SOURCE: Glickman, Robert Jay. “Julián Del Casal: Letters to Gustave Moreau.” Revista Hispanica Moderna 37, nos. 1-2, (1972-73): 101-35.

[In the following essay, Glickman assesses the significance of Casal's correspondence with painter Gustave Moreau, noting that the letters served to battle the loneliness and despair of Casal's everyday life.]

Julián del Casal was one of the most sensitive and emotionally vulnerable of the Spanish American Modernists. Disagreeing with the values of contemporary society, opposing authority-figures whom he considered unjust, and moving farther and farther away from the Church despite his desperate need for religious faith, Casal constantly tried to discover ways of protecting himself from the pain that life inflicted on him. He sought escape from daily miseries through dream and through art. He replaced nature with an artificial world of his own making; he cultivated the exotic; he investigated the macabre. And possessed of a boundless need to love and be loved, but incapable of forming close emotional ties with women, he used his artistic interests as a vehicle for establishing platonic relationships that would help him conquer loneliness.

It is in the latter respect, primarily, that Casal's epistolary activities are important. He corresponded with compatriots such as Cirilo Villaverde, Esteban and Juana Borrero, Aurelia Castillo de González, América Du-Bouchet, and Edouard Cornelius Price, as well as with distinguished non-Cubans such as Rubén Darío, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Luis G. Urbina, Francisco A. de Icaza, Enrique Gómez Carrillo, José María Bustillos, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Pedro II of Brazil, Judith Gautier, Paul Verlaine, Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Gustave Moreau. Whenever a friend or colleague visited his modest quarters, Casal would joyously display the letters he had received. These papers, he would say, are “los compañeros de mi vida.”¹ So great an impression did this ritual make on Rubén Darío that he continued to recall it vividly many years after Casal's demise.²

Realizing how valuable Casal's epistolary treasures were, Aniceto Valdivia expected that Carmen del Casal would collect them and preserve them after her brother's death.³ If Carmen did collect these documents, she guarded them so jealously that they eventually became inaccessible to the scholarly community. Another serious loss resulted when Dulce María Borrero died before she could publish the letters that Casal and her sister Juana had exchanged.⁴

In spite of the factors that have militated against their survival, a few of the letters that Casal wrote to his contemporaries have come down to us. A facsimile of the poet's first letter to Luis G. Urbina was published in the April 1909 issue of the Revista Moderna de México. Five brief notes were collected by José Antonio Fernández de Castro and were printed in the March 1923 issue of Social. Three letters were found by Gustavo Duplessis and were incorporated into his doctoral dissertation, which was published in 1944 by the Revista Bimestre Cubana. In the following decade, four new letters by Casal came to the attention of José María Chacón y Calvo; these were printed together with some already-known material in the Fall 1958 issue of the Boletín de la Academia Cubana de la Lengua. Two additional notes came out in 1963, when Cuba's Consejo Nacional de Cultura published its Centenary Edition of Casal's works.⁵ And so it goes: every once in a while, some part of Casal's correspondence turns up and is placed at the disposition of scholars.

Now, twelve letters that Casal sent to Gustave Moreau have become available for study. These letters span the period 11 August 1891-1 January 1893. Eleven of them were written in the poet's imperfect but highly expressive French, and one was composed in Spanish. In order to facilitate research on this material, the complete collection is designated as C (i.e., Cartas), each letter within the collection is tagged with a number that represents its position in the series (C1, C2, etc.), and each line within a letter is assigned a sequence number. According to this system, the designation “C5/8-14” refers the reader to “letter 5, lines 8 through 14.”

The significance of these letters becomes apparent at once. To begin with, they provide information about Casal's level of proficiency in French. But more important, they shed light on an aspect of his life that has been shrouded in mystery for some eighty years: his relations with his most venerated source of inspiration in the world of art, Gustave Moreau.⁶

.....

Born in Paris on 6 April 1826, Gustave Moreau came to be one of Europe's most outstanding symbolist painters. The dominant theme in Moreau's art is the perpetual conflict between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil. These opponents are symbolically represented through the eternal war between the sexes. In Moreau's opinion, all the major virtues are inherent in Man, while all the major vices are inherent in Woman. In his paintings, therefore, qualities such as altruism, courage, and justice are generally embodied in handsome young men like Prometheus or Hercules, while covetousness, corruption, and cruelty appear in the form of women like Helen of Troy and Salomé. Indifferent to the suffering she causes, Woman is particularly dangerous because of the irresistible attraction which her sensuous beauty exerts on the targets of her destructive instincts. As far as style is concerned, critics have repeatedly used two terms to describe the essential characteristics of Moreau's art: “la belle inertie” and “la richesse nécessaire.” The former alludes to the almost enchanted stillness of the figures in his compositions; the latter refers to the immense number of decorative elements which the artist believed necessary to convey his ideas to the observer.

In spite of the fact that Moreau received numerous honors, awards, and commendations during his lifetime,⁷ it should be emphasized that he was not especially well known to the general public and that his creations elicited sharp criticism as well as extravagant praise. For example, while an admirer such as Ary Renan felt that the work of Moreau was a monument of pure art, Degas severely criticized Moreau for indulging in excessive ornamentation: the artist, Degas sarcastically quipped, would like us to believe that the gods wore watch chains. Be that as it may, the fact is that Moreau was in great favor with some of the most outstanding writers of his time—among them, Théophile Gautier and Joris-Karl Huysmans. What these men admired most in his works were his expression of an ultra-refined aestheticism, his expert handling of detail, and his mastery of symbolism.

Although it is impossible to determine when Casal first became familiar with the art of Gustave Moreau, it seems that his initial exposure came about through the medium of Joris-Karl Huysmans in the spring of 1890.⁸ In any case, it could not have been later than 21 September 1890, for on that date, in La Habana Elegante, he published “Salomé,” the first of the ten cuadros that ultimately appeared in the “Mi museo ideal” section of Nieve. Casal's enthusiasm led him to write to a contact in Paris—most likely Huysmans himself—at some time between the summer of 1890 and the summer of 1891, in order to find out how he could obtain reproductions of Moreau's paintings. Before the beginning of August 1891, he received prints of Hélène sur les murs de Troie and Galatée. The first of these inspired him to compose “Elena”; the second, “Galatea.” Casal published these sonnets in La Habana Elegante on 2 August and 9 August 1891, respectively. Then, on the 11th of the month, he wrote his first letter to Moreau; with it he enclosed copies of the three sonnets he had already written under the inspiration of Moreau's work.⁹ Since he did not know the address of his “Très-adorè maître,”¹⁰ however, he sent the letter by registered mail to Huysmans, with a request that it be forwarded to Moreau.¹¹

Three days after mailing this letter, Casal received a shipment of pictures from the Photographie des Beaux-Arts, 8 rue Bonaparte, Paris. A catalogue number was written on the back of each item, but none of the photos had a title. The only works that Casal identified positively were L'Apparition, Hercule et l'Hydre de Lerne, and Prometheus. Of the eleven remaining pictures, he thought he could recognize the subject of eight (C2/25-40),¹² but had no idea of what the others represented. Casal's failure to identify three of the pictures was a disappointment of only minor importance, however, since the works that he did succeed in recognizing more than lived up to his expectations about the quality of Moreau's art (C2/59-79).

In the days that followed, while waiting for Moreau to identify the doubtful items and to tell him where he could purchase additional photographs,¹³ Casal wrote seven new sonnets: “Prometeo,” “La aparición,” “Hércules ante la Hidra,” “Venus Anadyomena,” “Una peri,” “Júpiter y Europa,” and “Hércules y las Estinfálides.” Then, on 30 August 1891, he published all ten Moreau-inspired sonnets in La Habana Elegante. The poems were grouped under the generic title “Mi museo ideal” and had as their subtitle the rubric “(Cuadros de Gustavo Moreau).” Beneath the subtitle was a four-line quotation from Joséphin Soulary.¹⁴ This, in turn, was followed by a dedication to Casal's friend Eduardo Rosell.

On 16 September 1891, after receiving his first letter from Moreau, Casal sent the painter a copy of the La Habana Elegante version of “Mi museo ideal” plus a photograph of himself. This picture was made by Ignacio Misa from a portrait that Armando Menocal had done a short time before. On the reverse side was the following inscription:

                              A
                    Gustave Moreau,
                              au
          maitre venerable et impeccable,
en temoignage de profond admi-
ration et de reconnaissance infinie,
cet portrait est respectueusement
dediè, par son fervent et obscur
admirateur

Julián del Casal

Evidence suggests that Casal sent these gifts to Moreau for three reasons: first, because he wanted to give Moreau tangible proof of his great devotion; second, because he was ill and did not know whether he would live long enough to present himself in person to Moreau; and third, because he hoped that his gesture would induce Moreau to send a photograph of himself, in return.

On 15 December 1891, as an additional sign of esteem, Casal sent Moreau two still unpublished compositions, “Sueño de gloria” and “Vestíbulo.” The former, he insisted, was not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it did represent a sincere expression of his feelings. The latter was a verbal portrait of Moreau. If it contained some inexactitudes, Casal explained, these were due to the fact that he had never seen a picture of the great master. After giving Moreau this exclusive preview of the poems, Casal published them in Cuba: “Sueño de gloria” came out in La Habana Literaria on 30 December 1891 and “Vestíbulo,” presented under the title “Gustave Moreau,” appeared in El Figaro on 15 January 1892 and in El Pais on 21 January of the same year.

Initially, Casal told Moreau that he would publish Nieve in the winter of 1891-1892 and that “Mi museo ideal” would be the third section in the book (C1/23-27). For reasons that are still not clear, Nieve was published in the spring of 1892 and “Mi museo ideal” was moved up to second place in the volume. Furthermore, the subtitle that Casal had used for the Moreau poems in August 1891 was replaced in Nieve by “(Diez cuadros de Gustavo Moreau),” the epigraph of the original version was suppressed, and Casal's most recent compositions, “Vestíbulo” and “Sueño de gloria,” were added to the series.¹⁵

Apparently flattered by these attentions, Moreau suggested that José María de Heredia might translate one of Casal's poems into French. With sincere modesty, Casal protested that he was unworthy of such an honor. Heredia was one of the gods in his literary pantheon: not only had Casal translated “Chanson de Torero” into Spanish (see “La canción del torero” in Hojas al viento—), but he had also tried to imitate the style of Heredia's sonnets in “Mi museo ideal” (C6/99-129). For a relatively unknown writer like himself, to do this was right and proper; but to think that a person of Heredia's stature might want to translate his poetry seemed rather presumptuous to Casal.¹⁶

This tone of extreme humility is evident throughout Casal's correspondence with Moreau. The young Cuban honestly felt that he was “un rêveur malade sans valeur” (C5/21-22) and when he wrote to persons of eminence such as Moreau, he sounded like an adolescent addressing a stage idol or a popular hero. But this was something which he could not avoid, for he was unable to love halfway (C3/66), and love for him was a sine qua non of existence: as he put it, “Je vis d'adorations, comme d'autres de méprises” (C6/114-116). His love was most intense, however, when it was directed to someone far away. In order to nurture his dreams, which were his most important possession, he needed to have a master in some distant land. That person had to be guided by the highest of values and had also to be a victim of life's incomprehension and cruelty. In Casal's view, such a person would be characterized by an uncompromising devotion to the ideal of art for art's sake and by a steadfast resistance to the enticements of Fame. In Casal's estimation, Moreau exemplified these traits better than anyone else on the continent of Europe (C6/38-69).

After glorifying his beloved master in “Mi museo ideal,” Casal composed five ballades and several odelettes under the inspiration of Moreau's work (C8/17-26, C10/37-39). Unfortunately, none of these poems has ever been found. An even greater loss to scholars, however, is the disappearance of preliminary notes that Casal had taken for a monograph he proposed to write on the life and works of Gustave Moreau. As background for his study, Casal planned to read everything that had been written about the painter (C6/79-91). Then, he would travel to Paris in order to meet Moreau and work on the book. According to his estimate, he would be able to stay in Paris for about two months. After completing the monograph, he would ask the artist for his frank opinion of it—and if Moreau did not understand Spanish well enough, Casal would get a bilingual friend, possibly Cornelius Price, to translate it into French (C12/38-62).

As had happened so often in the past, however, the poet did not have the good fortune to realize his dream. Although direct evidence on the subject has never come to light, it appears that the deteriorating state of his health was a major cause of this new disappointment. By the spring of 1892, Casal was already plagued by fevers, fainting spells, loss of vision, and paralysis; and, at times, he suffered pain so intense that he could not even hold a pen (C8/49-53). These were unmistakable signs of the seriousness of his illness—a disease, incidentally, which for a while he thought was heart trouble (C3/50-54). As the pernicious malady spread through Casal's body, it lessened his ability to endure the physical hardships involved in a trip from Havana to Paris. But it raised other barriers to the fulfilment of his dream, as well. First of all, it considerably reduced his economic potential. Casal had always been in precarious financial straits, but by mid-1891 the worsening condition of his health made it increasingly difficult for him to carry a normal work load. Besides limiting his ability to meet his material needs, Casal's life-sapping illness affected his emotional equilibrium. On the one hand, it increased the frequency with which he turned to his private world of glowing fantasy and away from the somber reality of common men. On the other, it decreased his ability to maintain his composure when reality intruded on the dreams that he had so laboriously fashioned. This imbalance is evident in his relationship with Moreau. In his letters, Casal expressed a degree of emotional involvement that went beyond the range of normalcy. And, as he perceived Moreau's reluctance to respond with similar fervor, he adopted the plaintive tone of a suitor whose beloved fails to satisfy his longings for a sign of true affection. What hurt him most deeply, however, was Moreau's refusal to grant his request for a photograph.

The matter of the photograph may seem trivial to us, but it was not to Casal. There is ample evidence to show that the poet was in the habit of sending his picture to persons whom he admired, and that he was accustomed to ask them to reciprocate. His success in the latter regard is verified by Manuel Márquez Sterling, who affirms that the walls of Casal's room were covered by a “nube de retratos.”¹⁷ Casal's attempts to obtain a photograph from Moreau began in September 1891. The months passed, but Moreau sent no photograph. This led the poet to exclaim: “¿N'avez pas vous recu une lettre a moi, en vous demandant votre portrait? Son envoi vous couterais si peu et me rendrerai heureux, si heureux!” (C10/57-61). Moreau's answer was that he had received the letter, but preferred not to send Casal a picture of himself.

Moreau's refusal was not designed to slight Casal personally but was dictated by his sincere belief that, while an artist's work should be freely accessible to the public, the artist himself should disappear from view. So strong, in fact, was his feeling about this matter, that he instructed future executors of his estate not to sanction the inclusion of his portrait in any book that might be written about him after his death.¹⁸

Although Casal understood Moreau's reasons for denying his request, he let over four months go by without answering his beloved master. One obvious cause of his silence was disappointment at Moreau's unwillingness to make an exception in his case—an exception which, in view of the importance that Moreau gave to the rule, would have provided excellent proof of his affection for Casal. Another cause of the long silence was Casal's fear that he might weary Moreau if he persisted in lavishing attentions upon him. The 1st of January 1893, however, provided Casal with an excuse for writing once again. Reaffirming his constancy, he sent Moreau greetings for the New Year and expressed the hope that he would ultimately be able to visit him in Paris. From all appearances, Moreau did not answer this letter and Casal did not attempt to write to him again. In spite of this, there is nothing to suggest that Casal ever gave up being Moreau's “très fidèle, très loyal et très passionnè admirateur …” (C12/66-67).

Notes

1. Manuel Márquez Sterling, “Julián del Casal,” Revista Azul, II, 21 (24 March 1895), 329.

2. See “Films habaneros,” El Fígaro (Havana), 30 October 1910. The entire article is quoted by José María Monner Sans in Julián del Casal y el modernismo hispano-americano (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1952), pp. 254-257, and an excerpt from it is presented in the Edición del Centenario of Casal's work (Havana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963), III, 129-132.

3. Aniceto Valdivia, “Julián del Casal” (La Lucha, 23 October 1893; La Habana Elegante, 29 October 1893); reproduced in Ed. del Cent., “Poesías,” pp. 295-300.

4. Monner Sans, p. 266.

5. See José Antonio Fernández de Castro, “Fragmentos de una correspondencia de Julián del Casal,” Social, VIII, 3 (March 1923), 13; Gustavo Duplessis, “Julián del Casal,” Revista Bimestre Cubana, LIV, 1 (July-August 1944), 65-67; José María Chacón y Calvo, “En torno a un epistolario de Julián del Casal,” Boletín de la Academia Cubana de la Lengua, VII, 3-4 (July-December 1958), 346-373; and Casal, Edición del Centenario, III, 81-90.

6. I take this opportunity to express my thanks to Jean Paladilhe, Curator of the Musée Gustave Moreau, and to Pierre-Louis Mathieu, whose splendid cooperation was an invaluable asset to me in my research on the relationship between Casal and Moreau.

7. In addition to winning awards for paintings exhibited at the Salon, he was named to the Légion d'honneur (1875), he was elected to membership in the Académie des Beaux-Arts (1888), and he was chosen to succeed Élie Delaunay as professor of painting at the Académie (1892). Casal refers to the latter appointment in C9/76-78.

8. In C2/5-7, Casal tells Moreau that he is indebted to Huysmans for “la inmensa dicha de conoceros. …” It appears that Casal had discovered Moreau by reading Huysmans' novel À rebours, which was published in 1884. Casal's earliest allusions to Huysmans are found in “Semana Santa” and “Verdad y poesía,” which he published in La Discusión on 5 April and 26 April 1890, respectively (see Ed. del Cent., II, 99, 115), and antedate all known references to Moreau.

9. The fact that “Salomé” came out almost a full year before the other sonnets raises a question for which there is still no positive answer: namely, despite what he said in C1 and C2, did Casal really wait until he obtained a photograph of Salomé before composing the sonnet, or did he use Huysmans' detailed description in À rebours as his immediate source of inspiration? An examination of that selection will show that if Casal read the Huysmans passage, he would obtain at least as much information about Moreau's Salomé as he would by studying a simple black and white photograph of the painting, for, as Casal himself indicated, “La pluma de Huysmans rivaliza con el pincel de cualquier pintor” (“Joris-Karl Huysmans,” La Habana Literaria, II [15 March 1892], 110). For opinions on the genesis of “Salomé,” see also, John Kenneth Leslie, “Casal's Salomé: The Mystery of the Missing Prophet,” Modern Language Notes, LXII, 6 (June 1947), 402-404, and Arturo Torres Rioseco, “À Rebours and Two Sonnets of Julián del Casal,” Hispanic Review, XXIII, 4 (October 1955), 295-297.

10. Casal's spelling of French and Spanish is reproduced exactly in all instances in the present article.

11. In a letter addressed to Huysmans on 4 October 1891, Moreau wrote the following postscript: “Je ne dois pas oublier, Monsieur, que je suis chargé par Mr. Julian del Casal de la Havane, un de vos fervents admirateurs, de vous bien remercier de l'obligeance si gracieuse que vous avez mise à être un trait d'union entre lui et moi.”

12. Among the works that Casal believed he had identified was La Péri. However, in Le Modernisme hispano-américain et ses sources françaises (Paris: Centre de recherches de l'Institut d'études hispaniques, 1966), Marie-Josèphe Faurie correctly observes that La Péri “n'offre aucune ressemblance avec le sonnet de Casal. … Nous avouons ignorer quelle œuvre de Moreau servit de modèle au poète pour composer son sonnet” (p. 177, n. 24). A possible solution to the problem was offered to me by Pierre-Louis Mathieu, who, in a letter dated 30 December 1970, suggested that Casal had probably mistaken Sapho se précipitant dans la mer for La Péri. Comparison of Casal's “Una peri” with Moreau's Sapho tends to corroborate Mathieu's impression.

13. In particular, Casal wanted copies of Phaeton, David, and Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (C2/53-58). As far as we know, none of these works became the source of inspiration for a poem, but the last one mentioned did serve as the basis for a very interesting prose image in Casal's article on José Arburu: see Bustos y rimas (Havana: Imprenta La Moderna, 1893), p. 120; Ed. del Cent., I, 280.

14. Casal considered Soulary (b. Lyon, 23 February 1815; d. Lyon, 28 March 1891) to be one of the best poets in Europe (see Ed. del Cent., II, 144-145). The epigraph which Casal chose for “Mi museo ideal” was the second stanza of the “Prologue,” dated 18 December 1880, that introduced Soulary's Les Jeux divins: “Pour nous, fils de l'Art, rien ne vaut / Le mythe et sa légende rose; / Nous mourons de la vie en prose / Où le merveilleux fait défaut.”

15. Evidence suggests that Casal wrote “Sueño de gloria” before “Vestíbulo” and intended to use it as the opening poem of “Mi museo ideal,” but that he moved it to the end of the section while Nieve was being typeset (see Robert Jay Glickman, “The Poetry of Julián del Casal: A Critical Edition,” unpublished manuscript, Part II, N18).

16. Among the holdings of the Musée Gustave Moreau is a copy of Nieve which Moreau was supposed to pass on to Heredia (see C9/10-25). The dedication in that volume reads as follows:

              A José Maria de Heredia,
    en testimonio de ardiente
    simpatía y de profunda ad-
    miración,

    Julián del Casal 20 Abril 1892

    A provocative insight into the influence of Heredia and other Parnassians on the poems of “Mi museo ideal” is provided by Lee Fontanella in “Parnassian Precept and a New Way of Seeing Casal's Museo ideal,” Comparative Literature Studies, VII, 4 (December 1970), 450-479.

17. Márquez Sterling, p. 328.

18. See Henri Rupp's introduction to Catalogue sommaire des Peintures, Dessins, Cartons et Aquarelles exposés dans les galeries du Musée Gustave Moreau (Paris, 1926). Rupp was the executor of Moreau's estate.