by Paul Morand
Those forms of peace that are enforced or negotiated, that are glorious or shameful, are to do with politics; for the writer as for the ploughman, there is only one form of peace, not several. I have only ever loved peace; though this fidelity has brought me some strangely disloyal strokes of luck; it has taken me from a very advanced left-wing position in 1917 to deposit me in 1940 in a Vichy upheld by the ideas of Charles Maurras, where I was no less ill at ease. It is not man himself who changes, it is the world that revolves around him; I have known England in Victorian times, when to use the word “trousers” was frowned upon, only to discover today nowadays an Albion that bathes naked in the fountains of Trafalgar Square; I have seen Russian officers in 1917 with their epaulettes ripped off, only to find a USSR that is concocting thousands of honorary distinctions and reinstating a mandarin form of hierarchy.
In between the two is that hemiplegic body that we nowadays call Europe…
The reason why these period portraits do not deserve to age too quickly is because, fifty years earlier, they prefigure our present times. In them I can identify that bitterness of someone like Scott Fitzgerald, writing in 1925: “Our parents have done enough of this damage; the old generation practically laid waste to the world before passing it on to us.” After 1917, I disassociated myself from my elders, without ever ceasing to accept their bequest; the heartbreak of the emancipated.
In 1917, Marcel Sembat, one of the leaders of the SFIO [the French Socialist party between 1905 and 1971] and a highly cultivated man, befriended me (the ground floor of the Berthelots’ home, on the boulevard Montparnasse, adjoined Léon Blum’s flat: domestic and foreign policy mingled there, in an atmosphere I associate with the last days of Symbolism, the former Revue blanche, Lugné-Poe and Claudel, and which did not survive after 1918). Sembat introduced me to the paintings that were being done by the new generation; I dared to contravene my father’s maxim: “As far as Cézanne, but no further”; Sembat, a gentle and tolerant man, humanised socialism; it was due to him that I came to understand that we had to overcome our dread of the working man, one of the legacies of 1848 and 1871.
That year, I met another Socialist leader, Bracke-Desrousseaux; it was at V.M.’s5 home (during supper, Claudel handed out hard-boiled eggs, on which he had written poems, to each of us). “I believe in socialism, but I can only think of it as national”, I remarked innocently to Bracke-Desrousseaux. (I little imagined that, twenty years later, these two words would cause Europe to explode.) He replied dryly: “Impossible; socialism is international in its essence.”
1919
AFTER TWO YEARS in Rome and Madrid, I returned to Paris bringing with me some poems that were those of an impatient young man; some were written in Venice, among them this:
Oh! Nous ne pouvons attendre davantage…
(Oh! We can’t wait any longer…)
or:
… Nous nous langons sur la mer sans routes…
(… We embark upon uncharted seas…)
or:
… Nos cadets, on lit dans leurs yeux
Qu’ils ne souffriront pas d’attendre…
… A quand un large et continuel don de tout à tous?
A quand une grande course, pieds nus, autour du globe?
(You can see in the eyes of our younger brothers / that they will not put up with waiting… /… When shall we all make generous, continuous sacrifices to one another? / When shall we race barefooted around the globe?)
A more distant note was struck there; it came from:
… Le Passé… avec ses
héros, histoire, expérience, en toi engrangés!
L’héritage total qui a convergé vers toi…
(… The Past… with its heroes, history and experiences that are stored within you! / Our entire inheritance which has converged on you…)
The note struck is that of Leaves of Grass. For many years the athletic, lush and elemental verse of Walt Whitman had made him my superman. Hugo? By the time I left the lycée I had got no further than Eviradnus (I would not discover his Bouche d’ombre until half a century later). It was in Whitman that I first inhaled the scents of the open road and of woman.
I had thought the itinerant American was unknown in France; I was wrong; translated in 1907, the lessons he preached had not been lost; I encountered them in unanimism and in the work of Duhamel and Romains; Whitman had inspired Cendrars’s Pâques à New York; following in his footsteps, Cocteau had just sailed down the Potomac; Whitman was assumed to be the inspiration for Supervielle’s Débarcadères and Gravitations, just as he had fascinated Barnabooth, the tramp dressed by Henry Poole: in the United States, Hemingway and Dos Passos had taken high altitude rest cures with Whitman.
I am for those who march abreast
with the whole world…
It was the last echo of an international romanticism, of the year 1848 stretched out on a planetary scale.
1920
OPENING OF HARRY’S BAR (before Orson Welles and Hemingway).
1922 OUVERT LA NUIT6
AFTER THE WAR of 1870, those attending Flaubert’s cénacle—his literary gatherings—were searching for an overall title for what was to become Les Soirées de Médan, made famous by Boule-de-Suif, and apparently almost called the anthology La Guerre comique; this casual reaction was not blasphemy, but rather a sigh in the wake of great danger; the same could be observed in 1918; this explains, and may perhaps excuse, my Nuits.
In the colourful language they used at the time, the critics were very easy-going about the superficiality of a book that cocked a snook at the vast wide world, the world of fifty years ago that still seemed immense. It was a cry of happiness at having survived, one that struck a false note in an age that was already impoverished; a happiness for which friends of mine, such as Proust or Larbaud, who were very ill, envied me; all I longed for was a little of their genius, whereas they used to say: “I should have liked to live like Morand.” (Without knowing each other, each of them said exactly that.) May they not envy me for the time I spent “living well”. How much time was lost in making up time! Larbaud, responding to my De la vitesse [“On speed”], dedicated his essay La Lenteur [“Slowness”] to me; he was the true voluptuary.
1921
ANOTHER HALT at this Venice railway station “which terminates at nothing, upon a large tank of shadow and silence” (Ouvert la nuit); thus begins “La Nuit turque”, which I completed yesterday.
That day, I continued my journey as far as Stamboul, travelling on a brand new Simplon-Express, the train with which the Allies intended to depose the old Orient Express, planned by Wilhelm II as the first section of his “Bagdadbahn”.
On terra firma, the trenches were being filled in, the children of Venice were fishing in the shell craters, and frogmen from the Arsenal were helping re-float the Austrian torpedo boats that had sunk or become silted up.
It was a Venice still drowsy after its wartime slumber…
In La Fausse Maîtresse, Balzac had written: “The carnival in Venice is no longer worthwhile; the real carnival is happening in Paris.”
That was true, too, of the 1920s.
It is not my intention to describe the Paris of those days; my purpose here is merely a tête-à-tête with Venice, the tempo of these pages being that of the ebb and flow of life on her shores.
Everything that took place in Paris during my years of absence confirmed the changes in social behaviour that had begun in 1917. A generation of people had returned from the war, disenchanted by the past and curious about the future, and about those who tried to explain it and unveiled the new world to them, providing them with a geographical assessment of their unexplored dwelling place, our planet. If my Nuits and Rien que la Terre were well received at the time, it was due to circumstances rather more than to the author: success is frequently nothing more than a man’s confrontation with the age in which he lives.
What is art, if it is not that which constitutes each age?
Quite unconsc
iously each one of our books seemed to be saying to everything that happened before the war: “This will help to bury you.” In every age, the fallow deer have moaned about the ten-pointer stags; all of a sudden, we were experiencing that miracle, repeated regularly since 1798, of not having anyone in front of us; our fathers and grandfathers had decamped and were fading into memory; everything was empty, wide open and available. We never knew that long period of youthful revolt, that stretches from the romantics to the post-1968 Leftists: “Advance or perish.”
It was a kind of instant, total freedom, a path that chance had unblocked and which one then discovers is—in every domain—bare, just as much in the art of Picasso and the dance of Massine, as in the parties thrown by Étienne de Beaumont (in his town house in the rue Masséran, situated, ironically, between the noble faubourg and Mont-parnasse)—parties that were described by Raymond Radiguet and that put the Persian balls of the pre-1914 era firmly back into the Musée Grévin. The public threw itself into the avant-garde with such passion that not only was there no rear-guard, but there were no troops either.
How did I come to find myself hurled from among the front ranks of the Ancients, how had a youth spent among the anchorites fitted me for the avant-garde? I still wonder. Was it the surge of the new generation carrying me along in its wake? Our publishers’ hysterical greed for publicity was never more than a turbo engine that exploited the force of a tide that launched talents as different as Montherlant or Breton into prominence.
What a stampede! Every snob wanted to be a part of it, to experience this new adventure and to belong to the perimeter of this literary Kamchatka of which Baudelaire speaks. The old generation asked for mercy and praised us to the skies, offering us reviews, honours, friendship and the hands of their daughters at comical lunch parties at which we were flanked at table by academicians who promised us the moon; most of them loathed us, just as people have always loathed those who come after them. “What should we think of you, Maître?” asked the members of Les Six of their senior, Maurice Ravel, who wittily replied: “Loathe me.” (They did nothing of the sort, incidentally; their loathing stopped with Wagner.)
For those of the pre-1914 era, we were insurgents, hungry for blood, members of a new sect of Carnivores who were derisively turning the Establishment upside down, forerunners of those “Barbarians” whose coming Barrès had long predicted; we took over Marinetti’s restaurant, howling at the death of Venice and making fun of the gondolas, “those idiot’s see-saws”; along the Champs-Élysées, Max Jacob and Cocteau called out to the children: “Hurry up and play, little casualties of the next war!” Literature’s old guard protested about this Proust “whose budding groves prevailed over the groves of the sacrificial heroes”; the “Wooden Crosses”7 denounced Le Diable au corps in which the poilus are cuckolds.
Jean Cocteau, 1934
Today those “années folles” shock us because of the number of victims they bequeathed us—the suicides, the hopeless, the deserters, the failures. How many Picassos may have been left behind! “I have cut through tradition like a good swimmer crossing a river”; what Picasso did not add was that Hans, the flute player, was followed when he swam by rats who, in their case, drowned.
Jean Cocteau, who had moved on from his Venetian poems of 1909, took risks which for anyone else would have been perilous; he always landed on his feet again. More acclaimed than ever, having acquired a new public and created a second youth for himself, he was everywhere at once; he couldn’t miss the bus because he ran in front of it; he was at the forefront of everything, the spiciest of metaphors on the nib of his pen, and because of his sarcastic turn of phrase he adopted a high-pitched voice; with his questioning chin, his gimlet-like expression and his fingers weaving in and out, he lived his life “at full tilt”. To have taken a rest would have blunted his talents. Electric sparks hissed from Cocteau-le-Pointu from all sides. Going down the Henri III staircase after visiting him in the block of flats in the rue d’Anjou where his mother lived, you felt foolish, retarded, stiff-jointed and slow-witted; only he was able to sleep as he danced, on the tips of his toes.
At the other extreme, confident of their genius and determined to flee from le Tout-Paris and its poison, Saint-John Perse (at that time known as Saint-Léger Léger), who was back from China, and Giraudoux held firm, deaf to all else but the very personal tones of Éloges (1911) and Provinciales (1908).
But the bell had tolled for them too; in their own way they would be induced to live in and occupy “the positions that had been relinquished”, as the recent official communiqués used to put it.
Here is an example: Round about the mid-1920s. A dinner-party at the home of Erik Labonne, in the flat in which he still lives in avenue Victor-Emmanuel; four young men on the staff of the Foreign Office, who had become friends while taking the competitive entrance examinations (even though they had sat their exams on different dates): Giraudoux, who was forty-four years old, Alexis Léger (Saint-John Perse), Erik Labonne and I, who were all thirty-five. Philippe Berthelot, our director, our boss and our friend, had just experienced one of those terrifying reversals of fortune which destroyed the end of his life; from now on it would be a matter of consolidating our administrative positions without him, and of maintaining continuity; let no one imagine us as over-excited young men eager to be in command; we had been through the war and had learnt how to control ourselves; we were simply obeying a “duty to be ambitious” (Stendhal). All of a sudden, we had become orphans; the great generation of French diplomacy—the Cambon brothers, Paléologue, Jusserand—had recently disappeared; between it and ourselves, there were only civil servants.
This is how fate would deal with us in that period when everything seemed to be in limbo and the future was abruptly turning into the present:
With the death of Berthelot, Alexis Léger, who was in the Far Eastern department, would gain direct access to his minister Briand, who was Président de Conseil; Briand was one of those intelligent but lazy men who knew how to make use of other people; Alexis Léger convinced his boss and even Parliament that Berthelot had alienated himself: for over ten years, serving under many ministers, he was to remain the master of French diplomacy; Erik Labonne, however, was a mystic: he had foreseen—almost through revelation, or inspiration, that our colonies in North Africa were overflowing with hidden oil; to begin with, nobody listened to him; with great tenacity he devoted his life to substantiating his beliefs: the results are well known. Here too, it was a case of tabula rasa. As for Giraudoux, he pursued two dreams: to serve in the government of his country, an illusion that was not so much incompatible with his genius, as with his character; it was fifteen years later that Daladier gave him his opportunity, at the Continental, in 1940; his other dream was the theatre: for a quarter of a century—ever since Maeterlinck or Claudel—there had been nobody; when his play Siegfried was acclaimed two years later, French theatres were empty.
And so what was the target of my own aspirations? For my friends, it was their work, their career, or both. All I dreamed of was complete freedom; and yet from a very young age I had been left unsupervised and been given a choice of careers; I had never felt I was being held back at the office, or if I was, only very gently so. So what did I think that total liberation or the sort of independence which only death can supply would give me? I still ask myself this question. Was it the sort of life of a “hippie”, before the term was invented, a journey towards some non-existent happiness, an abandonment to a lethargy which had more to do with illness than with good health? I search my memory trying to recall my state of mind at the time: being on this earth is a unique adventure; I had to make the most of it. To do what? To raise oneself up to man’s estate or satisfy one’s instincts? All of this, and simultaneously. Don’t think about it; forward march, head down! God will look after his own; let’s see what happens.
Two guardian angels, my mother and my wife, having a deep sense of tradition as well as being aware of my best interests, decid
ed differently. A life was something you constructed like a house, according to their way of thinking.
All I longed for was independence, not knowing that it is in short supply. Everything, straight away! Unaware that we pay for being “quick”. How unfair to make us wait! I wanted the whole world, one without end (did I carry within me the seeds of that mania for evasion in which people delight today?). Recognizing that I was not very adept at controlling others and at getting what I wanted, I sought to shape my life as if it were some precious substance, to hew away all rough edges and restore it to all its prismatic power.
Everything was available, everything was waiting to be plucked; everything was; the larger obstacles would await us twenty years later. Another story… The time has not come to tell it.
Those who try to recreate that period of fifty years ago imagine it as some immense Bal des Quat’Zarts, parading before an astonished and uncomprehending Paris; that is to miss the point entirely. We were artists delighted at the acceptance we were given by an increasingly well-informed public. We were living through a veritable springtime of work, research, new inventions and of friendship between the arts; rather like the Impasse du Doyenné at the time of Nerval. Everything moved forward along the same axis, open to the road ahead, in an atmosphere of reciprocity, generosity and true camaraderie. The Muses fraternised; those who had previously been forgotten we restored to their true position: Georges Auric, at the age of fifteen, thought the world of Léon Bloy and used to visit him, Poulenc rescued Satie from the depths of Arcueil, and we brought back Valéry from out of the shadows; the theatre alone continued to snore away on the boulevard. Artists created backdrops for the stage, and Derain painted sets for Massine; Darius Milhaud and I spent the summer of 1920 together in Juan-les-Pins’s only hotel, a small boarding-house for travelling salesmen called the Hôtel de la Gare; Radiguet, in order not to have to return home to the suburbs, would spend the night among Brancusi’s blocks of polished metal; Reverdy wrote his poems in the rue Cambon, while another great artist was busy fitting her clients.