Meryle Secrest

  The fact that doctors had no cures did not prevent them from asserting that they had found the cure. The time-honored methods of bloodletting and starvation diets, which further weakened Keats, might have been over, but their replacements were useless, or worse: goat’s milk, cod liver oil, lichen, antimony, tannic acid, creosote, arsenic, or the fumes from hot tar. Modigliani knew all about that. Doctors had been experimenting on his suffering body since he was sixteen. They had given him up for dead. He wanted nothing to do with them.

  Accounts suggest that, from about 1914 on, Modigliani’s intake of alcohol increased. Seen from the perspective of his affliction, this suggests that his symptoms had worsened; the reason is not hard to find. As spitting was considered tantamount to involuntary manslaughter, the urge to spit and cough had to be suppressed. Opium, usually taken in a preparation called laudanum, was the most effective antispasmodic and was legal, along with morphine and heroin. Failing these, alcohol was the remedy of choice. Cognac, brandy, and whiskey were preferred, but wine would do. The consumptive took a small sip here, another sip there, whenever he or she felt a cough coming. At all costs he must avoid bringing up “a fawn coloured mixture” of blood and phlegm, as Keats did, or spattering his handkerchief with blood—much less choke on a violent hemorrhage. It was primitive self-medication but effective.

  Friends attest to the fact that the moment Modigliani arrived at a café he wanted a drink. Nobody mentions spitting or coughing, which indicates a secret successfully kept. People did notice that he always seemed to have hashish with him. That was further proof of his moral decay. For Modigliani (the born actor) nothing was easier than to feign an addiction he did not have, at least at first, in order to conceal a disease that was going to kill him; better to exasperate than to be avoided and shunned. Perhaps only Picasso, that shrewd observer, suspected the truth. “It’s very strange,” he said, “one never sees Modigliani drunk on the boulevard Saint-Denis (where no one ever went), but always at the corner of the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail!”—where he was sure of an audience.

  Modigliani, center, at the Dôme with Adolphe Basler during World War I (image credit 9.5)

  And if he rapidly became drunk, perhaps a moment came when the intoxication, feigned for so long, became a reality. Or perhaps it was just one more stunt when he began to yell, break glasses, take off his clothes, and insult the waiters. When you are thrown out on your ear, do you have to pay the bill? People began to dread the sight of him coming up the street carrying his eternal blue folio of drawings, trying to sell them for the price of a drink. Hamnett wrote, “Picasso and the really good artists thought him very talented … but the majority of people in the Quarter thought of him only as a perfect nuisance.” Basler wrote, “He was the scourge of the bistros. His friends, used to his excesses, forgave him, but the landlords and waiters, who hailed from a different social stratum … treated him like a common drunk.” He might even occasionally bang on his chest and say, “ ‘Oh, I know I’m done for!’ ” and no one took him seriously. This, then, was the explanation for the puzzle I encountered when I set out to understand his life, and it changed everything. Here was no shambling drunk but a man on a desperate mission, running out of time and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however long remained. He was gambling, and willing to take the consequences. It must have been a courageous and lonely masquerade. At the same time he was launching himself on the most successful and productive period of his career.

  “[M]any tuberculous individuals have dazzled the world by the splendor of their emotional and intellectual gifts and by the passionate energy with which they exploited their frail bodies and their few years of life in order to overcome the limitations of disease,” René and Jean Dubos wrote in The White Plague. The poet Sidney Lanier used periods of relative health to write feverishly, feeling that his mind was “beating like the heart of haste.” Another poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s feelings of almost unbearable excitement seemed like “a butterfly within, fluttering for release.” John Addington Symonds, who wrote that tuberculosis gave him “a wonderful Indian summer of experience,” also felt the passion to create. “For most sensitive temperaments,” The White Plague’s authors wrote, “artistic expression is a kind of bloodletting, and Symonds spoke endlessly of the relief from his miseries that he found through writing.”

  Guillaume Chéron, one of Modigliani’s dealers, as seen by the artist, 1915 (image credit 9.6)

  Modigliani also had another, particular reason for celebration: he had finally found a dealer. He was Guillaume Chéron on the rue la Boétie, a small, round, fat man who is portrayed by Modigliani with a bulbous nose above what passes for a moustache. Chéron began life as a bookmaker and wine merchant in the south of France and transferred to pictures after he married the daughter of Devambez, a well-known dealer, and moved to Paris. Chéron knew nothing about art, and most memoirists paint him as boorish as well as ignorant. But he needed clients, realized the importance of publicity, and sent out booklets extolling the virtues of buying art as a financial investment. All that Chéron required were paintings, as cheap as possible. Those were the days when dealers collected stables of artists and paid daily stipends to get the work. Modigliani received ten francs a day. Chéron provided a studio, paints, brushes, canvas, a model, and the necessary bottle of brandy. The studio was in the basement, leading to several lurid accounts of Modigliani’s incarceration in a dungeon with a single window, locked in like Utrillo until he had produced a painting. Since the “basement” also contained a dining room where Chéron and guests lunched every day, the account seems as fanciful as most of the other reminiscences about Modigliani. He certainly did not complain about his quarters. He was absolutely delighted to have a job. “Now I’m a paid worker on a salary,” he told his friends. He and Chéron soon parted company, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

  Max Jacob, one of the many fascinating characters in the circle of Montparnasse in those days, had arrived in Modigliani’s life. John Richardson wrote, “The pale, thin gnome with strange, piercing eyes … was a Frenchman—brilliant, quirkish, perverse—with whom [Picasso] found instant rapport…[H]e was infinitely perceptive about art as well as literature and an encylopedia of erudition—as at home in the arcane depths of mysticism as in the shallows of l’art populaire. He was also very, very funny.” Jacob, a poet, artist, writer, and art critic, knew and liked Modigliani, and the sentiment was returned. Jacob had studied philosophy, could recite poetry with as much confidence as Modigliani, was addicted to ether and henbane, and was an alchemist. He had introduced Picasso to the Tarot and probably did the same for Modigliani. He was also adept at palmistry and famously had read Picasso’s hand and perhaps Modigliani’s as well, though there is no record of this. But his main gift seems to have been as a facilitator, with a vast network of friends. Hearing that Modigliani and Chéron had parted ways, Jacob had an inspired idea: he would introduce him to Paul Guillaume.

  Like Jacob, Guillaume came from a modest background and, also like Jacob, was born with an innate aesthetic sense, rising like a meteor from an entry-level job as a clerk in a rubber-importing company to a collector of African statues and then an expert on primitive art. He was still only in his early twenties. On the other hand he had met Apollinaire, who immediately sensed his unusual abilities and introduced him to the world of artists and sculptors. Most of them were looking, as was Modigliani, for someone who instinctively appreciated and understood their work and had the wit to promote it. In that respect Guillaume was heaven sent. Aspiring art dealers usually started business in a modest way in the rue de Seine on the Left Bank with the goal of eventually reaching wealthier clients on the Right Bank. Guillaume, who did not have any time to waste, started in the rue de Miromesnil, “a neighborhood dominated by the opulent, historic, institutional galleries,” Restellini wrote. It was the maddest folly from a business viewpoint, since artists like Picasso, Matisse, and De
rain had already found their dealers, but for unknowns it was an enormous piece of luck. Somehow Jacob, like Apollinaire, was convinced that Guillaume would become famous, as indeed happened with remarkable suddenness, and he decided to introduce the two men. The trick would be to have Guillaume meet Modigliani as if by accident. There are conflicting versions of this story, but they agree on some details. Jacob set the scene with care. He had a date to meet Guillaume one afternoon at the Dôme. Modigliani, as agreed, would arrive ahead of them and make a show of passing his drawings around. His table would be nearby. Jacob was convinced that Guillaume would soon “discover” him.

  All of it happened as Jacob planned. Guillaume drifted over to Modigliani’s table, liked the drawings, and sat down. From here the versions differ. The first came from Charles Beadle, one half of the “Charles Douglas” nom de plume of the writers of Artist Quarter. Rose describes him as a “down-at-heel English journalist” who collected mostly “scurrilous gossip and half-truths,” often the passages most quoted from the book. By accident or design, in these stories Modigliani is invariably seen in a poor light. So in this version, when asked if he had any paintings to show, Modigliani curtly said he did not. No doubt Modigliani thought of himself as a sculptor, but after having gone to all the trouble to stage a rendez-vous it is hardly likely that he would have brusquely rejected the invitation he had been angling for. The second version is more likely. When Guillaume asked the same question Modigliani, who perhaps had been hoping to be asked about sculpture, nevertheless admitted that he did paint “a bit.” He complained to Jacob about it afterward. But he did accept the invitation and Guillaume did, indeed, become his new agent.

  Like Derain and Giorgio de Chirico, whom Guillaume also represented, Modigliani painted several portraits of his dealer. Guillaume, who dressed with fastidious attention to detail, was as short as Modigliani but not as good-looking. The proportions of his face were against him—cheekbones too wide, forehead much too low—and he had a certain humorless habit of parting his hair strictly in the middle and plastering it down, something that may have made him look older but did nothing to correct the imbalance. He took to wearing hats with sizable crowns, which solved the problem of proportions, and two of Modigliani’s portraits show him hatted. On a portrait painted in 1915 Modigliani has appended “Novo Piloto,” and that was literally true. Modigliani desperately needed a guiding hand along with the publicity only a clever dealer could provide. A year later, Guillaume is still wearing a hat and an arm rests negligently along the back of his chair. A right hand is visible, and just below it, Modigliani has signed his name. Did he feel he was under Guillaume’s thumb? Was he being sufficiently grateful? An article written by Guillaume some months after Modigliani’s death in 1920 offers some clues.

  “Because he was very poor and got drunk whenever he could, (Modigliani) was despised for a long time,” Guillaume wrote, “even among artists, where certain forms of prejudice are more prevalent than is generally believed … He was shy and refined—a gentleman. But his clothes did not reflect this, and if someone happened to offer him charity, he would become terribly annoyed.” Who could forget his “strange habit of dressing like a beggar” that nevertheless “gave him a certain elegance, a distinction—nobility in the style of Milord d’Arsouille that was astonishing and sometimes frightening. One only had to hear him pompously reciting Dante in front of the Rotonde, after brasseries closed, deaf to the insults of the waiters, indifferent to the rain that soaked him to the bone.”

  Paul Guillaume, the dealer who put Modigliani on the map, 1915 (image credit 9.7)

  To think, only six years before, Modigliani had a hard time selling his drawings for fifty centimes or one franc. “No one will deny, I hope, that this sad state of affairs came to an end after he met me. Nor that I was the only person to provide him with some comfort from that time onwards.” There were plenty of people around nowadays, Guillaume commented with some asperity, to find his work important now that they no longer had to face general ridicule.

  Guillaume might have added, but did not, that Modigliani was not always the easiest person to deal with, quirky, full of changing moods, and quick to take offense. How delightful Modigliani could be when he was not drunk, Jacob was said to have remarked. “He could be a charming companion, laugh like a child, and be lyrical in translating Dante, making one love and understand him. He was naturally erudite, a good debater on art and philosophy, amiable and courteous. That was his real nature, but nevertheless he was just as often crazily irritable, sensitive, and annoyed for some reason he didn’t know himself.” That, too, was part of the general chorus: Modigliani is angry, but he does not know why.

  There are references to what Jacob Epstein called Modigliani’s predilection for “engueuling,” i.e., violent abuse of someone or something that aroused indignation and rage, though Epstein thought the outburst was usually merited. One never knew when this seemingly lovable personality might become haughty or rude, spiteful, and even hostile. The fact is that such mood changes are to be expected and are common, if not universal, among tuberculosis victims. Keats’s rapid shifts of mood are famously charted in his letters, “where in a moment he can go from self-mockery and brilliant wit to self-analysis to depression or indolence,” Plumly writes. “Always in extreme,” one of his classmates said, “in passions of tears or outrageous fits of laughter.” Keats also suffered from “blue devils,” black moods that periodically overwhelmed him; as for Modigliani, the well-known depressive effects of alcohol would have spiraled him further into despair. It was no coincidence that his laughter often seemed to have a demonic edge. One young student, studying at Dartmouth in the mid-nineteenth century, who was obliged to leave the college when he developed tuberculosis, wrote, “Shackled and oppressed by the most tedious and vexatious complaint that ever cursed human nature, I have been obliged to … relinquish my studies and overthrow and destroy some of my fondest and darling expectations.” Modigliani did not need to put his own feelings down on a page. He carried them in his pocket.

  Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror) was described by André Gide as “something that excites me to the point of delirium,” and as a work of “furious and unexpected originality by a mad genius.” Part Gothic fantasy, part serial novel and horror story, Les Chants de Maldoror is not a song or even a poem but a kind of interior monologue. Maldoror is “a demonic figure who hates God and mankind,” Ronald Meyer wrote. Edmond Jaloux called it “a world with a tragic grandeur, a world that is closed, impermeable, incommunicable”; a Divine Comedy “written by an adolescent of extraordinary intuition, full of darkness and punishment, and centripetal gloom.” In short, Octavio Paz observed, its author “was the poet who discovered the form in which to express psychic explosion.”

  Les Chants de Maldoror’s author was Isidore Ducasse, who styled himself as the Comte de Lautréamont. Ducasse, born in 1846, was the only child of a French couple living in Uruguay, where his father was an officer in the French consulate in Montevideo. He never knew his mother; she died a few months after he was born. He was sent to be educated in France, where his classmates described him as “a tall thin young man, slightly round-shouldered, with a pale complexion, long hair falling across his forehead … At school we reckoned him an odd, dreamy character.”

  After school Ducasse moved to Paris to become a poet. This first, rambling work was published in 1869 but was termed too controversial for general release and remained more or less unknown until it was rediscovered and republished in 1890. Modigliani seems to have found a copy in about 1910 and reacted as Gide had done: it was a life-changing experience. He memorized whole paragraphs and was willing to be parted from it only briefly by people like Paul Alexandre, who promised to give it back.

  Ducasse also seemed to have had a Surrealistic premonition a good fifty years before anybody knew enough to give the movement a name. His delirious imagination, his grotesque imagery, his demonstration of what could be created once the mind had dis
pensed with proper moral feeling, looked more than prescient, but almost uncanny, as if he had written the first Surrealist Manifesto in a visionary dream. In particular, images like “the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” gave André Breton, the poet and the movement’s chief theoretician, a jolt from which he never recovered. When Breton discovered Maldoror in a Belgian library (a decade after Modigliani had), and in the days before photocopying machines, he did it the singular honor of copying it out by hand—it ran to eighty thousand words. Another early Surrealist, Salvador Dalí, finding in Les Chants de Maldoror the most perfect possible example of his “paranoic-critical” method, devoted forty etchings to illustrating passages from the book. They are among the most delicately conceived and imaginative of his works.

  What is almost never pointed out about Ducasse, at a time when the illness was as taboo as AIDS is now, is that he was yet another victim of tuberculosis. At least some of his pages were written at the very end of his life, when whatever was feigned about his feverish state had become all too real. He died a year after it was published, in 1870, at the age of twenty-four.

  Like Modigliani, Ducasse “sings” what he did not dare to reveal: that he was very ill and probably dying. The clues are clear enough. First Canto: “Feeling I would fall, I leaned against a ruined wall, and read: ‘Here lies a youth who died of consumption. You know why. Do not pray for him.’ ”