by Craig Brown
Freud is likewise impressed by Gustav Mahler; he has never met anyone who grasped psychoanalysis so quickly.
‘... Mahler suddenly said that now he understood why his music had always been prevented from achieving the highest rank through the noblest passages, those inspired by the most profound emotions, being spoilt by the intrusion of some commonplace melody. His father, apparently a brutal person, treated his wife very badly, and when Mahler was a young boy there was a specially painful scene between them. It became quite unbearable to the boy, who rushed away from the house. At that moment, however, a hurdy-gurdy in the street was grinding out the popular Viennese air “Ach, du lieber Augustin.” In Mahler’s opinion the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement was from then on inextricably fixed in his mind, and the one mood inevitably brought the other with it.’186
Of course, this is what people admire in his music. It is what makes it innovative and modern. But it can be hard for artists to discriminate between their strengths and their weaknesses, as the two are so closely allied.
After they part, Gustav Mahler enters a state of elation. ‘Feeling cheerful. Interesting discussion,’ he wires Alma, and later, ‘I am living everything as if new.’ On the train back, he writes this verse about the meeting:
Night shades were dispelled by one powerful word,
The tireless throb of torment ended.
At last united in one single chord
My timid thoughts and my tempestuous feelings blended.
On his return, he looks again at Alma’s compositions, and starts to sing them at the piano. ‘What have I done? These songs are good. They’re excellent ... I shan’t rest until you start working again. God, I was narrow-minded in those days.’ Mahler dedicates his Eighth Symphony, which he unveiled on September 12th 1910, to her; he also has five of Alma’s lieder published, with premieres in Vienna and New York.
Nine months later, on May 18th 1911, he dies of bacterial endocarditis.187 Some months on, Freud suddenly realises he never sent an invoice for his consultation, so he writes one out, dating it ‘Vienna, October 24 1911’. He attaches two stamps and sends it to Mahler’s widow, Alma, ‘for services rendered’.
GUSTAV MAHLER
REFUSES TO KNEEL BEFORE
AUGUSTE RODIN
Rue de l’Université, Paris
April 23rd 1909
A group of Mahler’s admirers in Vienna has been persuaded by Alma Mahler’s stepfather, the painter Carl Moll, to commission the great Auguste Rodin to sculpt the composer’s head. At first, Rodin is indifferent. Only after being told that Mahler is a great composer, on the same level in music as he is in art, does Rodin agree to lower his regular price to 10,000 francs for a clay bust, with an additional charge for bronze casts.
Mahler is restless by nature, not the sort of man to agree to sit still for any length of time, so they appeal to his vanity, too, by telling him that the idea has come from Rodin himself, as Mahler’s head interests him so much. Flattered, Mahler agrees.
He arrives in Paris from America. He is suffering from rheumatic heart disease, and has been unable to hike in the mountains, so can no longer ‘wrest my ideas from Nature’. On April 22nd, their go-between Paul Clemenceau writes a letter to Rodin: ‘If you are free to do so, please come tomorrow, Friday, at 12.30 to have lunch with us at the Café de Paris. Mahler will be there. We could arrange everything while dining. Remember that Mahler is convinced that it is your wish to do his bust, or he would have refused to pose.’
The lunch goes well. Though the two men barely exchange a word – Mahler speaks French only falteringly, and Rodin doesn’t speak a word of German – Clemenceau is delighted by the way they get on. ‘The first encounter between these two men of genius was extremely impressive. They didn’t speak but only sized each other up, and yet they understood each other perfectly.’
Rodin gets down to work. Mahler has only a little time; he must leave for Vienna on May 1st. Each sitting lasts roughly an hour and a half. Rodin is a quick worker; he needs to be, because Mahler is such a fidget. In any game of musical statues, he would always be the first to lose. ‘He couldn’t keep still, even for a minute,’ notes Alma.
Despite all this, sitter and sculptor strike up some sort of rapport. ‘Rodin fell in love with his model; he was really unhappy when we had to leave Paris, for he wanted to work on the bust much longer,’ observes Alma. ‘His method was unlike that of any other sculptor I have had the opportunity of watching. He first made flat surfaces in the rough lump, and then added little pellets of clay which he rolled between his fingers while he talked. He worked by adding to the lump instead of subtracting from it. As soon as we left he smoothed it all down and next day added more. I scarcely ever saw him with a tool in his hand. He said Mahler’s head was a mixture of Franklin’s, Frederick the Great’s and Mozart’s.’
At each session, the Mahlers notice that one of the sculptor’s mistresses is always lingering patiently in the next room while Rodin works away. ‘Some girl or other with scarlet lips invariably spent long and unrewarded hours there, for he took very little notice of her and did not speak to her even during the rests. His fascination must have been powerful to induce these girls – and they were girls in what is called “society” – to put up with such treatment ... Sometimes we were interrupted by a loud knocking on the door; it was une amie whom Rodin described as troublesome. She was obliged to wait for hours in the next room, and she kept on knocking, which made Rodin nervous and furious.’
Rodin works at a furious pace. ‘He would step forward, then retreat, look at the figure in a mirror, mutter and utter unintelligible sounds, make changes and corrections,’ writes Stefan Zweig, observing him at work.
Only once is there a clash between the two artists. It arises from a misunderstanding. Rodin needs to look at Mahler’s head from above in order ‘to gauge its volume and contour’, so asks him ‘perhaps rather brusquely’ to get down on his knees. But Mahler is notoriously touchy, and misinterprets the instruction. Why should he abase himself? ‘The musician thought it was to humiliate him that I asked him to kneel,’ Rodin realises later.
Instead of kneeling as requested, Mahler flushes red with anger and storms out of the studio. As a conductor, he is more used to bossing than being bossed. What he says goes: he once declared that he would use only his eyes to conduct were he not so short-sighted. But, despite the language difficulties, the two men soon patch it up, and before Mahler sets off for Vienna, he has agreed to fit in some more sittings in October.
Rodin is thrilled by his own creation. ‘There is a suggestion not only of Eastern origin, but of something even more remote, of a race now lost to us – the Egyptians in the days of Rameses,’ he enthuses. He produces two busts of Mahler, one rougher and more expressionist, the other smoother and more naturalistic. On his fiftieth birthday, Mahler is presented with a book that has a photograph of his bust on its cover. Inside, there are tributes from his many admirers, including von Hofmannsthal and Zweig. Rodin himself writes the greeting, ‘Au Grand Musicien G. Mahler’.
After Mahler’s death, Rodin orders his assistant Aristide Roussaud to carve a marble version of the smoother bust. It can still be seen in the Musée Rodin. Bizarrely, it is labelled ‘Mozart’. Alma Mahler ascribes this to a custodial error, but others point the finger at Rodin himself. Does he wish to somehow include Mahler’s dying words, ‘Mozart ... Mozart!’ in his portrait? Or, ever conscious of commerce, does he think that the public will be more likely to come and see a sculpture of the most popular of all composers rather than the moody, difficult, modern composer whom cynics have sometimes chosen to nickname Herr Malheur?
AUGUSTE RODIN
YEARNS FOR
ISADORA DUNCAN
Rue de la Gaîté, Paris
1900
Just recently, the twenty-three-year-old Isadora Duncan has grown aware that her body is ‘something other than an instrument to express the sacred harmony of music’. Her bust, for a start, se
ems to be taking on a life of its own. ‘My breasts which until then had been hardly perceptible began to swell softly and astonish me with charming and embarrassing sensations. My hips, which had been like a boy’s, took on another undulation, and through my whole being I felt one great surging, longing, unmistakable urge, so that I could no longer sleep at night, but tossed and turned in feverish, painful unrest.’
So, having mesmerised London with her exuberant dancing, Isadora sets off for Paris with one aim in mind: to lose her virginity.
She proves as great a success in the French capital as she has already been in London. In her own eyes, she is ‘a little, uneducated American girl ... who in some mysterious manner had found the key to the hearts and minds of the intellectual and artistic elite’. With Maurice Ravel playing the piano, she dances to the music of Chopin at Madame de Saint-Marceaux’s Friday-night musical salons.
She is also taken up by an American lesbian in Paris, Winaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune. Winaretta’s first marriage, to the Prince de Scey-Montbéliard, got off to an uncertain start after she speared him with an umbrella on their wedding night, threatening to kill him if he came any closer. (Her current marriage is to another Prince, Edmond de Polignac, who is also, conveniently, homosexual.) Princess Winaretta arranges a series of subscription concerts for Isadora, to which Parisian high society flocks, and from which everyone else is barred: asked at one of these events why she has not invited Coco Chanel, the Princess replies, ‘I don’t entertain tradespeople.’ But Gabriel Fauré, Georges Clemenceau and Octave Mirabeau all come, as does the fifty-nine-year-old Auguste Rodin, who is immediately taken with Isadora Duncan, as she is with him. Others, more snobbish than Isadora, find Rodin humdrum socially. When Vita Sackville-West first met him, he struck her as ‘a rather commonplace French bourgeois ... rather an unreal little fat man’. For her, it was only when Rodin began stroking his marble that this commonplace French bourgeois metamorphosed into a genius.
Rodin’s attraction to Isadora is instant; he is desperate to sculpt her. He often gets carried away like this. ‘Madame,’ he cries while working on the bust of Mrs Mary Hunter, the ravishing sister of the composer Dame Ethel Smyth, ‘your skin has the whiteness of turbot that one sees lying on the marble slabs of your amazing fishmongers! It looks as if it were bathed in milk! Ah, Madame!’ And with this, he kisses Mary’s hand, ‘a little too greedily’, according to her.
Isadora pursues the delighted Rodin to his studio in the rue de l’Université ‘like Psyche seeking the God Pan in his grotto, only I was not asking the way to Eros, but to Apollo’. He is only too happy to show her around. ‘Sometimes he murmured the names of his statues, but one felt that names meant little to him. He ran his hands over them and caressed them. I remember thinking that beneath his hands the marble seemed to flow like molten lead. Finally he took a small quantity of clay and pressed it between his palms. He breathed hard as he did so. The heat streamed from him like a radiant furnace. In a few moments he had formed a woman’s breast that palpitated beneath his fingers.’
It does the trick. Isadora allows Rodin to take her outside. Hand in hand, the two of them glide to her studio in the rue de la Gaîté. Once there, she changes into her tunic and Rodin sits back while she dances an idyll of Theocritus:
Pan aimait la nymphe Echo
Echo aimait Satyr.
After dancing for a while, Isadora comes to a halt. She has developed various theories of dance that she is keen to share with Rodin, but she quickly discovers that a lesson in dance theory is very far from his thoughts. ‘Soon I realised that he was not listening. He gazed at me with lowered lids, his eyes blazing, and then, with the same expression that he had before his works, he came toward me. He ran his hands over my neck, breast, stroked my arms and ran his hands over my hips, my bare legs and feet. He began to knead my whole body as if it were clay, while from him emanated heat that scorched and melted me. My whole desire was to yield to him my entire being and, indeed, I would have done so if it had not been that my upbringing caused me to become frightened, and I withdrew, threw my dress over my tunic, and sent him away bewildered.’
In later life, she comes to regret this sudden attack of the scruples, a seizure she ensures will never be repeated. ‘What a pity! How often I have regretted this childish incomprehension which lost to me the divine chance of giving my virginity to the Great God Pan, the mighty Rodin. Surely Art and all Life would have been richer thereby!’
Despite missing his one and only chance (or perhaps as a result of it), for the rest of his life Rodin remains one of Isadora’s most devoted admirers. A full fifteen years later, she is back on stage in Paris, and he is shouting fit to burst, his passion undimmed. As Isadora lies prone on the stage at the end of Pathétique, ‘his arms went through the air like the wings of a windmill, and he seemed to shriek, although his voice was lost among the general shouting’.
Auguste Rodin never gets over her. ‘Isadora Duncan is the greatest woman I have ever known!’ he confides to a friend ‘... Sometimes I think she is the greatest woman the world has ever known. Elle est suprème!’
ISADORA DUNCAN
UPSTAGES
JEAN COCTEAU
Hôtel Welcome, Villefranche-sur-Mer
September 18th 1926
Now aged forty-nine, penniless and plump, Isadora Duncan has seen better days. ‘I don’t dance any more, I only move my weight around,’ she says. The waspish New York wit Dorothy Parker nicknames her ‘Duncan Disorderly’.
Isadora is living in a ramshackle studio at the far end of the promenade des Anglais in Nice. The block is surrounded by empty tin cans and discarded bicycles. Her front door is graffittoed with messages from friends and lovers. Next to its handle is a heart with ‘Jean’ written across it in Jean Cocteau’s distinctive handwriting.
The studio is filled to bursting with clutter from her eventful life: Louis XV furniture from the Galeries Lafayette, dyed bulrushes in fake Sèvres vases, aspidistras in pots from Oriental bazaars. There is a rusting bathtub in her dressing room: in the old days, she is said to have bathed in champagne, but nowadays the tub is filled with yet more clutter. Her bed is swathed in ageing mosquito nets, the walls of her bedroom decorated with fading photographs of her many lovers. No one knows how many she has had, least of all Isadora. ‘It became fashionable to boast of having had a week with Isadora,’ reminisces Agnes de Mille. ‘Whether true or false, the chance of contradiction was slight.’
Her love life is already the stuff of legend.188 ‘She was like a great flowing river through which the traffic of the world could pass,’ says Edna St Vincent Millay, herself no slouch. There is a tall story that, ten years ago, Isadora begged George Bernard Shaw to have sex with her, saying that a baby with her body and his brains would be a world-beater. ‘Yes,’ Shaw is said to have replied, ‘but suppose it had my body and your brains?’
She is a well-known sight in Villefranche, walking around the streets barefoot in a scarlet négligée, all topped off by hair of vivid magenta. She generally heads to the jetty, on the lookout for young men. Sometimes she attracts abuse from the less bohemian citizens of Villefranche. She imitates their tut-tuts: ‘That Bolshevik! She’s always carrying young men with her! She says he’s her secretary! Have you heard of her last scandal! Such a vile woman!’ Recently, when Isadora attended a dinner in Paris, a fellow guest, an American woman, turned to their host, Count Etienne de Beaumont, and exclaimed: ‘My dear man, if I had known that you would have that red whore here, I would never have set foot in your home.’ For a moment, Isadora looked taken aback, but then she turned to the butler, smiled, and said, ‘Do you have something sweet in the house? I feel the need of it just now.’
On this particular day, a party is being thrown at the Hôtel Welcome to celebrate the seventeenth birthday of a painter called Sir Francis Rose. His mother, Lady Rose, has appointed Jean Cocteau master of ceremonies, and he has decided to make the most of it. Dressed in a beige suit li
ned with black satin, with his chair covered in red velvet, he has a bust of Dante on the table beside him.
The other guests are quite a mixed bag. The conventional Lady Rose has invited only English officers and their wives, but others have slipped through the net: a priest in purple socks with a vast Greek cross hanging around his neck, an author in a Spanish clerical hat, carrying a gramophone with a tortoise-shell trumpet, and the bulky Lady MacCarthy in a frilly green dress, giving her the appearance, according to Cocteau, of ‘a cabbage reeling on tiny feet’. But some remain excluded: Lady Rose puts her foot down when an uninvited guest tries to bring his donkey in with him.
To the horror of Lady Rose, her son Francis,189 crowned with roses, arrives at his own party arm-in-arm with Isadora Duncan, who is wearing a diaphanous Greek toga and is wreathed in flowers.190 Cocteau describes her as ‘very fat and slightly drunk’, and ‘enveloping the young man like a placenta’. The couple are accompanied by two gay young American men, who Isadora calls her ‘pigeons’. Outside the hotel, fishermen are pressing their noses to the windows, ready to see what happens next.
A deathly silence turns the guests to statuary. Isadora laughs, and continues to drape herself over the birthday boy. ‘She even dragged him into the window recess,’ recalls Cocteau. ‘It was then that Captain Williams, a friend of the family, played his part ... He strode across the dining room, approached the window, and shouted in a tremendous voice, “Old Lady, unhand that child!”’ With that, the Captain hurls a large silver watch in her direction and brings down his cane on her head, blackening her eye and ripping her toga. Isadora falls to the floor.