…Balthus’s adolescents, in an endless afternoon of reading, playing cards, and daydreaming, seem to have come, we are told, as a subject for inexhaustible meditation from Wuthering Heights, a dismal and hysterical novel that he reads in his own way.

What caught Balthus’s imagination in it was the manner in which children create a subsidiary world, an emotional island which they have the talent to robinsoner, to fill all the contours of. This subworld has its own time, its own weather, its own customs and morals. The only clock I can find in Balthus is on the mantel of The Golden Days in the Hirshhorn, and its dial is out of the picture.

Balthus’s children have no past (childhood resorbs a memory that cannot yet be consulted) and no future (as a concern). They are outside time.

From #8 in Guy Davenport’s A Balthus Notebook

Camille Pissarro’s Landscape near Pontoise, the Auvers Road

Meadow, farm, field, country town — Balthus’s landscapes are a return to Pisarro, to take up where he left off. Balthus is interested in the same continuities as in his interiors: the survival of certain manners, ways of spending time, intimacies of the bath and bed. Impressionism was devoted to roads, paths, rivers: a collective study of the network of roads that connected one French village to another. These ways were once ancient sheep paths, then market roads, then the highway system of the Romans. Impressionism was an assessment of civilization up to its time, as if prophetically aware that in 1914-1918 all this would be mud and trenches; seventy French cathedrals would collapse under artillery fire; a mode of life would be forever lost. Swann’s Way (the name of a road) ends with automobiles in the Bois de Boulogne.

From #19 of Guy Davenport’s The Balthus Notebook

I discovered, from reading Guy Davenport’s A Balthus Notebook, that when Balthus was 13 a book of his illustrations was published.  It’s a story told in images (pre-Max Ernst’s La femme 100 tetes, as Davenport points out), and the preface was written by Rainer Maria Rilke.  The book is called Mitsou. It is the story of boy meets cat, boy loses cat.

I got it out from the library, and now I’m going to have to buy it. It’s so unique and charming.  A few bits from Rilke’s preface will follow this post.