by Jesse Curran
In the summer of 1942, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry sat, with coffee and cigarette, drafting The Little Prince. In the window next to his desk, the salty breeze shifted the curtains. At the same time, Arthur Dove sat painting about three miles south as the osprey flies across the Cow Harbor Bay. The same breeze shifted his curtains. They both glimpsed the sea and breathed the briny air, then proceed to create within the hilly and jagged coastline of Long Island’s north shore. This is the coastline I call home. It also absorbs my days. Within it, I’m both bound and free.
By 1942, Arthur Dove was a bit of an invalid, having endured a series of medical ailments due to Bright’s disease. By then, the Nazis were taking over Europe, which has much to do with why Saint-Exupéry was stuck in New York. He escaped the summer in the city by coming out to a quieter Long Island, still nursing his own wartime injuries. In July of 1944, Saint-Exupéry would go missing on a mission to Corsica. Dove would pass away in 1946, spending his last years with decreasing mobility, though with sustained creativity.
Saint-Exupéry wrote most of The Little Prince on the southside of Eaton’s Neck in Northport, looking off to Duck Island Harbor and beyond to the Cow Harbor Bay (now called Northport Bay). He and his wife, Consuelo, had rented an old Victorian mansion called the Bevin House. Few knew he was there. Until recently, I did not know he was there, though I’ve lived in Northport for over a decade and was born across the bay in neighboring Huntington. I never knew this most poetic and perfect novelette, a book I fell in love with in eleventh grade French class, was largely composed so close to home. The fabled traveler from Planet B-612 had travelled, in some way, to my locale.
A native of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, Dove spent most of his adult life on the north shore of Long Island, colliding modern abstractionism with an Emersonian fascination in the aesthetic preeminence of the American ecological scene. He lived for years on a sailboat and his practical captivation with tides, winds, and other climate patterns moves through his art. Poor health eventually confined him to a small cottage on the Centerport Mill Pond, though his letters reveal he was quite happy there. In June 1942, Dove wrote to his dear friend Stiglitz, “Have been watching a blackbird drying off after his bath—in tree—in front of me here. Good for one ’43 Dove painting, I hope. Vigorous….” (Morgan 470).
The painting that emerged, Blackbird, is by all means a vigorous one. It is decidedly more representational and less abstract than some of Dove’s other late work; the bird is clearly a bird, bathed in a sea-sky-sun of primary color. The painting is held by the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid and though the museum’s website offers a high-resolution image (you can zoom in on the strokes and see the streaks of brush fiber moving the color), save for a holiday in Spain, it remains in two dimensions. Recently, I was able to take a close look at a couple of Dove oils held locally, in the Heckscher Museum’s collection, laid out on a table in their storage warehouse. I squatted down and gazed at the surface of the painting from eye-level, enthralled with the texture, something the computer screen or art book just cannot capture. I imagine there is vigor and texture in Blackbird that I simply cannot see. Birds do not exist in two dimensions.
As the osprey flies across the bay, my house in Northport Village could be a third point creating a triangle between the Bevin House and Dove’s cottage. The views, the seasonal round, the flora and fauna, are all part of my native vocabulary, though my relationship to Long Island has been a tangled one. Long Island’s suburban explosion and the toxic culture that came with it haunt my days. While Antoine and Arthur would have easily dipped in the sea anywhere along the miles of twisting coastline, I’m mindful of the runoff and the hypoxia and the bacteria that sometimes can bloom in our beautiful bays. Still, I’ve been blessed to also live in little houses with water views, and on my daily walks and runs, I trace the jagged coastal edge and soak in all the change each day yields. On these jogs, which have become a type of spiritual medicine for me, I contemplate the pilot Saint-Exupéry and the sailor Dove, one settled at his desk in the Bevin House, the other in his wheel chair in front of an easel on the Mill Pond. Both watching birds, both acutely aware of the olfactory bouquet that is a tidal mudflat. Both bound to place, by war and illness respectively, yet also both opened by that place. Indeed, what these writers share is place itself. What they share is my place. And as a literary poet-critic, I’m confounded by what this means. I shift my gaze to the sky.
In contemplating the dictum, geography is destiny, and in fathoming the formative primacy of place, I’ve been pulling books down from shelves on the phenomenology of place. In particular, the work of philosopher Ed Casey, who writes, “Nothing we do is unplaced. How could it be otherwise? How could we fail to recognize this primal fact?” (ix). Place is so immensely encompassing, so connected to our ecological enmeshment, that sorting out all of the inputs and outputs can prove dizzying. Place, as a field of ecological enmeshment, asks us to engage in an expansive form of bodily thinking. And perhaps art created in our places might guide us to attune and embrace the body’s sense perception as it inhales the field and then adds breath back to it.
Although much of The Little Prince is set on imaginary planets out in space, the narrator describes how the hero comes to Earth: “In order to make his escape, I believe he took advantage of a migration of wild birds” (25). What is it about a wild bird that sets us free and brings us home? Dove usually signed his paintings in the bottom center with a script Dove, stamping his work with not only his surname, but also an allusion to one of the natural world’s most metaphorical creatures. Sometimes I like to think of Dove as a dove, capable of shifting perception beyond a representational likeness, simplifying the objects of nature to, in his words, “color and force lines and substances, just as music has done with sound” (Morgan 146). Perhaps wild birds are a musical counterpoint to our earth-bound existence.
I can’t easily trace a logic-driven line between Saint-Exupery’s wild birds, Dove’s blackbird, and my osprey observations. Somehow, I feel more sincere in not tracing the line of connection with an argument, but rather finding meaning through the presentation of an expanse of salt water and open sky. Perhaps place-based reflection exists on the edge of argumentation, defying a logical line of thought in favor of a sensory field of being. What is certain is that these artists dwell in my sensory field, and their work has become less of an idea for me and more a means of living more fully in my place. Like the concert mistress striking an open A so the rest of the orchestra might tune, art created in one’s place provides an occasion for sensory alignment. Through deep observation and interaction with both the art and field, we might stereoscopically use one to help read the other. Or, as philosopher Megan Craig writes, “The painter knows things about places that no one else knows, as the blind sense things about color that the sighted never discern” (151). As Saint-Exupéry writes, “anything essential is invisible to the eyes” (63).
Adèle Breaux, the high school French teacher, who served as Saint-Exupéry’s English tutor in the summer of 42, noted in her memoir that her pupil described the Bevin House as “a haven for writing—the best place I have ever had anywhere in my life” (85). In my best moments, I feel this too. This Northport coast offers a haven for writing; the muse is here, flapping her wings outside my window. I sense Dove knew this, and that the blackbird drying off, “good for one ’43 painting,” became—becomes—a painting, which in turn, teaches me things about place that no one else knows.
Works Cited
Breaux, Adèle. Saint-Exupéry in America, 1942-1943, A Memoir. Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971.
Casey, Edward. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. University of California Press, 1997.
Craig, Megan. “Slipping Glancer: Painting Place with Ed Casey,” in Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey: Giving Voice to Place, Memory, and Imagination. Bloomsbury, 2013.
Morgan, Ann Lee. Dear Stiglitz, Dear Dove. University of Delaware Press, 1988.
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. The Little Prince. Translated by Richard Howard. Mariner Books, 2000.
Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in a number of literary journals including Allium, About Place, Spillway, Leaping Clear, Ruminate, Blueline, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. She teaches in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury. www.jesseleecurran.com
After the Art 