep at the wheel of any car). He was a British philosopher with whom I lived in our cabanon, a very (VERY) rustic cabin in Mormoiron in the Vaucluse, in Provence. (We purchased it because I wanted, perhaps we wanted, to live near René Char on whom I was writing and whom I was translating.) The scorpions and snails and dor-mice loved our moving in: they certainly felt no obligation to move out. And never did. So, we went to see Jacqueline, and I was instantly and always delighted to be her friend. I managed to see her every time I was in France, in Paris for sabbaticals or summers, or in the cabanon we loved—having, alas, had to cut down the [End Page 93] tree in the kitchen and having hung all our kitchen implements on a tractor wheel above the table (around which we loved assembling our friends of various languages and countries and genders). We had to avoid the mice (well, usually not rats) who loved scampering around the furniture, itself riddled with holes for animal dwellings. Jacqueline would come to see us, really for the children as well as their parents, holding them each by a hand when they would all walk up our hill. She was as loving a friend as possible, and since they went to French schools the language was not an issue. The children all had no problem with our not having such a thing as indoor toilets, since we had a field usable for all kinds of actions, not just picking the cherries from our trees, but more mundane events. Often, with Jacqueline, they would stroll out together up the street (not really much of a street) or over the field of grass and snails. They would examine the olive trees, and together lament the theft of our major olive tree downstairs—for we had an upstairs, up the stone steps, where we slept and sometimes had our lunch and supper, and a downstairs in the kitchen, as well as the dormice, and a table outside. Jacqueline loved picnics, hated restaurants because you had to wait, and really liked relaxing by any wayside with us. We would wait for her to arrive in L’Isle-sur-Sorgue on the bus from the village over the hills, Simiane-la-Rotonde, where she lived and painted. I would often see Jacqueline in Paris, up the five flights of stairs she would glide up in her long skirts—she had taken them up in Mexico, where Frida Kahlo was her close friend when she was there with André Breton. She would prepare me a lunch and a conversation, to be savored equally, and we would talk about Jacques Lacan, whose course I was following (and brought her along one day, since we had so often spoken of psychotherapy and our readings of this and that, such as Winnicott and so on). We spoke often of René Char, and it turned out, of course, that she had known him with Breton, and so, one day when he came by, she had left some canvasses rolled up to show him. Thereby, through those conversations, a long tale of deep friendship and talk about our former loves, on the topic of which we could all expound at length. [End Page 94] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jacqueline Lamba, Simiane, 1964, oil on paint. © Aube Breton Éll...