In his memoir, The Romanian, winner of the 2004 Prix de Flore under the title Autobiographie Érotique, the American writer Bruce Benderson recounts his obsession with a scrappy young Romanian male prostitute. His infatuation leads him to immerse himself in work by another Romanian, the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Benderson focuses on The Kiss, first created in 1907–8 and depicting “an embracing couple as a single block of stone, fused eternally in hermetic union.”
To visit the weather-beaten marble in its original installation—atop the tombstone for which it was made, in Montparnasse Cemetery—is a rewarding pilgrimage. (Go there if you can; it is open to the public.) But seeing any of its six versions is to feel its power. “Brancusi’s fantasies of union in stone seem pre-oedipal and infantile,” Benderson continues, “attempts to reproduce the undifferentiated bliss of the child and the breast. Eyes, ears and noses have all but disappeared, buried in their closeness or perhaps not even yet born from stone. The moment of the kiss is eternal, like suspension in the womb. So static has the moment become that it represents what we all must miss—security, pleasure.”
