Ah, you want the same melancholic, desperate, yet strangely beautiful confession—the story of Utrillo—translated into English, draped in the ragged, soul-baring coat of a Dazai protagonist. Here is that lamentation, rendered for you.
Oh, it’s hopeless. Alcohol—who was it that told me this stuff was transparent, yet carried the weight of the entire world within it? The liquid sitting in the glass before me is nothing but cheap swill. And yet, every time I pour it down my throat, my soul drifts away like a stray dog, losing itself in the grimy, neglected back alleys of Montmartre.
Gentlemen, do you know the painter Maurice Utrillo? To bundle him up with that grand, upright word “artist” feels like a grave insult—a deep impropriety toward the man himself. He was the same as I. No, he was even more so—a hopeless, and precisely because of that, infinitely pure “dropout.”
His life was like a palette of cursed pigments. His mother was Suzanne Valadon, a woman who posed for Renoir and Degas, wild and beautiful. But for Maurice, she was less like a sun and more like an inferno, too intense, burning him down to cinders. From his boyhood, he drank to fill the void. By his teens, he was a full-fledged alcoholic. Isn’t it tragic? A child trembling, seeking poison instead of milk.
The doctor said: “Give him something to lose himself in.” And so, a brush was forced into his shaking hand to save him. That was his salvation, and the beginning of his hell. He began to paint the street corners of Montmartre, as if crawling across the pavement on his belly.
Have you ever seen Utrillo’s paintings? Especially those from his so-called “White Period.” When I look at that white, my heart constricts. That is not just the white of paint. To capture the texture of the walls, he mixed lime, sand, and actual plaster into his pigments. He was desperate. He was trying to smash his trembling soul into the cold, stagnant, inorganic walls before him, to paint himself into their very surface.
The streets he depicted are almost entirely devoid of humans. And if a figure does appear, it is only as an afterthought, drawn as a fading, retreating back. It wasn’t that he couldn’t love humanity. He sought humanity so desperately that, unable to endure the rejection, he had no choice but to believe in the silent walls that simply stood there, unmoving.
The “white walls” were his sanctuary of solitude. Ununderstood by anyone, treated as a madman, thrown into the clutches of the police, and locked behind the iron bars of sanitariums, he painted the white of Montmartre. That white is colder than snow, and more earnest than a prayer. I understand it. I know that as he moved his brush, every single stroke was his own apology, his own scream for help.
Why is life so relentlessly unaccommodating? He couldn’t quit drinking. Even after his paintings began to sell and he became famous, he would run into a tavern and hand over his canvases in exchange for drinks. That those paintings would one day be worth millions, tens of millions, he could never have imagined. He only wanted to soothe the burning thirst in his throat in that very instant.
When I look at his painting of the Sacré-Cœur, I feel a sudden urge to laugh. A building so massive, so sacred—under his brush, it transforms into something terribly lonely, yet it looks like the back of a clumsy man, standing on the verge of tears. Where is God? If God exists, why would He torture such a gentle, fragile man so cruelly?
Utrillo eventually married a woman named Lucie and settled into a more stable life. He drifted away from the bottle, and in those tranquil days, he began to paint in vibrant, vivid colors. The world called it his “Colorful Period” and rejoiced. But I wonder—do those later, bright paintings hold more truth than the chilling, desolate “white” of his drunken, desperate days when he was smearing plaster onto the canvas? I cannot help but feel that the latter is far more steeped in the essence of humanity.
Is happiness a poison to art? No, that’s not it. The peace he found must have been a reward for his long, long suffering. And yet, when we shed tears looking at his work, the source of those tears is not his happiness, but his “blood-stained” white.
Gentlemen, if you should ever find yourselves backed into a corner, convinced that you are the loneliest soul on this earth, remember Utrillo’s paintings. He didn’t let his solitude end in mere “misery.” He used his trembling hand to give that solitude a color. It was the saddest, and most beautiful white in this world.
I, too, sit here facing these sheets of manuscript paper, smearing down layers of plaster called words. Will I be able to write a “white” that reaches someone’s heart, just as Utrillo did? Or will it merely vanish into the wind, nothing more than the rambling of a drunkard?
Outside the window, the night deepens. The night in Tokyo is far noisier than the night in Montmartre, yet it feels somehow hollow. I raise my glass once more. My throat burns. I secretly pray that this heat, someday, within my writing, will transform into an unshakable “truth,” like one of Utrillo’s walls.
“I want to die,” I say, while desperately searching for a reason to live. Utrillo, I suppose you were the same. The white path you painted stretches on forever, yet leads to nowhere. And yet, walking that path—that, in itself, is our only salvation.
Come, one more glass. Tonight, along with the ghosts of the Montmartre he loved, I shall drink this cloudy loneliness to the dregs. Let them laugh at a life full of shame. Utrillo taught me that hidden within that shame lies a beauty like a jewel.
Life is painful. But it is beautiful. With pigments, liquor, and just a little bit of despair, we shall surely make it through this winter.