Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  Oddly, Stravinsky recalled that he had not anticipated a riot at the first performance, even though Count Kessler recorded in his journal that following the dress rehearsal the common opinion at a dinner attended by Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Ravel, Misia Edwards, André Gide, Léon Bakst, and others was that “tomorrow evening the premiere would be a scandal.”5 In any case, there were rumblings of protest from the evening’s outset. Stravinsky claimed he did not notice, having instead been keeping an eye on Debussy and Ravel, “who were not then on speaking terms, and who sat on opposite sides of the house,” making it essential for Stravinsky (who wanted to remain on good terms with both) to sit directly behind the conductor to avoid showing partiality. Then, when the curtain rose on “the group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down, the storm broke.”6

  The music, of course, was difficult, with complicated and rapidly changing rhythms and edgy dissonances that easily set unwary musicians adrift. “Everybody was confused,”7 one of the double-bass players later recalled, and it had taken the conductor, Pierre Monteux, an extraordinary seventeen orchestral rehearsals as well as five stage rehearsals with the dancers to pull it together. Nijinsky’s choreography was no less daunting. Advance publicity prepared the audience for a scandal, with Paris newspapers picking up on a press release that promised new thrills and a thoroughly savage evening to come. Yet it was the combination of music, choreography, and the strange appearance as well as movements of the dancers that sent shock waves through an audience well-prepared to be shocked.

  The storm began almost immediately, with the opening bars of the prelude, which prompted derisive laughter. Boos and whistles quickly followed, along with raucous animal yelps. Cries of “Ta gueule!” (“Shut up!”) broke out amid other yells, including one gentleman who erupted with, “Taisez-vous grues [whores] du seizième!”—a most unlikely slur on the society matrons of the sixteenth arrondissement, some of whom, including the elderly Comtesse de Pourtalès, took such affronts personally. Throughout the hall actual skirmishes broke out, while one gentleman suddenly realized that the man behind him had been pounding steadily on his head in response to the driving beat. Stravinsky was so angry at the outburst that he stalked out, slamming the door behind him. “I have never again been that angry,” he recalled. “I loved [the music], and I could not understand why people who had not yet heard it wanted to protest in advance.”8

  Heading backstage, Stravinsky saw Diaghilev flicking the house lights in a vain effort to quiet the hall, and for the rest of the performance the composer stood in the wings, watching the spectacle. He could see Pierre Monteux, “apparently impervious and as nerveless as a crocodile,” who somehow managed to bring the orchestra through to the end, while Nijinsky “stood on a chair shouting numbers to the dancers, like a coxswain,”9 since the dancers could hear virtually nothing above the uproar. Stravinsky, who was holding the tails of Nijinsky’s tailcoat, had all he could do to keep the furious choreographer from dashing onto the stage and creating an even bigger mess.

  Afterward, according to Jean Cocteau, he and Stravinsky, Nijinsky, and Diaghilev piled into a cab and headed for the Bois de Boulogne. There, by the water, Diaghilev began to mutter Pushkin in Russian amid his tears. Although according to Cocteau, Stravinsky explained the Pushkin quote to him, the composer later said Cocteau’s entire account was fictitious. Indeed, according to Stravinsky, Cocteau was not even present, and his story was only meant to make himself look important. What really happened, according to Stravinsky, was that he accompanied Diaghilev and Nijinsky (without Cocteau) to a restaurant, and Diaghilev—far from being in tears—was supremely contented. “Exactly what I wanted,” is what he said, fully aware of the publicity value of what had taken place.10

  Still, one cannot count Cocteau out of any nocturnal gathering of the Diaghilev clan. Count Kessler, who had attended the performance (“A thoroughly new vision,” he wrote afterward, “something never before seen, enthralling, persuasive”), wrote that he had taken a late supper at Larue’s with the “usual crowd,” and then at 3 a.m. he and Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Bakst, and Cocteau “took a taxi and did a wild tour through the city at night, . . . Bakst waving his handkerchief on a walking stick like a flag, Cocteau and I high up on the roof of the automobile, Nijinsky in tails and a top hat, silently and happily smiling to himself.”11

  Gertrude Stein and Alice attended The Rite of Spring as guests of a friend. It was the second performance rather than the opening night, but—much to Gertrude’s pleasure—the audience was almost as raucous as the opening night, hissing or applauding, depending on individual preference. She and Alice heard little or nothing of the music, because “one literally could not, throughout the whole performance, hear the sound of music.” As for the dancing, it was “very fine,” although their attention was distracted by an altercation between a disgruntled man in the box next to them and an enthusiast in the box beyond that. The first man brandished his cane throughout the performance and finally, enraged beyond endurance, smashed it down on the opera hat the other man had defiantly put on. “It was,” Gertrude Stein reported with satisfaction, “all incredibly fierce.”12

  By this time, she was a veteran of explosive events, even if in absentia. That February and March, a mammoth art exhibition in New York’s 69th Regiment Armory ignited a major cultural explosion in the art world and, in a curious chain of events, put Gertrude Stein’s name in lights. The exhibition, soon simply known as the Armory Show, was sponsored by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors—a loose coalition of people “of varying tastes and predilections,” as its explanatory statement put it. Many, including the group’s director, Arthur B. Davies, were emphatically traditional in taste, but the group as a whole had decided “that the time has arrived for giving the public here an opportunity to see for themselves the results of new influences at work in other countries in the art way.”13

  The man who ended up having the most say in the show’s selection was its secretary, Walt Kuhn, who borrowed unstintingly during a lengthy tour of Europe the year before. In making his choices, he leaned heavily in favor of Paris artists, thanks to the influence of Walter Pach, an American artist and art historian who had lived in Paris and was friend to a bevy of artists there. In the end, Kuhn selected more than thirteen hundred paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by more than three hundred European and American artists, with far more Europeans represented than American. It was a bonanza, and only a huge space could accommodate it. The cavernous Armory at Lexington Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street turned out to be just what the Association needed.

  The exhibition’s motto was “The New Spirit,” and it certainly summed up the show’s shattering impact. Public taste could tolerate some of the earlier artists represented (including Ingres, Goya, Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, and Puvis de Chavannes). Even works by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Mary Cassatt, Rodin, and Whistler no longer shocked. As for the rest, words could not describe the public’s disbelief and horror. Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin were bad enough, but what could one say about Kandinsky, Archipenko, and Picabia? Matisse’s Blue Nude and other works (there were thirteen Matisses in the show) became special targets for wrath and derision, but it was Brancusi’s goggle-eyed sculpture Mademoiselle Pogany and Marcel Duchamp’s Cubist Nude Descending a Staircase (famously caricatured as Explosion in a Shingle Factory) that became vivid illustrations for what many believed was a major affront to civilization.

  By the time the show moved on to the Chicago Art Institute, thousands had visited the New York Armory Show, and the waves of shock kept rippling outward. Thousands more Chicagoans flocked to see this latest example of European degeneracy, and they were just as outraged as New Yorkers by what they saw. Chicago school authorities declared the art “lewd,” and the Illinois Senate’s vice commission took it upon itself to investigate. Some offended students from the Chicago Art Institute even burned copies of Matisse’s Le Luxe and
Blue Nude. By this time, the show had moved on to Boston, and an alarmed Matisse (deemed a major instigator of all this immorality) had begged an American journalist to “please tell the American people that I am a devoted husband and father, with a comfortable home and a fine garden, just like any man.”14

  The Armory Show helped emancipate American artists and prepare the American public, especially collectors, for the future.15 It also played a major role in launching Gertrude Stein’s writing career. Stein’s word portrait of Mabel Dodge (which displeased Leo) had overwhelmingly pleased Dodge, who jumped at an opportunity to write an article about Gertrude’s work for the New York Sun just prior to the show’s opening. The editor provided a preface to the article noting that “this article is about the only woman in the world who has put the spirit of post-impressionism into prose, and written by the only woman in America who fully understands it.”16 As a result, Gertrude Stein became known at the same time, and as part of the same tidal wave, that brought Europe’s avant-garde artists to the fore of American consciousness. “Everybody wherever I go,” Mabel wrote Gertrude excitedly, “is talking of Gertrude Stein!”17 Gertrude was thrilled by the gloire, as she told Mabel, adding that she was “as proud as punch.”18

  Yet if Gertrude was pleased with the publicity, she was less than pleased with Mabel Dodge’s love of the limelight (“if Gertrude Stein was born at the Armory Show,” Dodge later wrote, “so was ‘Mabel Dodge’”).19 Gertrude did not willingly take second place to anyone, and it would not be long before she would shed Mabel Dodge.

  As with any major event, there were winners and losers at the Armory Show. Neither Picasso nor Braque had been well represented there, but at this point neither artist, especially Picasso, needed the Armory Show to further his career. Others, however, did. One of these was Modigliani, who had not even been invited to participate.

  By this time Modigliani had labored for several years as a sculptor, but he still had no dealer or collectors. Rodin, as always, took the laurels, but even youngsters like Alexander Archipenko managed to have at least one entry in the Armory Show, while Modigliani’s friend Brancusi had five—raising a furor with one sculpture in particular, his marble bust of Mademoiselle Pogany, which detractors likened to a hard-boiled egg balanced on a sugar cube.

  Soon Modigliani would leave off stonecutting and return to painting, possibly because the dust damaged his lungs but also because of discouragement. Although his surviving sculptures have all skyrocketed in value, they had no buyers at the time. Modigliani, unlike Picasso, was broke.

  Fortunately, he was about to find an art dealer, Guillaume Chéron, who would pay him a small but essential regular stipend. Soon after—with the assistance of Max Jacob—Modigliani would find a far more astute art dealer, Paul Guillaume. Guillaume was young and just starting on what would turn out to be a remarkable career (his collection now anchors Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie). He had vision, and he appreciated Modigliani.

  With Guillaume’s help, Modigliani would at last begin to clamber out of dire poverty.

  Ravel and Stravinsky got to know one other during those heady years of Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and Daphnis et Chloé (1912). They attended each other’s openings, listened with interest to rehearsals of each other’s music, and became friends. Their relationship became even closer when they jointly accepted Diaghilev’s commission to adapt and re-orchestrate portions of Mussorgsky’s incomplete opera Khovantchina (which was performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in June 1913, following Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring).

  The two worked together on the project during March and April 1913 at Stravinsky’s home in Clarens, Switzerland. It was then that Stravinsky showed Ravel the manuscript of Rite of Spring, which prompted an impressed Ravel to write a friend: “I do hope that you will be there [in Paris] for the Russian season. You must hear Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I believe it will be as important an event as the première of Pelléas.”20

  While Ravel’s relationship with Stravinsky was increasingly warm and cordial, his relationship with Debussy continued to deteriorate. This unhappy state of affairs was aggravated that year when both (without prior knowledge of the other’s activities) composed settings for three of Mallarmé’s poems, and by coincidence chose two of the same poems (a “phenomenon of autosuggestion worthy of communication to the Academy of Medicine,” Debussy remarked). Ravel completed his settings first and received exclusive permission from Mallarmé’s son-in-law and executor, Dr. Edmond Bonniot, to use the poems’ texts. Soon after, Dr. Bonniot refused permission for Debussy to use the same poems, on the grounds that he had just given the rights to Ravel. “Perhaps the Mallarmé family is afraid Nijinsky will invent some new choreography for these three songs?” Debussy commented acidly.21

  Ravel and Debussy both had the same publisher, Jacques Durand, who now sent Ravel a “desperate letter.” Not long before, Ravel had dived in to defend Debussy from critical attacks on Images by retorting in print that the critics had unsuccessfully attempted to turn younger composers “against their revered master [Debussy], and he against them.”22 Ravel immediately intervened in the Mallarmé affair as well, and asked Dr. Bonniot to reconsider, which Dr. Bonniot did. “I have settled everything,” Ravel wrote Roland-Manuel in satisfaction.23

  If Ravel anticipated that the two composers would create entirely different music for these texts, he was right. Ravel’s delicate and effervescent settings (which were not performed until early 1914) showed the influence of Stravinsky and, through Stravinsky, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Debussy, who continued to be disturbed by the latest musical developments, nevertheless flirted with atonality in this magical song set, which would turn out to be his last.

  That summer, Marie Curie—her health much improved—went hiking in the Swiss Engadine with Albert Einstein and their respective families. Madame Curie seems to have enjoyed herself, although Einstein found her overly serious.

  That same summer, following the death of Picasso’s father, Picasso himself became gravely ill with a fever that the doctor was unable to diagnose. It was then that Henri Matisse made the first overture to mend their friendship, frequently coming into town to visit the sick man and to bring him flowers and oranges.

  Picasso recovered, and the rivals now were reconciled, with Picasso actually joining Matisse on his daily horseback rides through the woods near Matisse’s home in Issy. Picasso was no horseman, and as one Matisse biographer has put it, “this was the equivalent of a public gesture of reconciliation between leaders of two warring countries.”24 The two continued to differ, but in a friendly manner, and now were in a position to compare notes and exchange ideas, much as leaders at an ongoing summit meeting. It was an amazing development, and their friends did not know what to make of it. Yet since Picasso and Matisse had obviously decided to forget the past, their colleagues could no longer regard them as deadly rivals. Instead, they soon would come to view Picasso and Matisse as joint leaders of modern art.

  It was around this time that one or the other—no one remembers which—remarked: “We are both searching for the same thing by opposite means.”25

  In the autumn of 1913, Céleste Albaret—Proust’s “dear Céleste”—went to work for Marcel Proust, “the monster of tyranny and goodness” whom she would love, enjoy, and put up with for the rest of his life. How could she have stood it, she was later asked, living only at night and with an invalid? “It was his charm,” she replied, “his smile, the way he spoke, holding his delicate hand against his cheek.”26

  Céleste, who would eventually become Proust’s housekeeper, first went to work for him as a last-minute replacement to distribute copies of Swann’s Way, which was published on November 14, 1913. Her husband was Proust’s chauffeur, and she was then a very young bride, new to Paris and homesick. Soon Proust (who seemed to understand exactly how she felt) suggested that she come during the late afternoon to cover for his manservant, Nicolas
, while Nicolas went to visit his wife in the hospital. By then, Proust would already have had his café au lait and croissant that he sent for when he awakened, but a second croissant was always kept ready for his second cup.

  Nicolas’s instructions to Céleste were precise: If the bell rang twice and the disc for the bedroom turned white (there was a black disc for each room on a wall panel), then she should deliver the second croissant “on a special saucer that matched the coffee cup that would be left ready.” In delivering the second croissant, she would see “a big silver tray on the table by the bed, with a little silver coffeepot, the cup, the sugar bowl, and the milk pitcher. Put the saucer with the croissant down on the tray,” Nicolas instructed her, “and go.” The most important instruction of all, though, was “whatever you do, don’t say anything unless he asks you a question.”27

  Céleste waited for several successive afternoons without the bell ringing. Then one afternoon, there suddenly were two rings. She placed the second croissant on the appropriate saucer and headed across the hall and through the big drawing room. At the fourth door, she opened without knocking and pushed aside a heavy curtain on the other side. There, the smoke was so thick that she could scarcely see. “M. Proust, who suffered terribly from asthma, burned fumigation powder—but I wasn’t prepared for this dense cloud.” She could make out a little light from a bedside lamp, and a brass bedstead with a bit of white sheet. “All I could see of M. Proust was a white shirt under a thick sweater, and the upper part of his body propped against two pillows. His face was hidden in the shadows and the smoke from the fumigation, completely invisible except for the eyes looking at me.” Intimidated, she made for the silver tray by the bed, placed the saucer with the croissant on the tray, and bowed toward the invisible face. He “gave a wave of the hand, presumably to thank me, but didn’t say a word.”28