Jimmie Charters says she was particularly fond of American seamen. ‘I do not suppose there is a single sailor on the U.S.S. Pittsburgh who has not toasted Kiki. Once I saw her on the Dôme terrasse with thirty sailors and not another girl.’
‘Little by little,’ writes Kiki of her own life, ‘I made my way into artistic circles.’ Eventually she took up with ‘an American who makes the nicest photographs … He speaks just enough French to make himself understood; he photographs folks in the hotel room where we live … We hang out with a crowd called Dadaists and some called Surréalistes – for my part, I don’t see much difference between them!’ The photographer was Man Ray. William Carlos Williams describes a photographic session with him during a visit to Paris:
Man Ray had said that he would like to take my photo. It seemed a good idea … Man Ray posed me. I kept my eyes wide open. He asked me particularly to close them a little and I, not knowing, did as he told me to, not realizing the sentimental effect that would be created. (I opened them, though, later when I got his bill.)
Kiki appears in Ray’s 1922 photograph ‘Kiki de Montparnasse’, in which she is nude and holds one hand modestly over her crotch; also in his famous ‘Violon d’Ingres’ (1924), in which the f holes from a violin are superimposed on her bare back. Bryher, visiting Man Ray’s studio, was being shown some pictures ‘when a door in the gallery opened and I looked up to find Kiki, literally a “nude descending the staircase”, attired in a couple of soap bubbles and a wisp of towel, tied where she did not need it, round her neck’.
During her years with Man Ray, Kiki became not merely his model but his visual creation. ‘Man Ray had designed Kiki’s face for her,’ writes Kay Boyle, ‘and painted it on with his own hand. He would begin by shaving her eyebrows off … and then putting other eyebrows back, in any colour he might have selected for her mask that day, sometimes as fine as a thread and sometimes as thick as your finger, and at any angle he chose. Her heavy eyelids might be done in copper one day and in royal blue another, or else in silver or jade.’ John Glassco describes how ‘her eyelashes were tipped with at least a teaspoonful of mascara’, and her cheeks were ‘plaster-white’ with ‘a single beauty spot … placed … with consummate art, just under one eye’. Laurence Vail writes: ‘You should have seen Kiki in her first coats of paint.’
Frederic Kohner, who wrote a life of her, describes his first drunken sight of Kiki singing at the Jockey Club in Montparnasse one night in the early 1920s when he was a new arrival from Austria:
Neither the years nor my state of inebriation at the time can erase my first impression of her. She wore a simple black dress; her hair was pitch dark and cut with bangs low on the forehead. She had a full mouth, white teeth, and amber-coloured, green-speckled eyes with long, curved eyelashes. Her brows tilted upward to enhance fine, dauntlessly candid eyes. Her figure was on the plump side, not conforming to the then prevailing ideal of the flapper. But it was Kiki’s face that one could never forget: a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman.
John Glassco, more cruelly, says that her face in full profile ‘had the lineal purity of a stuffed salmon’. Kohner goes on:
When complete stillness had settled over the room she began to sing in a raspy voice:
‘Les filles de camaret se disent toutes vierges
Les filles de camaret se disent toutes vierges
Mais quand elles sont dans mon lit
Elles preferent tenir ma vis
Q’un cierge – qu’un cierge – qu’un cierge.’
I understood only a few of the words, but Kiki came to the aid of the uninitiated. She reached for a candle and pointed it, with exaggerated daintiness, at the centre of her thighs. The audience went wild. Without blinking an eyelid she continued:
‘Mon mari s’en est allé a la pêche en Espage
Mon mari s’en est allé a la pêche en Espagne
Il m’a laissé sans un sou
Mais avec mon p’tit trou
J’en gagne – j’en gagne – j’en gagne.
The applause was uproarious. Now, for the first time, Kiki smiled. Then she snatched a hat from one of the customers and went around collecting money.
*
At the Stryx this Bastille night, McAlmon decided not to involve himself with Kiki and her companions. Instead he ‘stood at the bar with Rita. She always delighted me.’ Rita was a French girl, the kept mistress of a detective who allowed her a lot of freedom. McAlmon says she was ‘chummy’ with ‘the less successful poules’ (prostitutes), many of whom she virtually supported. Jimmie Charters records that she later took up with an Argentine, and one day shot him and then killed herself.
The Stryx ‘orchestra’ was by now playing out in the street, and Florianne ‘was doing an Eastern dance, writhing her long-waisted hipless body’. (‘Florianne … does the naughty-naughty dances that go over so big,’ writes Kiki.) Somebody was playing a honky-tonk piano on the pavement, and outside other cafés the street orchestras were grinding out their music.
This was the hour of the evening that brought the tourists to Montparnasse – ‘Americans in checked shirts,’ writes Frederick Kohner, ‘Scandinavians in sweaters and heavy boots, playboys in tuxedos, women in men’s clothes, dipsomaniacs, dope fiends, schizophrenics, Hindu mystics; it seemed that the whole world had contributed its most extraordinary specimens, its most promising artisans to that incredible conflux at Métro Vavin.’ John Glassco complains that the Dingo and the Stryx ‘were too full of alcoholics and Scandinavians respectively’, and Morley Callaghan mentions some Icelanders who were forever propping up the Stryx bar.
This July evening, the true Quarterites could be seen too. Across the street from the Stryx, says McAlmon, was a long open-air table at which ‘the older, staider and productive members of the community’ were collecting. ‘Jane Heap was there with Mina Loy … and Kathleen [Kitty] Cannell … Bob Coates, Malcolm Cowley, Harold Loeb and Jim Butler were wandering about before deciding where to have the next drink.’
Jane Heap, co-editor of the Little Review, looked entirely like a man and behaved as one. McAlmon describes her conversational style as ‘breezy, travelling-salesman-of-the-world tosh’, and says her ‘strong white teeth’ were inherited from Lapp ancestors, ‘and well they could gnaw into chunks of whale or seal blubber’. She and her fellow editor Margaret Anderson had recently arrived in Paris with the intention of running the Little Review there, but Anderson had fallen in love with a Paris beauty, the singer Georgette Leblanc, and Heap soon returned in dudgeon to New York to edit the magazine single-handed.
Mina Loy was an American by adoption. Born in London, she had trained as an artist in Paris at the turn of the century and had married an English painter, by whom she bore a strikingly beautiful daughter, Joella. The marriage broke up and she went to New York, where she met and married Arthur Cravan, nephew of Oscar Wilde and professional bohemian. Cravan opened a boxing school, prospected for silver, wrote poetry, and disappeared in the desert less than a year after the wedding, leaving Mina with their daughter Jemima. Mina took both her girls to Paris and supported them by making lampshades, which she sold in a shop rented for her by the heiress Peggy Guggenheim. She dressed strikingly. ‘Her hats were very like her lampshades,’ says Sylvia Beach, ‘or perhaps it was the lampshades that were like the hats.’ To McAlmon she looked ‘as beautiful as a perfect-featured English beauty can look’.
She occasionally published poems in the little magazines. Most of her friends thought them excessively cerebral, but they admired her ‘Brancusi’s Golden Bird’, printed in the Dial in 1922 opposite a photograph of the sculpture it described. She also wrote a neat little poem about Gertrude Stein:
Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word.
Willi
am Carlos Williams says that the line from her poems that everyone remembered was ‘Pig Cupid, his rosy snout rooting erotic garbage’.
At the Stryx, says McAlmon, she was talking ‘her cerebral fantasies’. Near her at the open-air table, Kitty Cannell contributed ‘gaiety, dazzle, a sparkling blondness’. Now in her early thirties, Kitty was currently engaged in divorcing a minor poet, Skipwith Cannell, and in having an affair with Harold Loeb. Later she supported herself in Paris by writing ballet and fashion reviews for the American papers. William Carlos Williams describes ‘Kitty Cannell in her squirrel coat and yellow skull cap, which made the French, man and woman, turn in the street and stare seeing a woman, approaching six feet, so accoutred’.
Of the men in the Stryx group, Bob Coates and Malcolm Cowley were graduates of Yale and Harvard, both in Europe – like so many others of their age and background – in the hope of making themselves into writers. Harold Loeb, who came from a wealthy New York banking family and had abandoned business for literature, was running one of the expatriate literary magazines, Broom. Jim Butler was the son of an American painter who had married Monet’s daughter.
By now, McAlmon had drunk himself into ‘a most hilarious frame of mind’, and his account of the evening becomes rather blurred; but he recalls, rather later at the Stryx, running across Harriet Monroe. Rather a fish out of water in Montparnasse, the spinster editor of Poetry had come over from Chicago to inspect the expatriate scene. McAlmon says she ‘proved to me her matured wisdom by letting me buy her some fine old Madeira, served in huge bowl-like glasses of crystal clearness’. She began to lecture him about how he should come back to America and not waste his life in Europe. McAlmon answered that ‘I was in Paris for its intellectual atmosphere’. His ‘drunken consciousness’ told him privately that ‘discussion of that sort is useless’.
Miss Monroe had not crossed the Atlantic for many years, and consequently had never met some of her most celebrated contributors to Poetry. McAlmon records that someone remarked that Ezra Pound was outside. ‘With an eager cry, Miss Monroe arose. “Ezra, I must meet Ezra! Will he be the way I imagined?’” A few minutes later she returned, ‘eager and happy’. Margaret Anderson, herself meeting Pound for the first time in Paris this year, had been less impressed: ‘It will be more interesting to know him when he has grown up.’
Deciding he had better put some food on top of all that he had drunk, McAlmon ordered a meal at the open-air table, where by this time ‘fourteen of us were drinking or eating’. At last his painter friend Kenneth Adams rolled up, moaning about having to go back to America because he was running out of money. Adams soon drifted away again into the crowd, and somebody suggested going to a bal musette, or maybe seeing what was happening in other parts of Paris, but McAlmon refused to budge out of the Quarter. What was the point, he asked, when ‘things are good just where one is’? Similarly Kiki says she would always refuse attempts ‘to turn me aside from the path of duty and take me to Montmartre … I refused to be a deserter.’
McAlmon drifted back across the street towards the Dôme, where he ‘met an excited group of Americans, headed by Peggy and Laurence Vail. It appeared that Malcolm Cowley had taken a sock at the patron of the Rotonde and the cops had arrested him.’
Laurence Vail, born in Paris, had been brought up by his American mother to ‘live like a Frenchman but think like an American’. He was married to Peggy Guggenheim, had just published his first novel, and was noted for drunken outbursts of temper – Jimmie Charters describes him hurling bottles across a bar at some Frenchmen he thought were laughing at him: ‘One man just missed being killed … and the dent in the wall can still be seen.’
Seven years younger than her husband, Peggy Guggenheim was, in her own words, the granddaughter of the ‘Mr Guggenheim the peddler’ who had bought up ‘most of the copper mines of the world’. She had had a lonely, isolated childhood, and as soon as she came of age and inherited her fortune had thrown herself into bohemian literary circles in New York, working at a radical bookshop near Grand Central that her cousin Harold Loeb was then running: ‘I became a clerk … doing various boring jobs. I was permitted downstairs only at noon, when I had to replace the people who went to lunch, at which time I sold books.’ In the shop she met Laurence Vail: ‘He had lived all his life in France and he had a French accent and rolled his r’s. He was like a wild creature.’ Peggy at this time ‘was worried about my virginity. I was twenty-three and I found it burdensome. All my boy friends were disposed to marry me, but they were so respectable they would not rape me. I had a collection of photographs of frescos I had seen at Pompeii. They depicted people making love in various positions, and of course I was very curious and wanted to try them all out myself. It soon occurred to me that I could make use of Laurence for this purpose.’ He acquiesced – ‘I think Laurence had a pretty tough time because I demanded everything I had seen depicted in the Pompeian frescos’ – and she married him in Paris, though neither of them was serious about it. They were soon having spectacular fights; Peggy found herself being knocked down in the streets, and for a grand finale Laurence ‘would rub jam in my hair’. She says her money gave her a certain superiority over him, but to revenge himself ‘he told me that I was fortunate to be accepted in Bohemia and that, since all I had to offer was my money, I should lend it to the brilliant people I met and whom I was allowed to frequent’.
McAlmon, catching up with the Vails and their friends, was told about Malcolm Cowley’s fight with the Rotonde patron. They said that the café proprietor was a known swine; he had ‘asked ladies not to smoke cigarettes or appear hatless on the terrace of his café. He also wished to make his place a rendezvous for sightseers, and comfortably incomed bourgeoisie.’ Someone added that during the First World War he had informed on Trotsky. After hitting him, Cowley had been led off by two gendarmes, so everyone, says McAlmon, ‘flocked to the police station and swore that the patron had started the fight. We knew he disliked Americans, although he had become rich through them, and that he was a sour-faced, scurvy swine.’
Losing interest in this fracas, and not bothering to discover whether Cowley would have to remain in jail, McAlmon observed to himself that the night ‘was not yet over’. Forgetting his resolution to stay in the Quarter, and not altogether certain how he had got there, a little later he ‘found myself at Bricktop’s in Montmartre’.
*
John Glassco was taken up to Montmartre by McAlmon on a similarly festive night:
We found another open taxi … and drove along the wide bright boulevards … until we arrived in the blaze of lights of the spider-web of tourist traps, clip-joints and dives around the Place Pigalle … with the pimps slouching at every corner, the touts outside the boîtes yelling at the passing groups of soldiers and tourists, and every now and then a passing busload of middle-aged American women peeping out from the sectioned windows … ‘God, what a wonderful smell this quarter has!’ [McAlmon] said. ‘Just like a county fair back home. It’s got a special quality, too, so phony you can hardly believe it. The triumph of the fake, the old come-on, the swindle – it’s marvellous, it’s just like life.’
Bricktop’s had a speakeasy door, leather-padded, with peepholes. ‘“Why, Mistah Bob!” cried a big Negro in a scarlet-and-gold uniform who threw open the door at once. “Come in, Mistah Bob! And how you feelin’? Bricktop baby! Come! Here’s the big spendin’ man himself!”’ Bricktop was a black American singer named Ada Smith who came from Chicago and took her sobriquet from her dyed orange hair. Glassco describes how she ran up and embraced McAlmon,
twittering, ‘Bob, honey, so good to see you! Just so good. You and you young friends want to sit at the bar, huh? Hey you, Houston, get off that stool and give some room to the clients, you hear me? Get behind that bar where you belong!
A small grinning black man in a white jacket slipped under the bar and came up on the other side.
‘First round is on the house, Houston,’ said Bricktop. ‘Anything the
boys desire, except champagne.’
We had three of Houston’s specials. This was a long drink of such potency that the first sip seemed to blow the top of my head off.
Bricktop’s club was very popular with Quarterites; it stayed open until the last customer had gone; Bricktop knew everyone’s name, and her singing of the latest Cole Porter numbers was always exquisite. On Bastille Night 1923, McAlmon noticed quite a few Montparnasse faces in the club: ‘Flossie Martin, Sylvia Gough, a young man she called California, Nina Hamnett, Man Ray and Kiki were there.’
Nina Hamnett, seasoned bohemian and veteran of the Bloomsbury and Vorticist circles in London before the First World War, was chiefly noted in the Quarter for her singing of the ‘original version’ of the ballad ‘Rollicking Bill the Sailor’, in which the hero becomes ‘Bollocky Bill’. McAlmon says that she ‘knew everybody and everything, and never let facts ruin a story’. The daughter of a regular army officer, she would tell how she had first sat for the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska – another of Ezra Pound’s pre-war protégés – who had carved a fine torso of her. He was the first person who had persuaded her to model in the nude; when he had finished the preliminary drawings, he told her that it was her turn, and took off all his own clothes, ‘and made me draw, and I had to’. Then he said: ‘Now we will have some tea.’
She had lost her virginity with the same enthusiasm as had Peggy Guggenheim, in a room near Fitzroy Square where Rimbaud and Verlaine had once stayed, and she said this merited a blue plaque on the wall as much as they did. She first came to Paris just before Jacob Epstein’s memorial to Oscar Wilde had been erected in Père Lachaise cemetery, causing a scandal with its prominent genitals. The authorities covered it with a tarpaulin, so every afternoon Epstein, Constantin Brancusi, and Nina would go to Père Lachaise and snatch it off.
Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Page 14