by Lisa Chaney
It is said that in the summer of 1923, Gerald and Sara Murphy persuaded the Hôtel du Cap at Antibes to remain open for the summer months. Gabrielle and her artist friends, including Picasso, the audacious and sociable Polish painter Moise Kisling, and Cocteau, had discovered Saint-Tropez, an as yet unspoiled fishing village, some time before, but the opening of the Hôtel du Cap during the summer set in motion the transformation of the area. Until then, the luxurious hotels and villas on the Riviera had their main season in winter and spring. In high summer, all the seaside resorts traditionally closed their doors to avoid the heat. We remember that Gabrielle went south with Dmitri Pavlovich in March, and the hotel where they stayed closed down in May. With the advent of a high-summer season by the sea, sunbathing now became high style. Gabrielle was certainly one of the first to sport a tan (although her friend Marthe Davelli had already taken to it during the First World War).
Gabrielle is so often credited with initiating something, such as cutting her hair short or introducing short skirts, because she had become the quintessence of high fashion. She had an unerring instinct for the moment, and what she did was now noticed and emulated. When as long ago as 1908, the dancer with the wild private life, Caryathis, had chopped off her hair in a fit of pique, most had thought her outrageous and unattractively eccentric. But when Gabrielle cut her hair several years later, in 1917, her timing, as always, was exactly right, and everyone followed suit. By the twenties, what Gabrielle wore, where she went, what sport she took up, how she entertained herself was of interest to the fashionable rich. This included sunbathing. From Saint-Jean-de-Luz, by the sea, Gabrielle wrote to a friend, “I was ill at first but I think it is because I ate too much which is quite disgusting! We’ve had terrible heat and my poor women [her seamstresses] were in a lamentable state, with sunburns which makes them rather ugly. I looked like a crayfish myself.”20 Eventually, thousands would follow.
In December 1923, the Parisian avant-garde was rattled when its prodigy Raymond Radiguet suddenly died. The boy’s book The Devil in the Flesh had become so popular it was even sold on street corners and at train stations, and it had made him famous. Reading France had fallen in love with Radiguet, and was appalled at the speed and premature nature of his demise. He had contracted typhoid when by the sea with friends, then, back in Paris, had once again fled Cocteau to a hotel across town. Here he picked up a girl and lived with her intermittently while revising his second book, Count d’Orgel’s Ball. Radiguet became wracked with chills, and the doctor diagnosed pneumonia. Cocteau was skeptical and called Gabrielle, who immediately sent her own doctor to the patient. He saw at once that it was typhoid and also that it was too late; he sent Radiguet to a hospital all the same. Radiguet’s mother misguidedly left his bedside for the night and in her absence he died, alone. Cocteau neither spent that last night with him, nor would he see him dead, or even attend the funeral.
As always, opinion was divided over Cocteau. Did he behave like “a self-indulgent queen,” or was he so devastated it was best that he keep away? Gabrielle had paid for the doctor, and now she also arranged and paid for the entire funeral, described as “most wonderfully done.” Artistic Paris turned out in force. Valentine Hugo wrote, “We were in utter despair” watching the white coffin, white hearse and white flowers, with just one bunch of red roses. It was all to Gabrielle’s design. The mourners followed in a long procession down the boulevard toward Père-Lachaise, the cemetery already harboring so many fellow writers.
Meanwhile, for several months past, Gabrielle had been spending time with another writer.
20
Reverdy
The date is lost, but at some point around 1922, Gabrielle had begun another affair, this time with Picasso’s old friend the poet Pierre Reverdy.
Reverdy was friend to many of the painters and poets of prewar Montmartre, on its hilltop in northern Paris. When they joined the postwar artistic exodus for Montparnasse, the new Montmartre in the southern part of the city, Reverdy stayed behind. With Max Jacob and the wild modernist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in 1916 Reverdy had founded one of the most progressive and significant literary magazines of its day, the short-lived Nord-Sud. The name referred to the Metro line linking those two artistic Parisian domains, whose inhabitants had fought over modernity within the covers of Reverdy’s magazine.
His great friend Georges Braque believed that while almost no French poets had understood the first thing about modern art, Reverdy was “almost the only exception.” Indeed, Reverdy’s publication on Picasso was one of the few that the artist himself admired. Reverdy was both attracted and repelled by the smart snobberies of the haut monde, famously saying that he preferred the company of artists, and that “life in society is one huge adventure in piracy and cannot be successful without a great deal of conniving.”
By contrast, Gabrielle was less ambivalent about having the haut monde as her friend, although none among them in the end would become as long-standing a companion as the supreme Misia Sert. Gabrielle was more emotionally resilient, more grounded than Reverdy, using her acerbic wit as a jousting tool with which to defend herself and keep mentally in trim. Describing society as “irresistibly dishonest,” she said, “They amuse me more than the others. They make me laugh.” 1 Gabrielle’s famed poise, mistakenly and patronizingly described as having been instilled in her by the Serts, was something she possessed naturally, and in abundance, long before she met them. Thus the confident and graceful Gabrielle felt quite equal to associating with the haut monde. Reverdy failed on most all of these counts. So why had they become lovers?
However much Gabrielle might have found herself at the center of fashionable society, she also remained an unconventional outsider. And despite Pierre Reverdy’s mulish stubbornness, and sense of pride that outdid even Gabrielle’s, perhaps she fell in love with him precisely because he wasn’t society. He represented something that, for her, was immeasurably greater. Almost half a century later, after he had died, she would say wistfully, “He isn’t dead. Poets . . . you know, they’re not like us: they don’t die at all.” This was the immortality Gabrielle herself longed for, and could not then know she would achieve.2
Gabrielle and Reverdy had known each other for some time before they began their affair, having been introduced by Picasso or Misia in the period after Arthur’s death and when Reverdy had given up Nord-Sud. At the time, Gabrielle’s heart and mind were entirely occupied with Arthur, but her suffering now made her more sympathetic to Reverdy’s “tormented and disquieting lyricism.”
Gabrielle was a deeply practical and pragmatic woman, yet an equally significant part of her lived wholeheartedly and unpragmatically in her imagination. This was a place quite different from the deeply absorbing craftsman’s space she inhabited in her work. At the same time, she continued to believe, as had Arthur Capel and the Theosophists, in “the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions” and in tolerating and trying to understand religions “other than one’s own.” She found much solace in the idea that “death is nothing; that one simply changes dimension.” Reassured by the thought that “one never loses everything and that something happens on the other side,” she said, “I believe in the unreal, I believe in everything that’s full of mystery,” adding, “But I don’t believe in Spiritualism.”3 These convictions helped Gabrielle empathize with Reverdy’s blackness of temperament. Her beliefs also added to her sense of Reverdy’s drawing down something greater, and beyond, with which she identified. This humbled her, and was central to what would become a kind of reverence in which she was to hold Reverdy in the future.
Such thoughts and beliefs would lead Gabrielle to champion this strange and increasingly reclusive man’s work. She would agree with the surrealist André Breton’s overstatement that Reverdy was “the greatest poet of our time.” Since Gabrielle’s first meeting with him, she had become more fully herself. Her defiance, never very far below the surface, was reflected in her love for Reverdy, itself an inevitable confrontatio
n with the establishment. Gabrielle didn’t really give a damn about the establishment. Demonstrating her accustomed capacity for paradox, while she may have acquired for herself one of the smartest addresses in Paris, and mixed with the haut monde, she cared little that she had also acquired a lover who was a poet, who eked out an existence as proofreader on an evening paper and was often virtually penniless.
A man proud of his forebears—freethinking craftsmen from the Bas-Languedoc, at the southernmost part of the Cévennes—with southern roots like Gabrielle, Reverdy enjoyed, with her, the sensual, earthy pleasures of food and wine. His somber, intense looks were just as dark as his lover’s, and while he was passionately voluble, Reverdy was just as capable as she was of silence. Gabrielle identified with his childhood suffering, and one senses that she must have told this fellow southerner about her own youthful miseries and her punishing incarceration in the convent at Aubazine.
Reverdy had a devoted wife, Henriette, a seamstress back in Montmartre, who was admired by painter friends such as Modigliani, Gris and Braque. They wanted to paint her for her simplicity and her beauty. When Reverdy’s failure to make a living from his writing meant that he and Henriette were on the verge of destitution, she took in sewing to help support them. Meanwhile, her husband was almost more adept at making enemies than he was at making friends. Cocteau rather spitefully described him as “a false, uncultured, irascible, unjust mind,” but had to admit that in his writing4 he was absolutely the reverse.
The poet Louis Aragon, Dadaist and founding member of surrealism, observed in Reverdy’s eyes “that fire of anger unlike any I ever saw.” Unlike Gabrielle, Reverdy was unable to use his towering pride as a spur. But like Gabrielle, he was a character of great paradox, and while exhibiting that overweening pride, he was also deeply modest. Finding balance almost impossible, he oscillated between indulgence and extreme ascetic abstinence. He was a brilliant talker, but his silences could be deadly, and everything was done by extremes: eating, drinking, smoking and women. Having overindulged in all these, he was led by turns from revulsion to an inexorable sense of self-loathing. Yet these tendencies and their corresponding darkness did nothing to reduce Reverdy’s ability to love women, no matter that afterward he was overcome by remorse. It wasn’t remorse alone, however, that periodically made him flee Gabrielle and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and return to his wife in Montmartre. Gabrielle brought out in him a dread at the thought of being tied.
While Reverdy’s vacillation between an obsession with Gabrielle and resisting her must have been emotionally taxing for both of them, she was prepared to suffer his erratic behavior and ferocious rages. One day, Gabrielle was entertaining at the Hôtel de Lauzan. Among her guests was Aimé Maeght, art dealer and friend to most of the significant artists of the period, including Braque and Giacometti. Reverdy appeared with a basket on his arm. Completely ignoring Gabrielle and her guests, he walked down the steps onto the lawn and calmly proceeded to collect snails and place them in his basket.
His disquiet about good living and wealth put Gabrielle right at the center of Reverdy’s doubts. But his love for her emerged from somewhere far more significant than her exemplification of refinement. There are a good many who make an art out of living, and while this is an undeniably important contribution to life, it should not be confused with art. But what drew Reverdy back to Gabrielle more than the lifestyle she represented was her strength, her joie de vivre, her imagination and her creativity. Reverdy also understood that an essential part of her was just as austere as he was.
Gabrielle accused him of masochistically refusing even fleeting possibilities of happiness, telling him he made his unhappiness into a “principle.” But Reverdy’s sense of isolation was almost impregnable; he believed that our most durable links with one another are the very barriers between us. He asked, “What would become of dreams if people were happy in their real lives?” It wasn’t that Gabrielle herself had ever been a particular devotee of the notion of happiness. Indeed, as time went on, she grew exasperated at the growing belief that one had a right to it. Nonetheless, she had a great urge toward life, and the positive, creative forces that this implied. More firmly grounded than Reverdy, she was not tempted by the mysticism gaining a hold over her poet. Battling to nurture him and nullify his remorse, Gabrielle tried to keep Reverdy by her, to tether him more firmly to this earth.
Offering her strength and capabilities as support, she helped him with great tact and generosity, made visits to his publishers, paid them grants to pass on to him, and also bought his manuscripts. It was Gabrielle who financed his first major book of poems, Cravates de chanvre (the hempen rope used for hangings). And all this she did in secret so as to save his terrible pride. Reverdy alienated a growing number of his friends, including the surrealists who had idolized him and sometimes Gabrielle tried to mediate. Eventually, there were few left who would support his dreadful rages: Picasso, Gris, Braque, Max Jacob—friends Reverdy and Gabrielle had in common. One senses, too, that Gabrielle and Reverdy must have each caused the other emotional torment.
Gradually, his periods of absence from her home grew longer until, sometime in 1924, he left, no more to return. Finally, to his friends’ amazement, Reverdy would withdraw from the world completely. Accompanied by his ever-faithful Henriette, he placed himself in a small house beside the Benedictine abbey at Solesmes, out in the Pays-de-la-Loire.
For Gabrielle to trust a man was most unusual. But over the years, whatever the tumult of her relationship with Reverdy, she never ceased admiring him and remained devoted to his poetry. It was immaterial that Reverdy was married, or that their love affair was turbulent. In turn, until his death, Reverdy would send copies of all he wrote to Gabrielle, with touching dedications :Dear Coco
The time that passes
The weather outside
The time that flies
Of my obscure life I had lost the trace
Here it is found again darker than the night
But what remains clear is that with all my heart I give you my love
And all that follows doesn’t matter.5
Despite all Gabrielle’s best efforts, she had lost yet another man, and with Reverdy’s final departure, she was left wretched. While outsiders had little comprehension of this relationship, they could yet see that between this strange pair there was a deep rapport. Sometime later, Abbé Mugnier, that inveterate old commentator on the Parisian comedy of manners, wrote, correctly, that Gabrielle’s affection encouraged Reverdy to write and that she herself was not the same as she had been before their affair.
Cocteau’s mother’s comment on the relationship as “the return of a peasant woman to a peasant,” albeit said in snobbery, went some way toward understanding Gabrielle and Reverdy. It wasn’t exactly that they were peasants—they had both traveled way beyond those roots, and neither of them could have either lived with or been accepted by their kin—it was the residual element of their inherited connections to the earth and tradition. Despite the strains of their relationship, in Reverdy Gabrielle had discovered someone whose significance, while not replacing Arthur’s, reconnected her with the pastoral nature of her roots, giving her emotional and spiritual nourishment. Reverdy had written to her, “You know well that whatever happens, and God knows how much has already happened, you cannot render yourself anything other than infinitely precious to me, for ever.”
With Reverdy’s departure, Gabrielle’s heart had been dealt a ferocious blow. But her habit of concealing the depth of her feelings was not so difficult to achieve because the worlds in which she moved were noted for their particular egotism and self-regard. All the same, one suspects that in her entire life, there may only have been a handful of people who understood this highly intelligent, paradoxical and defensive woman with anything like the emotional imagination necessary to do so.
In that same year, 1924, Gabrielle was once again asked by Cocteau to design the costumes for a new Ballets Russes production, Le Train Bleu, who
se inception arose out of a Diaghilev fit of pique. Following the death of Radiguet, Cocteau had gone to Monte Carlo to find distraction with his musical friends Stravinsky, Poulenc and Auric. Whatever the histrionics, Cocteau was genuinely prostrate at the death of his youthful amour and would take years to recover from it.
In Monte Carlo was the music critic Louis Laloy, a man of great cultivation who was also addicted to opium. In 1913, his notorious Le livre de la fumée, a history and manual of opium smoking, was credited with the great popularity of its practice in postwar Europe. Cocteau would write, “My nervous suffering became so great, so overwhelming, that Laloy at Monte Carlo suggested I relieve it in this way,”6 and so, with Poulenc, Auric and Laloy, he began smoking in earnest. By the time he left Monte Carlo a few weeks later, he was hooked, and in the future he would at times be reduced to an appalling state by his addiction. While Gabrielle would complain about Cocteau, she also remained his supporter, paying on several occasions for his rehabilitation. It is worth bearing in mind here the opinion of a present-day expert in drug addiction: “Addiction beginning in one’s mid-thirties [Cocteau’s age], or thereafter, is not a search for excitement or pleasure, as in the very young.” Cocteau was not out for kicks; he was desperate to escape the depths of his depression.
The ballet Le Train Bleu came about initially as compensation for Cocteau’s involvement in a contretemps between Diaghilev and the ambitious and flirtatious Ukrainian dancer Serge Lifar, who had stepped out of line. The ballet was set at a resort and became a vehicle for the extraordinary gymnastic antics of Diaghilev’s present lover, a young Englishman named Anton Dolin (real name Patrick Kay). Cocteau’s thin story line had Dolin impressing a troupe of golf and tennis players and featured beach belles of both sexes who were all in search of adventure.