by Sue Roe
On the opening night, the Parisian audience gathered for the first ever performance by Diaghilev’s newly formed Ballets Russes. The programme included Les Sylphides, Fokine’s plotless, ‘plastic’ ballet, together with Cléopâtre and Le Festin, a Russian medley primarily designed to showcase the talent of Nijinsky. Now, the interior of the huge Théâtre du Châtelet, which ballerina Tamara Karsavina (later principal of the Royal Ballet and a founder member of London’s Royal Academy of Dance) had called ‘a retail shop of cheap emotions, the paradise of concierges’, had been completely refurbished by Diaghilev. In this unlikely venue, the circle shimmered with the diamonds, bare shoulders and head-turning glamour of le gratin parisien; the front row was composed of models, blondes alternating with brunettes. Diaghilev’s associates had even ‘designed’ the audience – ‘itself a work of art’ – which included French and Russian ambassadors and their wives, cabinet ministers, fashionable painters, fashion designers, illustrators and sculptors. Rodin was among them, so were Isadora Duncan and the ailing Yvette Guilbert (at forty-four, well past her prime as a chanteuse). So, too, were Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, although Alice, uncharacteristically, recorded their attendance without passing any particular comment. Perhaps what they saw at the Châtelet was as pleasantly incomprehensible to her (or to Gertrude Stein), in its own way, as had been Alice and Harriet’s startling introduction to the Folies Bergère.
The audience watched the leaps, spins and turns of traditional Russian folk dance with quiet absorption until about halfway through, when Nijinsky danced a pas de trois with his sister, Bronislaw Nijinska, and Karsavina. There was an audible murmur of appreciation. A ripple of whispers ran through the auditorium. Then something completely unexpected happened. At the end of the piece, Nijinsky should have walked off the stage, but that night, instead, he spontaneously exited with a leap: ‘He rose up, a few yards off the wings, described a parabola in the air, and disappeared from sight. No one in the audience could see him land; to all eyes he floated up and vanished. A storm of applause broke; the orchestra had to stop … all reserve thrown away, the evening worked up into a veritable frenzy of enthusiasm … You would have thought their seats were on fire.’
Paris went mad for the ballet; almost nothing else was talked about in fashionable circles, and the press reported the invasion, the explosion, the outburst of the Ballets Russes. Overnight, it had brought exotica to the city, and modern dance now seemed to consist only of Diaghilev’s ballet. At Larue’s restaurant (where Marcel Proust sat quietly at a corner table drinking hot chocolate like a pale-green ghost), Diaghilev, his designers and principal dancers were joined by a clamour of admirers, including a new hanger-on, the young Jean Cocteau, a striking presence in lipstick and rouge, ‘irresistible at twenty’, dancing on the backs of the banquettes. Diaghilev’s company, he said, ‘splashed Paris with colours’. Dance, now, not only painting, fashion and film, had come to the streets.
By 1917, Picasso would be working with Cocteau on sets for Diaghilev’s ballets. For the time being, however, he kept to Montmartre, where the artists still gathered in the cafés and sat talking until dawn. New faces were beginning to appear, young artists and writers who just seemed to want to lark about, among them painter André Warnod and 23-year-old novelist Roland Dorgelès, who wore his hair long and strode about flourishing an ostentatious cloak. André Salmon thought he only went up to the Lapin Agile to challenge everyone’s obvious admiration for Picasso and his friends. Picasso, when he could be bothered, humoured the newcomers. ‘When you paint a landscape,’ he told them, ‘it must first look like a plate.’ There was no answer to that.
2.
Summertime
Picasso was out of town for the first appearance of the Ballets Russes in Paris. When the city erupted into full-scale balletomania, he and Fernande were back in Spain, this time in Horta, the rural village where (in late 1898 and early 1899) he had spent several months as a young man, recovering from scarlet fever. They arrived in Barcelona on 11 May and were met by fifteen of Picasso’s old friends, a reception Fernande found overwhelming. She had been ill before they left Paris, and by the time they reached Barcelona was in real pain, exacerbated by the journey. There, they consulted doctors, who diagnosed a suspected kidney complaint. They advised her to rest and, for the next few weeks, she did her best to recover, spending most of every day in bed because sitting was too uncomfortable, the pain so acute she felt as if she were going to die; she was freezing cold, chronically exhausted and weak. They had had to stay on for three days in Barcelona because she was haemorrhaging blood – why didn’t Picasso take her home?
He passed the time making pen and ink drawings in their hotel room. In what was already a period of major transition, the sketches were further breakthroughs, enabling him to find solutions to pictorial problems he had been preoccupied with for some time. From them, he said later, everything else developed: ‘I understood how far I would be able to go.’ He experimented with drawing fluid forms (palm trees from memory or his imagination) juxtaposed with geometric shapes (the local buildings), developing ideas he had been exploring since he met Braque. On 5 or 6 June they travelled on, finally reaching Horta, where they stayed until September, although Fernande was still in chronic agony which at times drove her almost to despair, and anxious about being in a place where it was impossible to get treatment and where there was nothing she could do but eat carefully and rest. She confided her fears in letters to Gertrude Stein, telling her she found the landscape pretty and the people congenial, but she was still worrying about what would happen if she did not get better.
She was not in pain every day, however, and on good ones she mingled with the villagers, who were amazed by Picasso’s corduroy trousers and by her hats, which she considered a success. Since there was no entertainment, Picasso arranged for the pianola in the nearest bar to be moved so that they could dance with the villagers. On Midsummer Day, bonfires were lit throughout the village and children jumped over the blazing straw, processing through the streets with torches. Picasso was overjoyed to be back, inspired and energized by his surroundings. On 24 June, he wrote to tell the Steins that he had begun ‘two landscapes and two figures always the same thing’. He was also taking photographs of the landscape and of the local people to send to Gertrude, ostensibly to tempt her and Alice to visit him but keen also to keep Gertrude abreast of developments in his work. Fernande wrote several times to Alice, describing the beauty of the landscape. Perhaps spurred on by Gertrude’s recent emergence as an author, Fernande told Alice she was writing with publication in mind; she would be happy for Alice to publish her letters … but after a while she had to stop: she felt too ill to continue.
The highlight of the summer was to have been a trip to Madrid and Toledo, where Picasso had hoped to rediscover El Greco – still an important influence. However, although, in July, he managed to persuade the local doctor to agree to Fernande accompanying him, in the event she was too ill to make the journey. While they were still hesitating about whether or not to go, there was a sudden revolt in Barcelona. The anarchists were protesting, principally against the Church, in a series of riots which affected most of Catalonia. Railway bridges were blown up and travel became, effectively, impossible.
In Horta, Picasso continued with his work. He was discovering how to transpose his new experiments with perspective, so far confined to his still lifes and landscape drawings, into faces and figures. In about fifteen paintings of Fernande, he fractured her face, the ground and solid objects, creating facets so that the viewer could walk ‘around’ the face or figure as if it were sculpture, seeing it from different viewpoints, in the process developing the way of painting Vauxcelles had called cubist, but which Picasso himself saw as a method of uncovering forms that was unnameable, as elusive and impalpable as perfume – nothing, really, at all to do with cubes. Back in Montmartre that autumn, he modelled a sculpture of Fernande’s head in plaster, afterwards casting it in bronze but, having onc
e realized his vision in three dimensions, he went back to creating the painted ‘sculptural’ forms on canvas that remained his primary concern. Unlike Modigliani, he had no particular ambitions as a sculptor.
• • •
Gertrude and Leo, Michael and Sarah Stein and their son, Allan, travelled to Florence for the summer, to the large Villa Bardi they rented in Fiesole. Alice and Harriet, at Michael’s invitation, came to stay in the smaller Casa Ricci nearby. Their rail journey to Milan, as described by Alice, was colourful: ‘Because of the heat I got rid of my cerise ribbon girdle in the dressing room of the train, throwing it out the window. When I returned to our compartment Harriet said, “What a strange coincidence, I just saw your cherry-coloured corset pass by the window.”’ They were driven from Florence to Fiesole, where they found Gertrude waiting to meet them.
In the mornings, Gertrude would come down to the Casa Ricci to collect Alice, and the two of them would go to Florence to borrow books from the Vieusseux library, or to run errands. In the city, Alice had boots ‘beautifully made to order, the only luxury I allowed myself – or, rather, Mike allowed me’; Michael Stein was by now managing her finances, along with everybody else’s. The whole party was in Florence the day on which Gertrude’s book of stories Three Lives was published, an event that made the author ‘rosy with pleasure’. Soon, reviews started appearing: ‘Those were proud and happy days when we received the first clippings.’
By the time they returned to Paris, in September, Alice and Harriet had decided it was time to resume their search for an apartment of their own. (Alice’s way of settling Harriet somewhere permanent, in preparation for her own move to the rue de Fleurus?) This time, they found one (for reasons Alice was later unable – or just too diplomatic – to recall) in Montmartre, in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, a location remarkably inconvenient for the rue de Fleurus. They proceeded to set up home, Alice hemstitching net curtains, buying cushions and hiring a servant, the niece of Gertrude’s concierge. Gertrude resumed work on her masterwork, The Making of Americans (begun in 1903, taken up again in 1909 and completed in 1911). When she gave sections of it to Alice to read, Alice found portraits of all their friends, including ‘an extraordinary one of Harriet’, impossible for any reader outside their circle to identify definitively as such within the convoluted weave of the narrative, composed as it is of fluid, intricate descriptions of complex personality traits. Gertrude’s narrative delved deep beneath the surface of a personality as she experimented to convey, in a faceted language nuanced with repetition, the inner lives of an ever more sprawling and indistinct array of characters, all of whom seemed to fuse and interlock at the level of the unconscious. The subject, as she baldly announced it on the opening page, was to be ‘The old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old.’ She continued with the assertion that personality is inherited, through antecedents and nationhood: ‘We need only realize our parents, remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete.’ She then proceeded, in over nine hundred pages, to examine the caveats and complexities, subtleties and shades of this tantalizingly misleading statement, developing the idea that, despite the durability of each person’s ‘bottom’ or basic nature, the difficulty of being human is to do with the structure of personality as a whole, which consists of any number of other contradictory or complementary elements, layered up in a kind of nuanced free-form.
The narrative was infused with ideas based on Gertrude’s earlier study of psychology. Alice read that there were two kinds of human being, the ‘dependent independent’ (the ‘resisting kind’) and the ‘independent dependent’ (the ‘attacking kind’). In ‘resisting’ people, ‘emotion is not as poignant … as sensation’. In the ‘attacking’ kind, ‘their substance is more vibrant in them, these can have reaction as emotion as quick and poignant and complete as a sensation’. The resisting kind were slower to respond, made nervous if under pressure to act too quickly, whereas the attacking kind might have more natural nervous energy but, if deprived of that nervous energy, they might lose the power to act. The ‘attacking’ types were actually the more conservative, their conservatism shored up by the convictions and traditions they were ‘attackingly defending’. Of the ‘resisting’ type, wrote Gertrude Stein, slowly one felt ‘the muggy resisting bottom that kept her from ever giving herself to any one unless some one needing her engulfed her by a need of her …’
Was she pondering on the differences between Harriet and Alice, even speculating as to why it seemed so difficult to prise them apart, even after the release of the old maid mermaid and the gathering of wild violets? In Fiesole, Alice and Harriet had been photographed clasped in an affectionate clinch. Gertrude, on the other hand, posed for her photograph alone, seated on a large stone, staring ahead like the Buddha in an attitude which resoundingly announces her solitude. The Making of Americans weaves fiction with reflections and includes, in the midst of the ongoing ‘resisting’/‘attacking’ meditation, a cryptic personal note: ‘I am all unhappy in this writing. I know very much of the meaning … I know it and feel it and I am always learning more of it and now I am telling it and I am nervous and driving and unhappy in it. Sometimes [some day?] I will be all happy in it.’ She need not have worried: Alice (despite appearances) was about to take things in hand. Gertrude’s research also consisted in closely observing and listening to everyone around her, including Alice, whom she asked to tell her everything she knew and how she came to know it. This Alice found ‘very exciting, more exciting than anything else had ever been. Even, I said to her laughing, more exciting than Picasso’s pictures promise to be.’ She had been given the task of typing the manuscript, for which the latest technology had been acquired. ‘I had commenced the typewriting of The Making of Americans on a wornout little Blickensderfer. Gertrude decided we should have a proper machine, and Frank Jacot recommended that we buy a Smith Premier. We ordered one. It was a formidable affair. There were a great many appliances removed by an imposing personage who had delivered the machine. He put them in his bag, and I was surprised that they were not deducted from the bill.’ Alice soon became proficient, achieving ‘a professional accuracy and speed. I got a Gertrude Stein technique, like playing Bach.’ Each morning, she made her way from the rue Notre Dame des Champs to the rue de Fleurus, where she typed until Gertrude, a very late riser, appeared for her breakfast coffee at one o’clock. Then they would talk over Gertrude’s work for that day, which Alice would type the following morning. ‘Frequently these were the characters or incidents of the previous day. It was like living history. I hoped it would go on for ever.’
Alice began to go down to the rue de Fleurus in the evenings as well, a habit Harriet disapproved of. She was concerned about Alice being out alone on the streets of Montmartre at night, particularly when she started coming home after midnight. The nocturnal walks passed without incident until, one evening, Alice was walking down the rue Vavin, where the pavements were very narrow, when she was suddenly aware of a man standing facing her. ‘Eh bien,’ he said, did she not intend to let him pass? Never, replied Alice. ‘“How difficult the Creoles are,” he said as he stepped off the sidewalk.’ When she heard about this, Harriet was not amused. In fact, it was worse than unfunny, it was the final straw. In a rare display of initiative, she soon afterwards announced that she had invited a friend, Caroline Helbing, over from America to stay with them. She would put up at the hotel and join Alice and Harriet for lunch and dinner. It was all arranged, and Caroline was already on her way. When Caroline arrived in Paris, she was introduced to the female bande. Alice took her out to lunch to meet Fernande and Marie Laurencin, who reciprocated by inviting the group to her home to meet her mother, Pauline, an unprecedented event. Marie’s affair with Apollinaire had come to an end that year – more of a catastrophe, by that time, for him than for her – and Marie was cloistered once again with her mother. Fernande called for Alice, Harriet, Caroline and Gertrude and they all made their way to the Métro sta
tion – another first, at least for Gertrude. By the time the train pulled in at the first stop, she had seen all she wanted of life underground. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we are getting off here, we will take a fiacre.’
At the foot of rue Fontaine, they located Marie Laurencin’s apartment. The friends were invited into two rooms, which seemed to Alice as sparse and orderly as the rooms of a convent, painted white and devoid of decoration except for some of Marie’s drawings. Marie asked Pauline to show the ladies some of her (Pauline’s) embroideries, all of which seemed to be of monkeys, for which Marie appeared to have a weakness. She also showed them some wallpaper she had designed, with monkeys swinging from trees. They were then served ‘very delicate tea’; Alice thought Marie must have crossed the river to find a good pâtisserie. At some point, Alice had evidently enquired about Marie’s background, since she somehow gleaned – in an interesting mix of truth and dissemblance that Pauline was from the Savoie and that, as a young woman, she had had an affair with a man rumoured to be the Préfet du Nord. Pauline said she had never seen Marie’s father after her birth. (Marie did not learn until some years later that the monsieur who visited throughout her childhood – who was indeed, as it transpired, the Préfet du Nord – was actually her father.) As for Fernande, Alice noted that in the presence of Pauline, she was suddenly ‘on her very best behaviour’.