Because of wartime censorship, it is difficult to know exactly where Maurice Ravel was driving at this time, but it is clear that by the spring of 1916 he was in the Verdun vicinity at the front. He wrote his mother that everything reminded one of this fact: “The airplanes going there, the convoys filled with soldiers, and at every turn in the road, you see the same sign: V . . . . . and an arrow”3 (the “V” that he could not name in full, for security reasons, being “Verdun”).
It is also clear that he was exposed to considerable danger. In writing the transcriber and arranger Lucien Garban, Ravel spoke of the risks and of his exhaustion: “I went through 5 days—and almost as many nights—of exhausting, insane, and perilous service, which consisted of going to look for damaged trucks over muddy or rough roads.”4 In another letter, this time to Major A. Blondel, Ravel elaborated: “For a week, I was driving day and night—without lights—on unbelievable roads, often with a load twice too heavy for my truck. And yet you couldn’t drag along [slow down], because shells were falling all around. . . . One of them, an Austrian 130, sent the residue of its powder right into my face.”5
He and his truck, Adélaïde, “escaped with only some shrapnel,” but at length the worn-out truck refused to go any further. Fortunately, at this point Ravel was within range of a truck encampment. During the days he waited to be evacuated, he slept in his truck, washed in a nearby spring, and coaxed food from the encampment cooks. Unfortunately, the weather turned cold and nasty, leaving him to “play . . . Robinson Crusoe for 10 days” until he could be rescued.6
It all was unquestionably challenging. Yet it was a very different sort of encounter, with “a nightmarish city, horribly deserted and mute,” that provided an even more disturbing experience. “Undoubtedly, I will see things which will be more frightful and repugnant,” Ravel wrote Jean Marnold. “[Yet] I don’t believe I will ever experience a more profound and stranger emotion than this sort of mute terror.”7
By February 25, Charles de Gaulle’s 33rd Infantry Regiment had moved to the outskirts of Verdun, where it was assigned a particularly dangerous sector, north of Douaumont. On March 1, de Gaulle (who had been injured a second time the previous year, awarded a Croix de Guerre, and promoted to captain) was told that the German offensive was over, and received orders to reconnoiter the regiment’s position. Yet in conducting his reconnaissance, de Gaulle concluded that the German threat was far from over and that, indeed, a second attack was imminent.
He was right. Starting at daybreak on March 2, the Germans’ heavy artillery began to roar across the entire sector, lobbing shells for as far as two miles. The noise was so deafening that communications became impossible—“an absolute hell, a never-ending thunder,” as one of de Gaulle’s men later recalled.8 It was in the thick of this assault that (according to his commanding officer) Captain de Gaulle’s 10th Company charged straight into the enemy, where he and his men engaged the Germans in hand-to-hand combat. De Gaulle’s commanding officer later wrote that Captain de Gaulle and his men continued the fight, even after they were completely surrounded. The young captain was presumed dead—“an incomparable officer,” as General Pétain noted in his dispatches.9
However, de Gaulle survived. He had been brave, but the accounts by his commanding officers, including that of General Pétain, were overblown. According to de Gaulle’s own account (as told to his son), the German attackers had isolated and surrounded the surviving defenders of his 10th Company, heading off his attempts to establish contact with the nearest French unit. It was as he dived for cover in a shell-hole that a German gave him a bayonet thrust in his thigh, causing him to pass out from the pain. When de Gaulle regained consciousness, he was a German prisoner.
On March 16, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Guillaume Apollinaire was sitting in a trench on the war front near Berry-au-Bac, in northern France. A shell came close, and he ducked before going back to reading the latest Mercure de France. Suddenly blood started to drip onto the page; shrapnel had pierced his helmet, wounding his head.
He wrote his fiancée, Madeleine (an attractive young teacher), that there was no cause for alarm, it was not serious. But it was serious. Paralysis set in, and soon he was moved to Paris, where he was trepanned. After the operation, he appeared to recover, but his friends noticed that he had changed. Not only did he abruptly end his engagement to Madeleine, but his personality seemed altered. In fact, his abrupt mood swings made his friends wonder whether his brain had been damaged, either by the wound or by the operation.
Meanwhile Georges Braque, who had also undergone trepanning, was sufficiently recovered that, in 1916, he went back to the army (this time, behind the lines). Soon he was invalided out and lived through the rest of the war quietly, with the exception of the riotous banquet given in his honor at Marie Vassilieff’s studio-canteen, where he was lauded by dozens of friends, including Apollinaire, Picasso, Matisse, Max Jacob, and Juan Gris. In a more decorous fashion, he also received the Croix de Guerre and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
While French artists, musicians, and writers were doing their utmost for their country, their German counterparts were doing the same for their own, including the aristocrat, Count Harry Kessler, whose keen interest in French culture did not prevent him from wholeheartedly embracing the German cause. This in turn did not blind him to a certain type of German careerist, “smug to the point of madness,” with “competent, but puffed-up, empty, subaltern minds.” Noting the prevalence of this type among the military and political leadership, he implored, “God save us from being ruled by such people after the war.”10
In the spring of 1916, Kessler’s regiment was transferred back from the eastern front to Verdun. After a stopover in Berlin, where he noted the lack of food as well as the growing discouragement about the war, he reached Verdun in May, where he witnessed the slaughter during the assault on Mort Homme (Dead Man) and Hill 304. Called back to Berlin, he spent the summer there before going to a posting in Bern, Switzerland, as cultural attaché to the German embassy—a sufficiently cushy position that it served to substantiate a long-circulating rumor that he was the illegitimate son of none other than the old Kaiser himself. After all, Kessler’s mother, a striking beauty, had noticeably attracted the attention of Kaiser Wilhelm I, who became godfather to Kessler’s little sister. Tongues wagged, but a more likely explanation for Kessler’s Swiss posting is that, after two years of fighting, Count Harry Kessler was suffering severe fatigue or possibly even a nervous breakdown, requiring time to mend.
Another notable among France’s enemies was the Austrian concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who was wounded early in the war, leading to the amputation of his right arm. It was a ghastly fate for a pianist, but after capture by the Russians, Wittgenstein was exchanged and returned to Vienna. There, in the autumn of 1916, he astounded audiences by resuming his concert career. In the years to come, he would commission works for the left hand, including Maurice Ravel’s ravishing Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.
It was while Ravel was at the front that he first learned of the efforts of an organization called the National League for the Defense of French Music, which proposed to ban all public performance of music by German and Austrian composers not yet in the public domain. In other words, the ban would apply to works of contemporary or recently born composers, such as Schoenberg, and exclude works of composers such as Mozart and Beethoven. About eighty French musicians had already become members, including d’Indy and Saint-Saëns, but Ravel politely refused to join them. Although he wholeheartedly endorsed their commitment to French victory—after all, he pointed out, he had joined the war effort despite an easy excuse not to do so—he did not believe that such a regulation of music would safeguard France’s artistic heritage. Even the proposed exception for “classical masterworks” did not mollify him. It would be dangerous, he stated, “for French composers to ignore systematically the productions of their foreign colleagues, and t
hus form themselves into a sort of national coterie.”11
It was a courageous position for Ravel to take, but one that he took without hesitation. After all, as he wrote Jean Marnold in June, “after having fought the militarist element of modern Germany, it would be intolerable to return home and have admiration or aversion imposed by decree.”12
Debussy was of similar mind. Despite his use of the descriptive title, “Debussy, musician français,” he did not hold with the chauvinism of d’Indy and Saint-Saëns. In late 1916, in a preface for a series of essays, Pour la musique française, he wrote that “Strange statements are to be heard about Beethoven who—Flemish or German—was a great musician, and about Wagner, who was a greater artist than a musician.” His point was that “not everyone is able to write ‘la grande musique,’ but everyone attempts to do so.”13 He was not persuaded that anyone should be prevented from so doing.
Debussy had declared his musical independence from German hegemony since the 1890s, when Erik Satie bluntly told him that Frenchmen ought to free themselves “from the Wagnerian adventure,” and that “we ought to have our own music—if possible without choucroute [sauerkraut].”14 By 1916, Satie still was living in Arcueil, south of Paris, and walked home every night across the city, a bowler hat always on his head and an umbrella in his hand. As Jean Cocteau later put it: “Another poet whom the angels guide, cherish and torment is Erik Satie, who walks every night from Montmartre or Montparnasse to his home at Arcueil-Cachan—a miracle which cannot be explained unless the angels carry him.”15
Cocteau first encountered Satie in 1915. A year later, prompted by a performance of Satie’s Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear (despite the title, the work actually contains seven pieces), Cocteau invited the “hermit of Arcueil” to collaborate with him in a ballet. By this time, Satie had become something of a celebrity in Parisian musical circles, notwithstanding his strange behavior and the odd titles of his compositions. His work was published and performed, and critics wrote favorable reviews. Debussy and especially Ravel expressed their admiration. Cocteau, who had been frantically trying to catch Diaghilev’s attention with a sufficiently daring production, had until now encountered nothing but reversals on all fronts, including rejection by Stravinsky, Cocteau’s composer of choice (Diaghilev, always proprietorial, may have encouraged Stravinsky to keep his distance). It was after hearing Satie play his Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear with Ricardo Viñes (four-hand version) that Cocteau’s idea for Parade began to take shape—as “a burlesque scene played outside a sideshow booth to entice spectators inside.”16
With the help of Satie’s and Cocteau’s mutual friend Valentine Gross, Cocteau made his pitch to the composer, who was somewhat mystified but intrigued. “You are the idea man. Bravo!” he wrote Cocteau,17 adding (in a note to Gross) that he did not understand what Cocteau had in mind, but hoped that Cocteau did not intend to rely only on Satie’s previous works. “Let’s do something new, no?” he proposed.18
While Cocteau was on leave from the front, where he was working with yet another private ambulance unit, he assiduously paid court to Picasso—who took him to the popular Montparnasse café, the Rotonde, located near Picasso’s Rue Schoelcher studio. Cocteau later wrote that “our promenade took us to the Café de la Rotonde. The Rotonde, the Dôme, and a restaurant at the corner of boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse formed a town square, where the vegetable sellers stopped their small carts and grass grew between the paving stones.”19
Cocteau was amused by the reception he received from the Rotonde’s regulars: “Gloves, cane and collar astonish these artists in shirtsleeves—they have always regarded them as the emblems of feeble-mindedness.”20 Yet Cocteau was already envisioning a role for himself as a bridge between the Beau Monde (situated in Paris’s most fashionable districts) and Bohemia, now located in Montparnasse. “I was on the way to what seemed to me the intense life,” he later wrote, “toward Picasso, toward Modigliani, toward Satie, a little later toward the young men who were to become ‘Les Six.’” He endured suspicion from Picasso’s friends because Picasso himself took him around to meet everyone. “His authority was such,” Cocteau added, “that I could quickly make contact with people who might have been slow to accept me if it had not been for him.”21
Still, Picasso had made no commitment to Cocteau’s latest project, and by May, Cocteau had returned to the front, where he eventually was posted to the second great battle of that year, the Battle of the Somme. Suddenly his blithe insouciance disappeared, replaced by the horror and depression that marked his earlier descriptions of the wounded in Reims. “Too dispirited to write,” he told Valentine Gross. He and his colleagues were “hunting for the dead—horrible deliveries of wretches battered to pulp—blood flows—the very sheds are groaning.”22
It seems to have shaken his health, perhaps even caused a breakdown. “I’m paying for the war trauma,” he wrote Valentine Gross, “ridding myself of immense fatigue and disgust. Tics, dizziness, toxic smells that cling to my hands.”23 It may have been a breakdown, or it may simply have been a ruse to get him back to Paris, where Picasso still was playing hard-to-get. Misia Edwards had gotten wind of the project—a dangerous situation, since her usual mode of operation was to undermine any artistic endeavor involving her artists (she counted Satie as one) that dared to function outside her control. She and Diaghilev were going to take Parade away from Cocteau, Misia told him, and “begin all over again with Satie,” whom she claimed as her own personal discovery.24 She even enlisted Stravinsky in the fight.
Cocteau and Satie immediately got to work in pacifying Misia (“Tante Brutus,” as Cocteau privately called her) by considerable stroking, including the fiction that Parade was entirely her idea—a story that only temporarily put her off. Yet by late August they had persuaded Picasso to join them, as designer of sets and costumes. In early autumn, they persuaded Diaghilev to back them, and contracts to that effect were signed early in 1917. Diaghilev in turn decided that Léonide Massine would dance the role of the Chinese magician and would also serve as the ballet’s choreographer.
Somewhere along the way, Misia appears to have been mollified—perhaps because Satie refused to knuckle under, and possibly because Diaghilev (who was much impressed with Picasso) overrode her objections. In the meantime, danger appeared on another front: Picasso and Satie threatened to pair off and exclude Cocteau from the planning. Still, despite these hazards, the project continued to move briskly ahead. As for Cocteau, he managed to pull enough strings that he now held down a desk job in army staff headquarters in Paris. It was not a permanent solution—the job bored him. But for the moment, it would do.
“The war continues—as you know,” Debussy wearily wrote a friend in February, “but it’s impossible to see why. . . . When will hate be exhausted?”25
So many of Paris’s artists, musicians, and writers had departed for the front. Foreign dealers and collectors had also left, publishers shut down, and galleries closed. Concerts had virtually disappeared, and even the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants had canceled. There were too few people to perform or to attend, and besides, it seemed frivolous.
Of course, there always were those who simply sought distraction and escape in the face of war. Helen Pearl Adam noted that “while Paris prided herself on having suppressed all unseemly gaiety during war-time, a small section of her population . . . took measures to secure its own amusement.” There were places where, if you knew the password, one could dance the latest dances from America until the wee hours—private clubs not being subject to the curfew.26 French and Allied servicemen on leave, airmen passing through, and war profiteers of all sorts, came to taste the proverbial delights of Paris. By 1916, “the town had become the capital of pleasure, to the great scandal of those who were suffering from the war.”27
It was in the midst of the war’s endless slaughter, and the raw Parisian nightlife that accompanied it, that culture
began to take a stand. This was not a backward-looking movement, draped in the gentle aura of turn-of-the-century salons, but a harbinger of the future, anticipating the postwar years. Not long after Satie’s 1916 performance of Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear prompted the beginnings of the ballet Parade, the writer and critic André Salmon enlisted the couturier Paul Poiret—an avid art collector—in presenting what Salmon named the Salon d’Antin. This ambitious cultural event (held in July in Poiret ’s extensive couture salon at 26 Avenue d’Antin) included literary and musical matinees, timed to avoid the evening blackout. Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars read their poetry; Beatrice Hastings read an excerpt from her unfinished semi-autobiographical novel Minnie Pinnikin, based on her affair with Modigliani; and several young musicians (including Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Arthur Honegger) performed works by Debussy, Satie, and Stravinsky. Yet from the outset it was the art exhibition that drew the most attention. “Would you ever have believed that we would be coming to an opening in wartime?” one attendee was said to have remarked, while another responded, “Artists have to live, like other people, and France, more than any other nation, needs art.”28
Poiret’s sister, Germaine Bongard, had led the way a few months earlier by opening part of her own dress shop to a group exhibition. Normally Picasso did not exhibit anywhere but at his art dealer’s gallery, but Kahnweiler’s departure for Switzerland made alternatives seem more attractive. Picasso, along with Matisse, Modigliani, André Derain, and Fernand Léger, participated in Germaine Bongard’s small group exhibition in December 1915. Now, in July 1916, he presented—for the first time in public—his seismic Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Salon d’Antin.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 39