Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  Jarry simply stood Bernhardt on her head, sensing that people did not pack the theater to see stodgy old Phèdre. They came to see the woman who slept in coffins, let wild animals roam about her house, and kept kings as lovers. The public came to see the Bernhardt. Jarry simply affected the inverse of this relation, thereby discovering—with Planck, Einstein, Freud, the Cubists, and the stream-of-consciousness novelists—the intermarriage of observer and observed, dreamer and dream, worshiper and stage celebrity. He became his fictional King Ubu.

  Transformed into fictional royalty, he built himself a castle—a hovel standing on four rotting planks, which he called, through the machinations of dream logic, “The Royal Tripod.” He pedaled about on “that which rolls.” He brandished firearms in public. He consumed heroic amounts of alcohol and ether. He initiated Banquets, lavish bohemian parodies of Sarah fêtes. At these several-day-long bashes, guests threw one another out of windows and gave long speeches glorifying squirrels or metal bolts or pieces of poster torn from kiosks. Jarry’s feasts were object lessons in how to love and ridicule a thing at the same time.

  As King Ubu, Jarry let his speech grow lavish and grandiloquent, even as he sank into addiction and squalor. Somewhere in the charade, he passed the point of role-playing into belief. He induced in himself a divine schizophrenia not unlike the Divine Sarah’s, driving himself simultaneously into self-proclaimed Great Personality and obscure Everyman. King Ubu, self-made schizophrenic, addressed himself by the royal “We.” Only on his deathbed did he revert to first person. For several days, semicomatose, he repeated, “I search, I search.” In his last lucid moment, Jarry asked for a toothpick. Given one, he held it devoutly in his hands as if it were the object of his delivery and final happiness. After his burial, his friends held a banquet.

  The great task of Jarry and the avant-garde was to force two things to occupy the same place at the same time: public and private, celebrated and obscure, serious and ludicrous. One tool that helped instigate this pursuit of the simultaneous was the automobile. Tearing along at fifty miles an hour, the new century saw its familiar landscapes collapse along the axis of travel, breaking the old barrier of time, shortening the space between Paris and Vienna until the two seemed synonymous. The car inspired action paintings, superimposed photographs, tone clusters and polychords—a whole art of the simultaneous. Movements and manifestos equated the auto and speed with power and beauty. Marinetti and the Futurists found in the car further good: danger, audacity, revolution, and war. Again, in their worship of the private auto, the avant-garde did not oppose Sarah’s values so much as democratize them: each to her own Bernhardt Special.

  So the showgoing public polarized violently into camps for Queen Sarah and camps for King Ubu. Yet by far the greatest number of those in the early century—both celebrities and those millions who left no document of their ever having lived—were untouched by the controversy between the personality-become-actress and the playwright-become-personality.

  Count Zeppelin was busy keeping his airships from blowing up. Diesel had disappeared, with both German and British espionage agencies blaming the other. (The inventor had, in fact, killed himself after suffering huge losses in the market.) The Czarina Alexandra was staying up late with her hemophiliac son; recently, she had found a man who could stop the bleeding. De Broglie, Planck, Heisenberg, and Einstein were interpreting the discoveries of their Miracle Year. Mahler kept together the Ninth Symphony, in which things fall apart. Sun Yat-sen was busy freeing half a billion people. The suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under the King’s horse at the English Derby, and by this vote, recorded in a remarkable photograph, abstained from the theater for good.

  The Wrights tinkered, Stalin wrote news copy, and Kafka stamped official papers. Hearst incited his reporters to denounce ragtime. Schweitzer wrote about Bach and set up camp in Africa. And Alexander Fleming, the fellow who identified the most important substance of the century, was busy putting out a thousand petri dishes, waiting for the chance spore blown from a brewery to mix with the mucus from a runny nose and reveal the antagonistic action of penicillin. Finally, there is the innumerable class of those who might have advanced beyond the achievements of any of these mentioned. Where is the Sarah of mid-century? Where is Ubu’s heir? As one poet-journalist put it, in Flanders’ fields.

  So the reports of these times circle back to Bernhardt and her enormous popularity. Biographies document endless anecdotes: crowds near hysteria, duels, Days of Glorification, parades—a worship so great that on her first visit to America, hearing an incredulous reporter exclaim, “New York didn’t give Dom Pedro of Brazil such an ovation,” Sarah said drily, “Yes, but he was only an emperor.”

  In her twilight years, Sarah only tightened the hypnotic grip she had on the public. In March of 1914, while Ford perfected his automated plant and Sander bicycled into the Westerwald, Bernhardt, yet a third celebrity with only half a dozen years of schooling, in debt to the hilt, stood on the stage of her own Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt and received France’s greatest award: Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. That summer, the seventy-year-old took her latest hit on the road, electrifying the provinces as if she were a girl of eighteen. She’d returned to her summer home for a brief vacation when the newspapers started to carry accounts of the troubles in the Balkans. When the news of August first arrived, Bernhardt is reported to have said, “Dear God! Why does civilization keep on receding?”

  The gallant French front, which was to sustain itself on élan vital and red pantaloons, fell apart in the first month following Germany’s devastation of Belgium. France had left the route through Belgium only lightly covered, daring Germany to bring Britain into the war in defense of Belgian neutrality. Each day the German columns advanced until the fall of Paris seemed certain. The government was evacuated to Bordeaux, leaving Gallieni in charge of the city. Still Sarah refused to leave. She had nursed soldiers in the occupation of 1870, and insisted on doing the same this time around. But when intelligence revealed that her name led a list of Great Personalities the Kaiser wanted captured and brought back to Berlin, a hysterical Paris forced its Divine Sarah from the city.

  On the morning of her departure, her son had extraordinary difficulty in securing a taxi to take her to the station. He searched for over an hour, finally turning up one sorry excuse for a cab. Sarah instructed the car to go by way of the Champs Élysées for what might be a last look at the beautiful thoroughfare now belonging to a lost time. Arriving there, she saw a scene that caused Gallieni, the defender of Paris, himself to cry out, “Here at last is something remarkable.”

  The way was jammed with five hundred cabs rushing an entire army of men to the Battle of the Marne. The taxi portage was the last act of heroism from a lost world. An officer stopped Bernhardt’s cab, reprimanding the driver for not falling in for the bizarre conscription. He threw open the door to evict the passenger, and stood face to face with the third most famous woman in France after Jeanne d’Arc and the Virgin:

  I beg your pardon, Madame, I didn’t know! Go chauffeur, take Mme. Sarah Bernhardt to the station, then come back and put yourself at our disposition. . . . Go with a tranquil mind, Madame.

  And then he repeated the catchphrase that all France was rallying around: Ils ne passeront pas. And while it was technically true that the Germans did not pass, one needs the cynical rejoinder, invented later by boys at the front, to tell the truth about the next four years: “And neither will we.”

  Sarah left for Bordeaux. There a flare-up of an old knee injury, first contracted when jumping out of a stage parapet, grew so severe that it forced surgery. Sarah went into amputation almost eager for her war wound. Fantastically, not even losing a leg at the hip ended her career. She burned her wooden leg and appeared onstage in a chaise. She was again a marvel, and the public had more cause for adulation than ever. An agent for Barnum offered ten thousand dollars for the severed limb.

  Sarah demanded to play for soldiers in the field, insisti
ng on going, escort or no. The authorities set her up in a tent near the front and announced to a division of battle-shocked men, who had just spent a year under the Germans 420s, gassed, bombed by airplanes, and slaughtered by the carbines, that they were about to see the great Sarah Bernhardt perform. The soldiers watched in silence as a horribly aged woman hopped about onstage, mirroring their own mutilation, shouting out lines in the remnant of a voice once called the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” a woman who could not move without extraordinary effort, bandying some ludicrous patriotic pap, refusing to believe that she was hideous, that she was not still irresistible to her old, faithful lover, the audience, and, in her obstinate refusal, forcing reality to meet her halfway. The soldiers reportedly broke out weeping, many of them calling out, “To arms!”

  Badly strapped for funds, Sarah turned to that source of income she had considered little better than prostitution: she made films. Seeing these, hearing her Victrola recordings reveal the paradox of mechanical reproduction: the lens insists, “Here is her physical evidence. See how the film follows her, fits her into any viewer’s world.” But there is no fitting her world to ours. We are left to pick out of the reproduction the auburn mop, the other-worldly movement, to reconstruct, despite the machine, the cult of this personality, what it was that made all the world chase after this figure. But her contemporaries chased the red-haired Sarah forward in time, into the promise of a new century. We can at best chase the reproduction backward for some misunderstood resemblance.

  Sarah spoke her roles for the camera, performing for the deaf machine exactly as she had done onstage, ignoring that the camera could not reproduce her glowing articulations and alexandrines. Instead, she hobbled about, making the camera follow her, enunciating each line as carefully as she would in front of a live audience. If she so much as gave a line a bad inflection, she would insist on a retake.

  Sarah was the first personality of such mythic fame to leave so comprehensive a performance record. And yet the mechanically reproduced Sarahs multiply rather than reduce the ambiguity surrounding this most unpinnable of subjects. Just as Magritte added, to his hyperrealistic painting of a pipe, the painted caption This is not a pipe, one feels on watching Bernhardt’s film Queen Elizabeth that this is not Sarah. It is only her tracks, an interpretation.

  For three years after the war, she continued to write, lecture, and perform. She was in rehearsal when she passed into a coma. On awakening an hour later, she asked, “When do I go on?” She passed into a week-long period of semi-consciousness. Waking, she asked if there were any reporters outside. Told there were, she said, “All my life, reporters have tormented me enough. I can tease them now a little by making them cool their heels.” These were her dying words. Here the legend, or the mechanically documented legend, ends.

  BUT AT THE office Christmas party, where I was destined to come across so much that wasn’t in the books, Mrs. Schreck, the immigrant cleaning lady, told me an extended version in a heavy accent that at several points thickened into incoherence. She told of how a relative of hers was one of those reporters cooling his heels outside the Divine Sarah’s death chamber. This fellow bequeathed to his family an heirloom, repeated again and again over the years, the story of how at the eleventh hour, the Bernhardt repented of her cruelty to the gentlemen of the press waiting for word of her condition. She asked for one, chosen at random, to be brought in for an important message.

  When Mrs. Schreck’s cousin entered the room, he had to approach very close to the shrunken woman to hear her aspirated French. She looked up at him and asked:

  —You’ve heard I lost a leg?

  He smiled, and nodded. Then, with the air of imparting a great truth, she added:

  —And yet, I still feel it there, though it was removed some years back.

  With that, doctors led the reporter back to the foyer, where he was mobbed by his fellow journalists. He announced that the great actress had passed into unconsciousness, having said nothing.

  This exchange is no more or less believable than the rest of Bernhardt’s speculative biography. So much depends on an initial misunderstanding. Of Mrs. Schreck’s cousin, I could find no documentary mention in any book on Bernhardt, nor any mention in any book on Ford, whose path he also claimed to have crossed in his role as reporter. No document remains of the fellow ever having existed except, if one allows, the photograph by Sander.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Conscription and Vocation

  Chodounsky was saying to Vaněk that in his opinion the world war was bloody nonsense.

  —Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk

  The first time the two rotund gentlemen came calling at the tobacconist’s widow’s shop, Peter missed being arrested by the slightest of misunderstandings. It was late in September. Von Kluck’s turn in front of a prostrate Paris had exposed the army flank that Adolphe would have been in had he not been skimmed for occupation duty. Gallieni and the taxicabs capitalized on the mistake, halting the German drive. The race to the Channel stalemated, and the armies of the Western Front settled in along a line that for the next four years would remain virtually unchanged except for the identities of those going over the top.

  On hearing the bell to the shop door, Peter, who could dress faster than the widow, came out front. There, two old friends of apoplexy stood huffing and puffing and speaking in tongues. On seeing Peter, they produced a parody of High Dutch, which they flushed out with a variety of inventive hand gestures. Peter, too amused by the spectacle, failed to tell the fellows that he spoke German like the citizen he was.

  Making sense of the fellows’ performance was the most fun Peter had had since the war started. Under the influence of an initial misunderstanding, he soon solved the riddle of their primitive Dutch. The pair circled back again and again on the same keywords: zoon, which, though pronounced with two syllables, could only mean “son,” and neet waar, perhaps a quaint rendition of “false.” He recognized the name Schreck only after some while, having slid back into the habit of being called Kinder since his return to Holland.

  Having arrived at these clues, it was but a small leap for Peter to piece together the gist of the round fellows’ concern: fake Schreck son. He let out a burst of air, part laugh, part aha.

  —That would be Hubert Minuit, or Schreck, as you gents have him. I thought he might have the law after him. You can find him at his friend Willy Hoven’s house on Schunk Straat. But be careful. They’re both communist lunatics, as I’m sure you’re already aware.

  The interviewers, relieved at having made communication at last, forgot to be irritated at this sudden burst of fluent German. They thanked Peter, laughing at his warning. One, mopping at the water that sprang from the red splotches of his face, spoke an idiom the earthy equivalent of “naturally”: “Thanks for telling us our pants are soiled.”

  As Peter turned back into the shop and began telling the tobacconist’s widow about the transaction, he wondered if what he had just done qualified as denouncement. He supposed it did, and felt a little sad at having betrayed Hub without intending to. Intent, it seemed, had little to do with cruelty. He stopped in front of a tin of loose pipe weed and spoke, to no one:

  —So Hub has gone and gotten himself in serious trouble. I knew he would.

  And he thought no more about denouncement until two days later, when the Bavarians returned. This time, he was out of the shop on an errand. The men took up their search with the widow, but she was less adept at the word-salad game than Peter. She refused to understand German and could make no sense of the High Dutch the men mangled. She refused to communicate in anything but the provincial Plaat dialect.

  The twin Central European megaliths took to pantomime to make their point. First, one of them pointed a thick finger at the widow’s breast and shook his head no, to indicate they were not looking for a woman. The widow thought her tits had offended them in some way. Too bad, she responded. Then the other fellow held his finger under his nose, symbolizin
g moustaches and, thereby, manhood. Now Peter could no more grow a moustache than could an infant. The widow had no opportunity to be confused by this, however, as she had already pieced together the conclusion that the two strangers were allergic to her breasts.

  One German rolled his way behind the cash counter. The widow, in a fit, thought he meant to rob the till. Instead, the men began miming a dialogue between what was now clearly themselves and Peter. The one playing Peter made a comment that the other objected to strongly. The latter clapped the surrogate shopkeeper by the wrist and made a show of dragging him off. Then he made the universally familiar and recognizable gesture of shooting.

  The tobacconist’s widow yelped pitifully. The proceedings suddenly became clear. The veil was torn from her eyes. Peter, playing one of his endless pranks on the customers, had insulted these clients and they had come back to kill him. In this interpretation she was not far from the truth. She began chattering a steady stream of pseudo-German, ushering the beefsteaks to the door.

  —Now you two sweethearts get along. Important folk like yourselves have weightier stuff to attend to. I’ll give the young scoundrel what’s coming to him, be sure of that. He’ll be so bloody he won’t be able to sit down for a week. Imagine getting saucy with caliber gentlemen. Good day, friends. Here’s a smoke. Off now, and come back at week’s end for the satisfaction of seeing the lad on crutches by my own hand.

  She thought that by speaking loudly and inanely, nodding her head rapidly the while, that she could make the men understand her. Feeble and foreign had always meant about the same to her. By making them think she was on their side, she could trick them out of the shop and all would be well and all manner of things would be well.