Twilight of the Belle Epoque
Page 49
32. 16 March 1911, unsigned interview in The Musical Leader, in Ravel, Ravel Reader, 410.
33. Debussy to Jacques Durand, 19 July 1911, in Debussy Letters, 244.
34. Debussy to Jacques Durand, 26 August 1911, in Debussy Letters, 246.
35. Debussy to André Caplet, [October 1911], in Debussy Letters, 247.
36. Debussy to André Caplet, 22 December 1911, in Debussy Letters, 252.
37. Debussy to Robert Godet, 18 December 1911, in Debussy Letters, 250.
38. Kurth, Isadora, 280.
39. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 231.
40. Poiret, King of Fashion, 193.
41. Poiret, King of Fashion, 194.
42. Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, 629.
43. Spurling, Matisse the Master, 63.
44. Kessler, 26 May 1911, in Journey to the Abyss, 535.
45. Spurling, Matisse the Master, 91.
46. Five hundred copies were published in 1925; of these, one hundred were exported for an American edition published by Albert and Charles Boni in 1926 (Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, xxxvi).
47. Wineapple, Sister Brother, 328.
48. Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein on Picasso, 23.
49. Wineapple, Sister Brother, 332.
50. Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel, 18 May 1911, in Monet by Himself, 243.
51. It is now located in the Cité de la Musique in the Parc de la Villette (19th).
52. Saint-Saëns, Camille Saint-Saëns on Music and Musicians, 49.
53. Her books included Le Coeur innombrable (1901), L’Ombre des jours (1902), and Les Eblouissements (1907).
54. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 47.
55. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 57.
56. “The utmost intimacy . . . reigns between Lucien and Cocteau,” Proust reported to Reynaldo Hahn in March (Proust to Hahn, 4 March 1911, in Proust, Selected Letters, 3:34).
57. Cocteau, Souvenir Portraits, 139.
14 Dancing on the Edge (1912)
Selected sources for this chapter: Poiret, King of Fashion; Scheijen, Diaghilev; Lockspeiser, Debussy, vol. 2; Nichols, Life of Debussy; Debussy, Debussy Letters; Kessler, Journey to the Abyss; Butler, Rodin; Champigneulle, Rodin; Laloy, La musique retrouvée; Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries; Walsh, Stravinsky; Ravel, Ravel Reader; Orenstein, Ravel; Steegmuller, Cocteau; Arthur King Peters, Jean Cocteau and André Gide: An Abrasive Friendship (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973); Carter, Marcel Proust; Albaret, Monsieur Proust; Proust, Selected Letters, vol. 3; Brandon, Ugly Beauty; Justine Picardie, Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life (New York: itbooks, 2010); Barillé, Coty; Reynolds, André Citroën; Rhodes, Louis Renault; Murphy, Military Aircraft; Harp, Marketing Michelin; Bertaut, Paris, 1870–1935; Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Rebel; Williams, Last Great Frenchman; Watson, Georges Clemenceau; Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War; Quinn, Marie Curie; Eve Curie, Madame Curie; Wildenstein, Monet, vol. 1; Monet, Monet by Himself; Potter, Nadia and Lili Boulanger; Léonie Rosenstiel, The Life and Works of Lili Boulanger (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1978); Wineapple, Sister Brother; Brinnin, Third Rose; Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Touchstone, 1996); Flanner, Men and Monuments; Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel; William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989); Olivier, Loving Picasso; Olivier, Picasso and His Friends; André Salmon, Montparnasse: Mémoires (Paris: Arcadia, 2003); Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, Kiki’s Paris: Artists and Lovers, 1900–1930 (New York: Abrams, 1989); Crespelle, La vie quotidienne à Montmartre au temps de Picasso; Bougault, Paris, Montparnasse; Dan Franck, The Bohemians: The Birth of Modern Art: Paris, 1900–1930, trans. Cynthia Hope Liebow (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001); Chagall, My Life; Wullschläger, Chagall; Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); Gold and Fizdale, Divine Sarah; Kurth, Isadora; Isadora Duncan, My Life.
1. Poiret, King of Fashion, 204, 205.
2. Nichols, Life of Debussy, 141.
3. Calmette quoted in Kessler, Journey to the Abyss, 600n.
4. Lockspeiser, Debussy, 2:265. By the second performance, Nijinsky had changed the gesture, and instead of lying on the veil, he now knelt (Kessler, 31 May 1912, Journey to the Abyss, 601).
5. In fact, Marx forged Rodin’s signature, although Rodin stood by the article, which he said reflected his views (Scheijen, Diaghilev, 249).
6. This indeed happened. The current Musée Rodin is located in the former Hôtel Biron.
7. Butler, Rodin, 475. Another of Rodin’s biographers quotes him as saying: “That woman was my evil genius. . . . She took me for a fool and people believed her” (Champigneulle, Rodin, 244).
8. Laloy, La musique retrouvée, 213.
9. Debussy to Stravinsky, [5 November 1912], in Debussy Letters, 265.
10. Nichols, Life of Debussy, 141.
11. Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries, 148.
12. Ravel to Ralph Vaughan Williams, 7 June 1914, in Ravel Reader, 146.
13. Shortly after the two performances of Daphnis et Chloé, Fokine permanently broke with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.
14. Ravel to Rouché, 7 October 1912, in Ravel Reader, 132. According to Ravel, that spring’s season, especially Daphnis et Chloé, “left me in a pitiful condition,” and he had to repair to the country for a rest cure (Ravel to Ralph Vaughan Williams, 5 August 1912, in Ravel Reader, 132). Ravel would experience more problems with Diaghilev in 1914, when Diaghilev cut the choral sections in a London production of Daphnis et Chloé, over Ravel’s strenuous objections. Ravel finally published these objections in the London press (Ravel to Ralph Vaughan Williams, 7 June 1914, in Ravel Reader, 146–47).
15. Lockspeiser, Debussy, 2:267.
16. Debussy to Igor Stravinsky, [5 November 1912], in Debussy Letters, 265.
17. Debussy to Jacques Durand, 9 August 1912, in Debussy Letters, 260–61.
18. Debussy to André Caplet, 25 August 1912, in Debussy Letters, 261–62.
19. Ravel, “Les ‘Tableaux symphoniques’ de M. Fanelli,” in Ravel Reader, 350.
20. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 82.
21. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 82.
22. Gide won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947.
23. Steegmuller, Cocteau, 81–82.
24. Later, a contrite Gide confessed to Proust as having “thought of you . . . [as] a dilettante socialite” (Gide to Proust, [10 or 11 January 1914], in Proust, Selected Letters, 3:225).
25. Proust to René Blum, [5, 6, or 7 November 1913], in Proust, Selected Letters, 3:207.
26. Early in 1913, he wrote Madame Straus that he had been trying to arise sufficiently early to be able to “stop in front of the St Anne portal [the right-hand portal] of Notre Dame,” but had been unable to do so. He needed a model for the church porch at Balbec, and according to the editor’s note, several days after writing Madame Straus he “stood for two hours, his fur-lined coat over his nightshirt, in front of the St Anne portal” (Proust to Madame Straus, 14 January 1913, in Proust, Selected Letters, 3:143 and 145n4).
27. Brandon, Ugly Beauty, 25.
28. Picardie, Coco Chanel, 70.
29. The building, at 714 Fifth Avenue, is now occupied by Henri Bendel, which has carefully restored the windows.
30. By 1914, France was second only to the United States in automobile production (Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 327).
31. From Crowds: A Study of the Popular Mind, by Gustave le Bon, quoted in Rhodes, Louis Renault, 73.
32. Bertaut, Paris, 1870–1935, 237.
33. Bertaut, Paris, 1870–1935, 236.
34. Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Rebel, 20.
35. Q
uinn, Marie Curie, 337.
36. Wildenstein, Monet, 1:396.
37. Wildenstein, Monet, 1:396.
38. Monet to G. and J. Bernheim-Jeune, 16 April 1912; Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel, 10 May 1912; Monet to Gustave Geffroy, 7 June 1912, all in Monet by Himself, 245.
39. The American violinist Albert Spalding quoted in Rosenstiel, Life and Works of Lili Boulanger, 62.
40. Hemingway, Moveable Feast, 14.
41. Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother was completed by mid-1912 but not published until after her death.
42. Wineapple, Sister Brother, 350, 354, 355, 358.
43. Wineapple, Sister Brother, 363.
44. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 96.
45. Flanner, Men and Monuments, 145. Interestingly, it was around this time, following the affair of the African statuettes and his imprisonment, that Apollinaire changed his allegiance and began wholeheartedly to extoll the Salon Cubists, whom he had previously reviled (Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 207).
46. Klüver and Martin, Kiki’s Paris, 63.
47. Salmon, Montparnasse, 127.
48. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 111.
49. They moved to 242 Boulevard Raspail, in a ground-floor apartment adjoining the Montparnasse Cemetery. They remained there for only a year and then moved to a larger apartment at 5 bis Rue Schoelcher, which also overlooked the cemetery.
50. Quoted in John Richardson, “Epilogue,” in Olivier, Loving Picasso, 279.
51. In 1957, when she was in her mid-seventies and broke, Fernande Olivier was able to coerce Picasso into giving her a sizable amount of money to prevent her from publishing during his lifetime yet another memoir of their years together. Souvenirs intimes (published in English as Loving Picasso) was first published in French in 1988, after both of their deaths (Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 232).
52. Bougault, Paris, Montparnasse, 52.
53. Chagall, My Life, 110.
54. Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 165, 189.
55. Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 217.
56. This was perhaps a marketing ploy on the part of Apollinaire, who had just published Bestiaire, subtitled Cortège d’Orphée.
57. Gilot and Lake, Life with Picasso, 282. “Long after that,” Gilot wrote, “Chagall gave me his opinion of Pablo. ‘What a genius, that Picasso,’ he said. ‘It’s a pity he doesn’t paint.’” (Françoise Gilot was the mother of Picasso’s two youngest children, Claude and Paloma.)
58. Gold and Fizdale, Divine Sarah, 311.
59. Kurth, Isadora, 287.
60. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 231.
61. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 232.
62. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 233.
63. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 234.
15 Fireworks (1913)
Selected sources for this chapter: Lockspeiser, Debussy, vol. 2; Gaston Varenne, Bourdelle par lui-même: Sa pensée et son art (Paris: Fasquelle, 1937); Nichols, Life of Debussy; Debussy, Debussy Letters; Steegmuller, Cocteau; Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries; Stravinsky, Autobiography; Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring; Scheijen, Diaghilev; Kessler, Journey to the Abyss; Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989); Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Wineapple, Sister Brother; Brinnin, Third Rose; Quinn, Marie Curie; Eve Curie, Madame Curie; Flanner, Men and Monuments; Barr, Matisse; Spurling, Matisse the Master; Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel; Butler, Rodin; Secrest, Modigliani; Ravel, Ravel Reader; Orenstein, Ravel; Albaret, Monsieur Proust; Proust, Selected Letters, vol. 3; Carter, Marcel Proust; Proust, The Guermantes Way; Carter, Proustian Quest; Proust, Selected Letters, vol. 1; Poiret, King of Fashion; Gold and Fizdale, Divine Sarah; Esterow, Art Stealers; Butler, Rodin; Champigneulle, Rodin; Odile Ayral-Clause, Camille Claudel: A Life (New York: Abrams, 2002); Sert, Misia and the Muses; Gold and Fizdale, Misia; Mugnier, Journal; Rosenstiel, Life and Works of Lili Boulanger; Potter, Nadia and Lili Boulanger; Isadora Duncan, My Life; Steegmuller, “Your Isadora”; Kurth, Isadora; Irma Duncan, Duncan Dancer (New York: Books for Libraries, 1980); Watson, Georges Clemenceau; Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War; Philippe Bernard and Henri Dubief, The Decline of the Third Republic, 1914–1938, trans. Anthony Forster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Williams, Last Great Frenchman; Murphy, Military Aircraft; Voisin, Men, Women, and 10,000 Kites.
1. Varenne, Bourdelle par lui-même, 168, 169.
2. Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, 188.
3. Debussy to Robert Godet, 9 June 1913, in Debussy Letters, 272.
4. Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries, 87.
5. Kessler, 28 May 1913, Journey to the Abyss, 619.
6. Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries, 90, 91.
7. Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, 202.
8. Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries, 91. The first concert performance of The Rite of Spring, conducted by Pierre Monteux at the Casino de Paris a year later (5 April 1914), was received much more favorably. Louis Laloy reported that the audience listened to the music “in the most respectful silence, and [it] was endlessly acclaimed” (Walsh, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, 232). According to Ravel (who wasn’t there): “Apparently it was a triumph. When I think of all those idiots who booed it less than a year ago!” (Ravel to Ida Godebska, 8 April 1914, in Ravel Reader, 146).
9. Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries, 91. Like Debussy, Stravinsky had a low regard for Nijinsky’s choreography. Stravinsky considered the choreography for The Rite of Spring “a very labored and barren effort rather than a plastic realization flowing simply and naturally from what the music demanded. How far it all was from what I had desired!” (Stravinsky, Autobiography, 48).
10. Stravinsky and Craft, Memories and Commentaries, 91.
11. Kessler, 29 May 1913, Journey to the Abyss, 619–20.
12. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 137.
13. Brinnin, Third Rose, 179.
14. Flanner, Men and Monuments, 92.
15. By purchasing Cézanne’s 1887 View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph from the Armory Show, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York became the first American museum to acquire a Cézanne.
16. Brinnin, Third Rose, 185.
17. Wineapple, Sister Brother, 174.
18. Brinnin, Third Rose, 186.
19. Brinnin, Third Rose, 187.
20. Ravel to Lucien Garban, 28 March 1913, in Ravel Reader, 134.
21. Debussy to Jacques Durand, 8 August 1913, in Debussy Letters, 277.
22. Ravel, “Regarding Claude Debussy’s Images,” [originally published in Les Cahiers d’aujourd’hui, February 1913], in Ravel Reader, 367–68.
23. Ravel to Roland-Manuel, 27 August 1913, in Ravel Reader, 140.
24. Spurling, Matisse the Master, 138.
25. Spurling, Matisse the Master, 138.
26. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 2.
27. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 15.
28. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 16.
29. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 17.
30. As of November 1913, Proust envisioned Swann’s Way as the first volume of a three-volume work under the general title of A la recherche du temps perdu, with the second and third volumes being The Guermantes Way and Time Regained, although he already was contemplating naming the second volume In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom [later translated as Within a Budding Grove] (Proust to René Blum, [5, 6, or 7 November 1913], in Proust, Selected Letters, 3:207).
31. Others whom Proust drew upon for this character we
re the Countess de Chevigné (“her bearing and her clothes,” according to Céleste Albaret) and Proust’s good friend Geneviève Straus, for her wit (Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 244–45). William Carter calls Madame Straus “the primary model for the duchesse de Guermantes” (Carter, Proustian Quest, 134).
32. Albaret, Monsieur Proust, 148, 149.
33. Proust to Robert de Montesquiou, [2? July 1893], in Proust, Selected Letters, 1:51.
34. Poiret, King of Fashion, 177–78.
35. Kessler, May 24, 1913, Journey to the Abyss, 618. Countess Greffulhe, a talented amateur artist, painted her own portrait as well as that of the Abbé Mugnier (both now in Paris’s Musée Carnavalet).
36. Debussy to Jacques Durand, 30 August and 3 September 1913, in Debussy Letters, 277–78.
37. Champigneulle, Rodin, 244.
38. Ayral-Clause, Camille Claudel, 198.
39. Scheijen, Diaghilev, 277–78.
40. Sert, Misia and the Muses, 120.
41. Scheijen, Diaghilev, 283.
42. Mugnier, 23 May 1911, Journal, 215. “Pneumatics” were pneumatic tubes, powered by compressed air and used for quickly transporting messages, business accounts, and small packages over short distances (often within a single building).
43. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 237.
44. Isadora Duncan to Gordon Craig, 19 April 1913, in Steegmuller, “Your Isadora,” 317.
45. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 236.
46. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 245.
47. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 245, 246.
48. Kessler, 21 April 1913, Journey to the Abyss, 615–16n.
49. Kessler to Craig, quoted in a letter from Craig to his mother, Ellen Terry (28 April), in Steegmuller, “Your Isadora,” 321.
50. Isadora to Gordon Craig, 31 May 1913, in Steegmuller, “Your Isadora,” 323.
51. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 250.
52. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 251, 259.
53. Isadora Duncan, My Life, 260.
54. Voisin, Men, Women and 10,000 Kites, 183.
16 “Dear France, dear country” (1914)
Selected sources for this chapter: Mayeur and Rebérioux, Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War; Bernard and Dubief, Decline of the Third Republic; Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People, trans. Arnold Pomerans (Dover, N.H.: Berg, 1985); Butler, Rodin; Watson, Georges Clemenceau; Proust, Selected Letters, vol. 3; Carter, Marcel Proust; Kurth, Isadora; Isadora Duncan, My Life; Brinnin, Third Rose; Wineapple, Sister Brother; Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Gertrude Stein, Three Lives and Tender Buttons (New York: Signet, 2003); Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein on Picasso; Mugnier, Journal; Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Appleton, 1934); Edith Wharton, Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919); Helen Pearl Adam, Paris Sees It Through: A Diary, 1914–1919 (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1919); Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994); Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory: Verdun, 1916 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1962); Ian Ousby, The Road to Verdun: France, Nationalism, and the First World War (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002); Kessler, Journey to the Abyss; Flanner, Men and Monuments; Klüver and Martin, Kiki’s Paris; Timothy Newark, Camouflage (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007); Spurling, Matisse the Master; Richardson, Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel; Myers, Erik Satie; Debussy, Debussy Letters; Ravel, Ravel Reader; Orenstein, Ravel; Steegmuller, Cocteau; Sert, Misia and the Muses; Bertaut, Paris, 1870–1935; Lysiane Sarah Bernhardt and Marion Dix, Sarah Bernhardt, My Grandmother; Poiret, King of Fashion; Danchev, Georges Braque; Edith Wharton, The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Scribner, 1988); Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007); Gold and Fizdale, Misia; Quinn, Marie Curie; Eve Curie, Madame Curie; Albaret, Monsieur Proust; Cossart, Food of Love; Monet, Monet by Himself; Brandon, Ugly Beauty; Picardie, Coco Chanel; Chagall, My Life; Wullschläger, Chagall; Bougault, Paris, Montparnasse; Murphy, Military Aircraft; Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Rebel; Williams, Last Great Frenchman; Journas, Alfred Dreyfus; Burns, Dreyfus.