Twilight of the Belle Epoque
Page 30
It would be fully five years before Cocteau would in fact astound Diaghilev, but Cocteau later attributed his abrupt break with frivolity to this command. “I was quick to realize that one doesn’t astound a Diaghilev in a week or two,” he later wrote. “From that moment I decided to die and be born again. The labor was long and agonizing.”21
In the meantime, Anna de Noailles was mentoring Cocteau, and his third volume of verse, La Danse de Sophocle, published in 1912, showed signs of her influence, both in its subject matter and its newfound seriousness of tone. It was this volume that received a review in the September issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française, which already was emerging as an influential literary review under the leadership of Jean Schlumberger, Jacques Copeau, and future Nobel Prize winner for literature, André Gide.22
Cocteau had earnestly sought this review, having contacted Gide (whom he had not yet met) following a spring trip to North Africa with Lucien Daudet. Gide’s connections to North Africa were well known, given his 1902 publication of L’Immoraliste, whose depiction of a young man’s self-discovery in the company of Arab boys in Tunis shocked even the blasé French reading public. Cocteau poured on the flattery (“Your light beckons to me”), and sent a copy of La Danse de Sophocle to Gide soon after it was published, but no review appeared. Cocteau then wrote Gide again: “So you loathe my book so much you don’t speak?”23
In September, the longed-for review at last appeared, written by Henri Ghéon, although Gide may well have had a hand in it. Although outwardly favorable, it contained some barely disguised slurs that made it clear that the author viewed Cocteau as little more than a frivolous addition to the Paris literary scene. Soon after, Cocteau and Gide met for the first time, but it was not a cordial encounter. Gide clearly had no use for Cocteau, and he would have more to say on this subject in the years ahead.
Soon Proust would have his own difficulties with Gide. In September he completed Swann’s Way, the huge first volume of In Search of Lost Time, but could not find a publisher. Fasquelle turned it down, based on the report of one reader—a poet and playwright whom Proust had earlier parodied and who now strongly condemned the manuscript. Proust’s preferred alternative was to publish with the Nouvelle Revue Française, but here André Gide gave a firm thumbs down. Convinced that Proust was merely a dilettante with literary pretensions, Gide read only two passages before sending the manuscript back.24
Proust, who had “put the best of myself, my thought, my very life” into this work,25 now prepared to publish the manuscript at his own expense.
Proust worried endlessly about details—the right kind of hat for one character, the precise cries of Paris street vendors for the background of a scene, or the exact details from statuary in Notre-Dame de Paris for his description of the church at Balbec.26 Despite illness and weakness, he even made a trip to the countryside to study the colors of hawthorns and apple trees in bloom—carefully keeping a closed car window between him and the cut branches he admired, to prevent them from bringing on an asthma attack. When he met Helena Rubinstein, soon after her relocation from London to Paris, he made use of the opportunity to quiz her about makeup. Would a duchess use rouge? he wanted to know, or did demimondaines put kohl on their eyes? “How should I know?” Madame Rubinstein retorted. She thought Proust was “nebbishy looking” and noted that he “smelt of moth-balls [and] wore a fur-lined coat to the ground.” Given such an unpromising appearance, “how could I have known he was going to be so famous?”27
There were others on the Paris scene whose success would be every bit as surprising. Few, for example, would have predicted that Coco Chanel, the self-described country bumpkin and innocent, would soon emerge as a fashion powerhouse. Paul Poiret later remarked: “We ought to have been on guard against that boyish head. It was going to give us every kind of shock, and produce, out of its little conjuror’s hat, gowns and coiffures and jewels and boutiques.”28 Having done well in selling her sleek and attention-getting hats, Chanel began to sell women’s clothes as well, many inspired by menswear, and all modeled on the simplicity of design that suited her and (in her own estimation) enhanced the youthfulness of the wearer. By 1912 she was earning enough to operate without Boy Capel’s, or anyone’s, financial support. This freed her from anyone else’s control—much as her corset-free fashions freed their wearers.
While Chanel was making fashion waves, François Coty continued to expand his perfume empire, opening a subsidiary in London and commissioning Lalique to design a unique set of windows for the façade of Coty’s Fifth Avenue store in New York.29 Not to be outdone, in 1912 Jacques Guerlain, of the third generation of the House of Guerlain, created L’Heure Bleue, one of the great perfumes of all time. Similarly, Eugène Schueller continued to prosper, expanding sales of his L’Oréal hair dyes to Austria, Holland, and Italy.
That year, both André Citroën and Louis Renault made their way to Dearborn, Michigan, to meet Henry Ford and observe Ford’s production-line methods that were creating, at rock-bottom prices, the Model T—the world’s first standardized, mass-produced vehicle. Both came away impressed with what they saw and convinced that it was necessary to adapt to this revolutionary way of production, inspired by the scientific management ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Citroën made improvements to his gear factory, but his automobile company (Mors) produced only luxury cars, and so the lessons of modernization and the Model T had a more immediate impact on Renault, who already had captured one-fifth of the French market (10,000 of the 50,000 vehicles sold in France that year) and had expanded his sales to Japan, New Zealand, India, and Russia.30
Renault was no fool and had noted the decreasing competitiveness of Renault automobiles in America. Realizing the importance of Ford’s methods in maintaining his competitive edge, he attempted to put these methods into practice following his trip to Michigan. Yet Renault had not anticipated the strength of his employees’ resistance to this new way of doing things. They were craftsmen, they informed him, not machine-minders, and were proud of it. They also held out for their long-established perquisites, including time-devouring hourly cigarette breaks.
Renault did not back down. As a book he admired put it: “It is indeed fortunate for the progress of civilization that the power of the masses was born only after the great discoveries in science and industry had been made.”31 It was only the intervention of the prominent labor leader, Albert Thomas, who helped bring Renault’s workers around by telling them that they were hurting themselves as much as Renault; without these new methods they would soon be out of jobs, because America would dominate the market. Renault’s promise to pay more if output increased provided the clinching argument, and a threatened strike was called off.
Yet working conditions, whether at Renault’s factory or another’s, remained harsh: the normal factory workday for French men at that time was twelve hours, six days a week. A weekly “rest day” had been put into law in 1906, but there still was no paid annual holiday. Women and children worked nine-hour days (marginally improved by a cut from ten hours in 1909). When Citroën’s workers at Mors went on strike, demanding a five-day week and the right to join a trade union, Citroën immediately opened negotiations that led to major improvements in their conditions. But Citroën was unusually progressive for the times, and already his presence in the French auto industry was drawing attention—and disfavor—from other owners, especially from Louis Renault.
It was a year marked by tragedy, most memorably by the sinking of the luxury liner the Titanic, in which more than fifteen hundred lives were lost. On a far smaller scale, but no less devastating for the survivors, was the death that September of thirty-year-old Charles Voisin in an automobile accident. The Baroness de Laroche, who was with him, was severely injured. Gabriel Voisin had broken with his brother two years earlier, in large part over the wild life he was leading with the baroness. Despite hopes to mend the breach, Charles died before they ever saw one another again.
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After the accident, Gabriel Voisin continued the expansion of his Boulogne-Billancourt factory, now without his brother’s name. Despite Voisin’s personal tragedy, it was a good time to be in the aviation business, especially as interest in air warfare was heating up. By now air shows were featuring demonstrations of aerial bombing, and in 1912 the tire manufacturers André and Edouard Michelin (with the French War Ministry’s blessing) introduced a prize to encourage French aviation development. The Prix Michelin established various feats for aspiring aviators to accomplish, including artillery spotting and dropping mock bombs on target—all with a large cash prize as a reward. In the meantime, the Michelins had taken to heart the ideas of Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor and had modernized their own company’s tire production. They also published millions of brochures advocating these “American” ideas to the French, with the aim of improving their nation’s competitiveness with the rising American behemoth. As Etienne Rey’s The Renaissance of French Pride (published in 1912) put it: “The martial spirit, that inheritance from our past, which we have for so long thought to be dead, has suddenly burst into flower by a magic germination.”32
France had just suffered defeat at the 1912 Olympics, held in Stockholm (the United States won the most gold medals, while Sweden won the most overall; France came in fifth in gold medals and, most maddeningly, behind Germany in overall medals). In response, with the nation in agitation over how France could improve its prospects for the 1916 Olympics, the Marquis de Polignac founded an athletic training college in Pommery Park, near Reims. It was an immediate hit, attracting all ages, but especially drawing the younger generation, who by now were “mad on physical development.”33 The grounds contained race tracks and courses, facilities for all kinds of games, and the latest equipment for it all. Pommery Park became a favored destination, where those intent on improving their physiques camped in the open, performed Swedish exercises “with utmost vigour and regularity,” and did what was necessary to pound themselves into shape.
It was in this environment of escalating competitiveness and militarism that Charles de Gaulle graduated from Saint-Cyr in September 1912 with the rank of second lieutenant. “A very highly gifted cadet,” his captain reported. “Will make an excellent officer.”34
With his choice already made for the infantry, de Gaulle could have gone into the rifle regiments, the Foreign Legion, or any of the glamorous overseas units then in Morocco. Instead he chose to return to the 33rd Infantry Regiment in Arras where he had served as an enlisted man, despite the fact that he had not liked it. Quite possibly a determining factor was the new commanding officer, Philippe Pétain—reputed to be an outstanding instructor—who held the strong conviction that what mattered in modern warfare was which side had the greatest concentration of firepower. Pétain firmly believed that the offensive should only advance with the line of fire—a view that ran directly counter to the received wisdom of his high command, which preferred to put its faith in taking the offensive, complete with successive dashes and the determined use of the bayonet. Cantankerous and contemptuous of military conventions, Pétain was hardly beloved by his superiors—which explained his posting to the backwater regiment in Arras. Yet he would quickly earn the respect of young second lieutenant Charles de Gaulle, despite de Gaulle’s own personal preference for taking and maintaining the offensive. De Gaulle always admired a nonconformist.
Nonconformists? Paris was full of them. On the political front there was Georges Clemenceau, who refused easy categorization and in early 1912 was once again making his presence known after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus. It was now that he asserted himself in characteristic fashion by helping to overthrow yet another government (by this time he had brought down several) and bringing in that of Rodin’s friend and supporter, Raymond Poincaré.
In her own quiet way, Marie Curie had been among the boldest of the nonconformists, both in her career and in her personal life, and she had paid the price for it. Those who knew her best believed that her collapse in late 1911 was due in part to overwork, but mostly to emotional exhaustion following the excruciating public airing of her affair with Paul Langevin, not to mention the aftershocks from her rejection by the Academy of Sciences. It would take a long while for her to recover, and during 1912 and 1913 she traveled under assumed names from one retreat to another, looking for a cure. At each place she worried that her location would be discovered, and she begged her friends to keep her address a secret.
One of her stays was with a friend in England, Hertha Ayrton, who was not only a scientist but also a political activist who ardently supported Irish independence and women’s suffrage. Marie Curie had always kept her distance from causes, but when Ayrton in mid-1912 asked her to sign a petition to protest the imprisonment of the leaders of the English suffrage movement, Curie readily agreed. “I was very touched by all that you told me of the struggle of English women for their rights,” Curie wrote Ayrton. “I admire them very much, and I wish for their success.”35
Claude Monet remained depressed for months following Alice’s death, despite the attempts of friends to distract him. Renoir, Mirbeau, and Clemenceau were chief among these, and Clemenceau (who was in poor health himself, and about to undergo a prostate operation) encouraged Monet to remember “the old Rembrandt whom you know from the Louvre. . . . He clings on to his palette, determined to battle through to the end despite his terrible ordeal. There is your example.”36
Still Monet remained discouraged and dejected. After a few attempts to finish several paintings, he wrote Paul Durand-Ruel that he was “completely fed up with painting and I am going to pack up my brushes and colours for good.”37 In April 1912, he wrote his other major dealers, Josse and Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, that he had “enough good sense in me to know whether what I’m doing is good or bad, and it’s utterly bad.” Shortly after, he wrote Paul Durand-Ruel, that “now, more than ever, I realize just how illusory my undeserved success has been.” The following month he wrote his friend, the art critic Gustave Geffroy, “No, I am not a great painter.” Geffroy had just written two complimentary articles about him, but Monet was adamant: “I only know that I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and that most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.” This will never change, he added, “and this is what makes me despair.”38
Adding to Monet’s despair was his own health and that of his eldest son, Jean. Jean was seriously ill, and although he had recovered somewhat by late summer, Monet’s own eyesight had by then become a major problem. He could only see clearly through one eye, and a specialist recommended an operation. What Monet feared was not the operation itself but the possibility that it would totally alter his sight. Impelled by this fear, he once again began to paint, yet continued to express discouragement about the final product. Overall, despite overwhelming critical and financial success (several prominent exhibitions and a grand total of 369,000 francs for 1912 alone), this was a difficult time for Monet.
That year, Lili Boulanger took a huge step toward her own dearest goal when she was accepted to the Paris Conservatoire. Despite years of invalidism, she had never given up on her dream to enter the Conservatoire and compete for the Prix de Rome. Her sister, Nadia, helped every step of the way, teaching and encouraging her. Lili also received extensive private lessons from instructors at the Conservatoire, and she audited classes there whenever she was able.
In the meantime, she embarked on an ambitious reading program and began to learn several languages, in the attempt to become as well-versed in culture, history, and languages as the rest of her family and its cultivated milieu (her mother spoke Russian, French, and German fluently). Lili unquestionably received much assistance along the way, but in the end it was her own brilliance that won her acceptance to the Conservatoire at the advanced age of eighteen. Her teachers soon reported that she was “very gifted.�
�� Yet as one onlooker noted that summer, “it was evident even then that the flame of Lili’s talent was likely to overtax her meager physical resources.”39
Despite illness that spring, Lili continued to prepare for the Prix de Rome and insisted on entering the competition for that year. Unfortunately she became ill midway and had to withdraw; but no one was able to step into what she regarded as her place since, as it turned out, no Grand Prix de Rome was awarded that year.
After recovering sufficiently, Lili went to work again—this time preparing for the 1913 competition. Yet health problems constantly interfered, and it was a question of whether she could even continue her classwork at the Conservatoire. By year’s end, she was undergoing physical therapy on the remote northern coast of Normandy, near Calais. There, separated from her friends and family, and surrounded by other invalids, she endured bad weather and gloom. It was a thoroughly depressing end to the year.
Leo Stein did not like Alice B. Toklas, and Gertrude Stein did not like Leo’s recently acquired love interest, Eugénie Auzias, otherwise known as Nina of Montparnasse (as she was called throughout the quarter). Nina, the daughter of a provincial professor of mathematics, had originally come to Paris to study singing, but she ended up singing on the streets to support herself. She sang, she modeled, and she slept around. The men in the neighborhood all knew and loved her, calling her the soul of the quarter. Leo came to love her as well, which was a happy outcome for Nina, who had loved him from afar ever since first glimpsing him several years earlier.