Creators

by Paul M. Johnson

  Some might argue that it was Eliot’s power which kept him to the fore as the greatest living poet. But that would be unjust to the sparse but intense gift he possessed. In 1925 he published “The Hollow Men,” a ninety-eight-line poem which reprised the emptiness, despair, and horror of The Waste Land, and proved extraordinarily memorable, from its opening line “We are the hollow men” to its shocking last couplet,

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  “The Hollow Men” was followed by two other successes: “Journey of the Magi” (1927) and “Ash-Wednesday” (1930). These punctuated his progression into the austere but glowing form of Christianity then known as Anglo-Catholicism. Indeed in 1927 he was ritually confirmed and became a British subject (not “citizen,” as he liked to point out). However, it was with his grand poem or poems, Four Quartets, that he finally proved, beyond possibility of argument, that he was the world’s greatest poet. Their chronology is complex, since the first, “Burnt Norton,” dates from 1935 and the other three date from 1940–1942. Effectively, however, the Quartets are a mid-war publication, appearing as a whole in various editions toward its end. They led to the repeated assertion, which became almost a truism, that Eliot was dispersing the wartime darkness with his solitary gleam of civilization.10

  The Quartets were self-edited, without Pound’s assistance, for Eliot had learned the lessons Pound had taught. Together, these poems are longer and fuller than The Waste Land, more pictorial, full of luminous images and catchy themes, with more rhymes, and with a great deal more music. Whether they are more “accessible” (a term just coming into vogue in 1942–1943) is a matter of opinion. They echo all sorts of incidents, themes, and places in Eliot’s life, but they are not about anything. Like The Waste Land, they are poems of mood. But if we take these two major works together, we see how Eliot creates, sustains, or changes mood. He harps continually on certain abstracts and certain concretes or substances. Among the abstractions the most important is time. (Time is sometimes contrasted or linked with distance—a reminder that Einstein’s general theory of relativity of 1915 was demonstrated to be true, empirically, in 1919, while The Waste Land was being written, and that this theory was a key element in Eliot’s cosmology.) Time is a word that occurs frequently in the Four Quartets, notably in the opening of “Burnt Norton” (“Time present and time past,” itself a Proustian echo) and in the introduction to “East Coker” (“In my beginning is my end”). Another principal abstract theme is desiccation. The word “dry” is very often used, for instance in the title of the third of the Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” (though this was actually the name of a group of rocks near Eliot’s childhood vacation home in New England). Desiccation is not really abstract, since it is a quality Eliot associates with bones (he is fond of bones, especially dry ones), sand, earth, and rock. The world is a desert, a lunar or Martian landscape, sometimes menacingly hot, sometimes piercingly cold. Its images, such as rocks, dry riverbeds, and cracks in the earth’s surface, reproach the human who strays there. Eliot also traffics in the undersea world, with its dim or impenetrable recesses, and its transformations over time (“Those are pearls which were his eyes”). Then there is fire, the subject of “The Fire Sermon,” one of the five parts of The Waste Land. Fire recurs repeatedly in Four Quartets. Eliot’s landscape is fiery when it is not desiccated or frozen, but though the fire scorches (“Burnt Norton”), it consumes not. It leaves ashes, though—and “ashes” is another favorite word. Then there is death; the word “death” occurs nearly as often as “time” in Eliot’s work. As Eliot puts it in “Little Gidding,” last of the Quartets:

  We die with the dying;

  See, they depart, and we go with them.

  We are born with the dead;

  See, they return, and bring us with them.

  The Four Quartets were much discussed when I was a freshman at Oxford in 1946, and they, too, were still fresh from the presses. I recall a puzzled and inconclusive discussion, after dinner on a foggy November evening, in which C. S. Lewis played the exegete on “Little Gidding,” with a mumbled descant from Professor Tolkien and expostulations from Hugo Dyson, a third don from the English faculty, who repeated at intervals, “It means anything or nothing, probably the latter.” But, like The Waste Land, it required input from the reader, and each reader’s contribution was and is different. Therein lay the charm and the power of Eliot’s poetry.11

  With Four Quartets, Eliot’s active life as a poet was essentially complete. He had created one of the most penetrating and memorable moods in the history of the art, and that was his contribution to western culture. It exactly suited a dreadful century, the twentieth, and in a sense said all that could be said, or hinted, about it. As the old rabbi observed, “All the rest is commentary.” Eliot had been dabbling in poetic drama most of his life, and with his fame as a poet firmly established, he felt he could indulge his foible. So we were given the five plays: Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman. It is a habit of poets to write plays, and a custom of the public to dislike or neglect them. There are exceptions, but most of these works fall by the wayside. Who has seen the plays of Byron or Shelley? Eliot’s repute was sufficient to get his plays staged, and they are revived from time to time, briefly and unmemorably. But he was pre-Beckett and pre-Pinter, and believed a play must tell a story; and his gift lay not in telling stories but in setting moods. So we pass over his plays.

  In 1947 his first wife, from whom he had long been separated, died. The next year Eliot received the Nobel Prize; and shortly afterward he received England’s highest award, the Order of Merit. He received eighteen honorary degrees from universities throughout the world, and was an honorary fellow of colleges in both Oxford and Cambridge. His second marriage, in 1957, brought him happiness, and a faithful future custodian of his oeuvre. He died in 1965 in an odor of sanctity, literary distinction, and high social repute, a model celebrity and a writer sans peur et sans reproche. My favorite line of his is still “There is nothing quite so stimulating as a strong dry martini cocktail.”

  13

  Balenciaga and Dior: The Aesthetics of a Buttonhole

  OF ALL THE CREATIVE PEOPLE I have come across, Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972) was easily the most dedicated to the business of making beautiful things. His work absorbed him totally, and there was no room in his life for anything or anyone else. When the cultural revolution of the 1960s, that disastrous decade, made it impossible (as he saw it) to produce work of the highest quality, he retired and quickly died of a broken heart.

  Making elegant clothes is one of the most ephemeral but oldest forms of art. The oldest of all, and by its nature even more transient, was body painting, which antedated the art of painting in caves and on stones (itself 40,000 years old) by many centuries. Nothing whatever survives of that, and the clothes worn by our distant ancestors are found only in minute fragments. Indeed, until the sixteenth century complete outfits are the rarest of all artifacts to survive; and until quite modern times museums were lacking in even rudimentary collections of historic clothes. With historians and archivists fighting shy of the subject, one of the most important of human needs and interests was ill recorded. When H. G. Wells began his history of the world (1920s), purporting to put in the subjects conventional historians neglected, he asked the question: “Who did the dressmaking for the Carolingian court?” But he did not provide the answer.

  Until the twentieth century only the rich dressed well and fashionably. From earliest times there was an international trade in wool and other textiles but made-up clothes (as opposed to fashions) rarely crossed frontiers until the eighteenth century. Wealthy men in the American colonies began to order clothes from London tailors, and in the 1790s Beau Brummell established standards in male attire that became international at the highest levels of society and made the London tailors, centered on Savile Row in Mayfair, the world focus
of the trade. Slowly, Paris began to achieve a comparable supremacy in female fashions, but it was a precarious position until the late 1850s, when Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895) set up shop in Paris, dressing the very rich. Worth was an Englishman, trained at Swan & Edgars in Piccadilly Circus, the shop said to have introduced the cage (hoopskirt), a sprung steel lightweight frame that could be used to increase the size of skirts to amazing dimensions. Britain was the world center of the textile trade (except for silk) and was the first country to establish large department stores, so it is curious that Worth, who was enormously inventive, methodical, and businesslike, did not choose to make London the center of high fashion. The reason was that Queen Victoria, though she reluctantly adopted the cage (and later, equally reluctantly, discarded it), was a plain, dowdy woman, not interested in dress even before the death of the prince consort in 1861 turned her into a widow weed woman. By contrast, Empress Eugénie was passionate about clothes and turned her court into a manequin parade. In 1860 she appointed Worth her official dressmaker and, for the first time, he began to make for her entire multi-dress outfits, one set in January for the spring and summer, and another in July for the autumn and winter. This determined the cycle of the Parisian dress year; and since the empress rarely if ever wore the same dress twice, and certainly never wore a dress from the year before (and since all the Parisian rich followed her example), Worth greatly expanded the volume of what he called haute couture.1

  The system demanded seasonal change to make clothes from the previous season look out of date and therefore unwearable. Worth responded with astonishing ingenuity and ruthlessness. He invented “planned obsolescence” a century before the term was coined. Among his novelties were: the antique over-tunic (1860); the shorter, ankle-clearing walking skirt (1862–1863); the flat-fronted cage (1864); light-colored spotted and striped summer dresses (1865); and fur trimmings (1867). In 1868 he abolished cages completely and with them the long-lived crinoline—a dramatic step that achieved the first real coup in fashion history. In 1869 he brought back the bustle, another audacious step that paid off. Worth survived the Franco-Prussian War and the siege of Paris, shutting his maison but reopening it in the autumn of 1871, catering especially for a new range of American customers who now began to come to Paris to be dressed. In 1874 he created the “cuirass line,” giving the upper part of the body the sheathed shape beloved of late Victorian women, and in 1881 the “princess line,” after Alexandra, princess of Wales. In 1890, he introduced the cut against the bias (i.e., against the natural line of the textile), an innovation later credited to other designers. In 1893–1895 he made leg-of-mutton sleeves the main feature of his silhouettes.2

  By the time he retired and handed the business over to his son, Gaston, Worth had explored virtually every shape open to the designer and proved what all dressmakers learn in time: there are only half a dozen basic ways of sculpting a dress, using the focii of hemline, waist, bust, neckline, and sleeves. If fashion is to change regularly, repetition is inevitable—Worth reintroduced the bustle three times and the leg-of-mutton sleeve twice—and the art of the skillful designer is to conceal it. Under Gaston Worth, the Parisian fashion world took its classic organizational shape: concentration around Avenue Montaigne; biannual shows coordinated in the first fortnight in January and the last two in July (six weeks before the autumn salon); and membership in the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, which fought piracy, disciplined the fashion press, and upheld standards, including the manner in which original designs could be sold to large ready-to-wear firms in Britain and America. To qualify for membership, a maison had to employ at least twenty people in its atelier and produce a minimum of fifty new designs in each collection. Both Worth and his son pioneered close links between the Parisian fashion industry and the textile trade, especially the silk makers of Lyon, to produce materials of the highest quality. Gaston Worth’s organizational work was complete by 1910. The number of houses then rose slowly (and allowing for wartime interruptions) to a peak of about 100 to 110 in 1946–1956; and their primary aim—to produce women’s clothes of the highest quality, in materials, design, cutting, sewing, fitting, and finish—was maintained until the end of the 1960s.3

  There is, however, an interesting historical point, which is not sufficiently grasped by those who study fashion. There was no intrinsic reason why women’s high fashion should be centered in Paris rather than London. Paris became the center essentially because Empress Eugénie provided client-leadership and Worth responded with designer leadership. If Victoria had died in, say, 1870, and Alexandra, an unusually handsome woman with a fine figure, had become queen and offered client leadership, Worth would have responded by transferring his house to Mayfair, and the whole story would have been different. Design was, and is, international, and a good dressmaker can operate anywhere if the market is encouraging. Not only was Worth English; so was John Redfern. Redfern, a linen dealer from the Isle of Wight, was the first to design (in the 1870s and 1880s) lightweight leisure and sports clothes for women, the kind of outfits a fashionable lady could wear playing croquet or indulging in the new craze for bicycling. Between the wars some of the best Parisian designers were foreigners. For example, an Englishman, Captain Molyneux, set up his house in Paris in the 1920s and again in 1946. He would have preferred to work in London, and did so for a time (as did his ablest disciple, Hardy Amies), but he had to follow the custom. The French could always produce original designers, such as the brilliant, fierce Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, who invented a form of elegant simplicity that she produced, with tiny variations, for nearly half a century. But of the greatest designers during the years between the wars, one was Mainbocher, an American; and another was Elsa Schiaparelli, an Italian. These two set up shop in Paris in 1930 and 1929 respectively. It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened if Wallis Simpson, who captivated the heart of King Edward VIII, had become queen. Even as the duchess of Windsor, she became the finest client leader of the twentieth century, having an exceptionally slender, fine-boned figure that designers loved to work for, fit, and adorn; an intense interest in fine clothes; and a superb eye for the kind of fashion novelty that works. She quickly established herself in 1937–1938 as a pillar of the Paris industry. As queen of England, with virtually unlimited money and an immense natural following of society ladies, she would surely have made London the focus—or so Molyneux and Amies believed. As things happened, however, Queen Elizabeth, a Scotswoman with a natural predilection for tweeds and tartans, pursued a homely upper-class native dowdyism for her entire long life (her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, following her), attended by a suitably homegrown couturier, Norman Hartnell. Hartnell laid down his philosophy of dressing royalty as follows, making it clear why his clients could never be called smart: “One of the essential elements of a majestic wardrobe is visibility. As a rule, ladies of the royal family wear light-colored clothes because such colors are more discernible against a great crowd, most of which will be wearing dark, everyday clothes.” It is hard to imagine the duchess of Windsor accepting such a principle.

  So the fashionable world went to Paris, and all the great designers were to be found there. Among the foreign-born masters of Parisian fashion, Balenciaga was the greatest.4 Indeed many would rate him the most original and creative couturier in history. And he was a true couturier, not just a designer: that is, he could design, cut, sew, fit, and finish, and some of his finest dresses were entirely his own work.

  He was born on 21 January 1895 in Guetavia, a Basque fishing village. Balenciaga’s father was a sailor and mayor of the village but died young, leaving his wife, Eisa, badly off. There were three children: Augustina, Juan Martin, and Cristóbal, the youngest. Eisa set up as a dressmaker and also taught the village women to sew. Cristóbal, age three and a half, joined the class and showed astonishing skill with a needle. For the next seventy-four years he could, and did, sew superbly, and kept his hand in by doing a piece of sewing (be it only darning) every da
y of his life. His first original work was a collar set with pearls for his cat. The collar was noticed by a grand lady of the neighborhood, Marquesa de Casa Torres (the great-grandmother of Queen Fabiola), who became his first patron, getting him to copy one of her best dresses. At twelve he was apprenticed to a San Sebastián tailor to learn cutting (an art few dress designers really possess). At seventeen he went to Biarritz, across the border, to acquire French. By 1913, at age eighteen, he was learning the women’s-wear trade in San Sebastián, in a luxury shop, Louvre, where he became adept at fitting ladies and finding gowns for their personal requirements. Later, experts as well as customers marveled at the speed with which he went about his work, especially the difficult business of fitting models with scores of garments just before a collection (he could do 180 in a day). The explanation is that from the age of three to his mid-twenties he learned thoroughly every aspect of his trade, building on his immense natural gifts—he had, for instance, strong, powerful, but also delicate hands and was ambidextrous; he could cut and sew with either hand. The one thing he was deficient in was draftsmanship: he could draw, in a way, and certainly got his ideas down on paper clearly, but as he progressed he employed skilled artists to interpret and embellish his designs.

  In 1919 Balenciaga opened his first shop in San Sebastián, on a coast more frequented by high society than it is now—Chanel had been operating at Biarritz since 1915. His first major commission was a bridal gown (as was his last, done in retirement and depression for the duchess of Cádiz in 1972). He was soon in demand at court, in the last phase of the Spanish monarchy before its suspension in 1931, working for Queen Victoria Eúgenie and Queen Mother Maria Cristina. He opened a second house in Madrid and a third in Barcelona, all three called Eisa, after his mother. His Spanish business was run with the help of his sister, his brother, and other relatives, and was from first to last very much a family firm, though on a substantial scale: 250 people worked in the Madrid house alone, and a further 100 in Barcelona. These three houses showed his own clothes; but he also imported clothes from Paris, going there frequently to choose them, from Worth, Molyneux, Chérait, Paquin, and Lanvin. Madame Vionnet, the most beloved of designers, was his inspiration. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he had to shut up shop, and it was natural for him to transfer to Paris (the third floor of number 10 on the new Avenue George V) in 1937. When the war ended in 1939, he reopened in Spain and was soon dressing General Franco’s wife. But Paris thereafter remained his chief base, though it had to be financed from Spain. Clearly his French profits (if any) probably never matched his Spanish ones.