Meryle Secrest

  Second Canto: “It is not enough for the army of physical and spiritual sufferings that surround us to have been born: the secret of our tattered destiny has not been vouchsafed us. I know him, the Omnipotent … I have seen the Creator, spurring on his needless cruelty, setting alight conflagrations in which old people and children perished! It is not I who start the attack; it is he who forces me to spin him like a top, with a steel-pronged whip … My frightful zest … feeds on the crazed nightmares which rack my fits of sleeplessness.” Maldoror, a name probably derived from mal d’aurore, a bad dawn, is being taken for a madman, “who seemed not to concern himself with the good or ill of present-day life, and wandered haphazardly,…his face horribly dead, hair standing on end, and arms—as though seeking there the bloody prey of hope.” He is “staggering like a drunkard through life’s dark catacombs.”

  Fifth Canto: His body is no more than “a breathing corpse,” and his bed is a coffin. His only pleasure is making others suffer in agony as he himself is being tormented. It all begins to sound like “engueuling” and also like Eugénie’s poem “Fierce Wish,” in which she proposes to set fire to her neighbor’s barn and burn his child alive: a frustrated rage and resentment that turns on life itself. Small wonder that Modigliani memorized page after page. He could hardly avoid seeing himself in the same light, as one more victim of a malignant fate. In 1913 he, offering a drawing of a caryatid to a friend, added the dedication: “Maldoror to Madame.”

  One spring day in 1914 Alberto Magnelli, an Italian artist four years Modigliani’s junior, who happened to be in Paris studying Cubism, was strolling along the boulevard Montparnasse in a westerly direction toward the railway station. It was a beautiful morning and he was thinking of other things when he realized that the conductor of a tram, also traveling in his direction, was ringing his bell violently and simultaneously applying his brakes with a great screeching noise. He looked up and saw a man on the opposite sidewalk crossing the street in front of the tram, walking like an automaton straight toward it. He was bound to be hit. With a start, Magnelli realized it was Modigliani.

  In a flash Magnelli had sprinted across the street and flung himself at Modigliani, whose eyes looked glassy and enormous. He wrote, “I do not know how I managed to get in front of him in time.” He was so close to the tram that it scraped him as it passed. As for Modigliani, he had been knocked to the ground and seemed, at that moment, to have come to his senses. He was helped over to the sidewalk and the nearest café table, which happened to be at the Rotonde. Magnelli ordered a round of drinks. About his narrow escape from death, Modigliani did not say a word.

  CHAPTER 10

  Beatrice

  Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers?

  —JEAN ANOUILH, The Rehearsal

  BEATRICE HASTINGS, who met Modigliani in the summer of 1914 and with whom he fell madly in love, was a poet, journalist, editor, and novelist, and an invaluable witness to one of the most important periods of his life. In contrast to her lover, for whom putting any words on paper was like pulling teeth, she dashed off a weekly column about life in Paris: anything and nothing. That included references to him, their friends, conversations, and daily life together that are only sporadically disguised.

  Yet even she has said different things at different times, making the separation of truth from fiction almost as difficult as it is in any other aspect of Modigliani’s life. One version given for the way they met has been quoted often. In it she said she met him at the Rotonde and was repelled. He reeked of brandy and hashish and needed a shave; she thought he was a pig. But when they next met he was clean, neat, shaved, and sober. “Raised his cap with a pretty gesture, blushed to the eyes, and asked me to come see his work.” He might be “a pearl” after all.

  Modigliani, about the time he met Beatrice Hastings (image credit 10.1)

  The “pig” versus “pearl” is not only suspect—a comment made, perhaps, long after they had broken up—but hardly reflects the truth about their relationship or does justice to the subtle evasions of this author whose biography by Stephen Gray, Beatrice Hastings: A Literary Life, runs to seven hundred pages. Born in South Africa of British parents, she was as much of a phenomenon in her own right as Akhmatova was in hers, a New Woman emerging from the detritus of the Victorian Age, abandoning her corsets, shortening her skirts, smoking, drinking, and taking lovers. From the start this softly pretty girl with a halo of brown hair and an uncompromising gaze seemed able to épater les bourgeois in a way that the women in Modigliani’s family, including his sister, could hardly dream of. First of all, she married a boxer, probably while she was still a teenager. Shortly afterward she had divorced him and sailed to New York, where she attempted to become a showgirl. This did not last either, and she was soon in London, where she had the good luck to hit upon her rightful career as a journalist, the literary editor of a progressive weekly magazine appropriately titled the New Age. It helped that the magazine’s editor, A. R. Orage, was in love with her. But she was a pearl in her own right, as he discovered, nurturing the talents of Ezra Pound and Katherine Mansfield and the intellectual equal of authors like H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and Arnold Bennett who graced its pages.

  The evidence she herself presents about her first meeting with Modigliani suggests that the truth was more complicated. Along the way several people, including Zadkine and Hamnett, claimed to have introduced them. By 1936 she was annoyed enough to contradict them and herself. She wrote to Douglas Goldring, who subsequently coauthored Artist Quarter, that she met Modigliani before Hamnett arrived in Paris and not at the Rotonde (after all). The real story was in her book, Minnie Pinnikin, an unfinished, semiautographical novel. By 1936 she had written a number of chapters but unfortunately had mislaid it. In those days, “I was Minnie Pinnikin and thought everyone lived in a fairyland as I did.” She was shrugging him off with a lame excuse but it was also true that her typescript had disappeared. Subsequent authors, including Pierre Sichel, assumed it had been lost. Then one day the art historian Kenneth Wayne made a sensational discovery in New York. He was doing research at the Museum of Modern Art in preparation for an exhibition, “Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse,” in 2002 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, and there it was in the William Lieberman Papers. Wayne published the first chapter, which he translated from the French, in the catalog for the show.

  The name, Minnie Pinnikin, could well be a reference to Mimi Pinson, the heroine of a novel by Alfred de Musset written in the 1840s. If so, it is a strange one, since the novel tells the story of a grisette who provides “a perfect answer to the physical and emotional needs of lonely, sometimes idle, and often self-centered young bourgeois,” Seigel observes in Bohemian Paris. One would expect that since Minnie Pinnikin represents herself, Hastings would have modeled her heroine on some prominent early feminist. But she always denied being one, among the many curious contradictions of her character. She was not to be labeled. She was simply doing what women had always done, fighting her way to the top with a judicious blend of intelligence, guile, tactics, talent, and charm. And if the price of success included sex she was perfectly willing. It is said that she boasted about how many men she had slept with and kept a running tally of notches on her bedpost. Before she dispensed with corsets, there is a photograph of her in a preposterous hat balanced precariously on an untidy nest of hair. Her tight-fitting jacket clearly shows the outline of her nipples, the kind of absentminded-on-purpose display one rarely sees even in drawings of Toulouse-Lautrec’s prostitutes.

  Beatrice Hastings at the turn of the century (image credit 10.2)

  In Minnie Pinnikin Modigliani has the name of Pâtredor, or Pinarius, and the first chapter is a description of their meeting. He was “fishing men from the street, swinging them with his long hands. ‘How beautiful he looks this morning!’ It was true he was really
beautiful. The sun that danced in his hair leaned forward to look into his eyes.” Then Pâtredor becomes aware of Minnie Pinnikin and drops everything to run after her. “One could tell that they would be married one day, but no one ever mentioned it simply because it was not yet time,” she wrote. They were “still playing the first love games: jumping from hill to hill, traveling the world without stopping anywhere, drinking rivers of hope as big as the Seine.” All of which does not tell us how they met either.

  The version that probably comes closest to the truth—which is not saying much—is the one published in the New Age early in June 1914. She had arrived in Paris two or three weeks before and they had already met, but he was probably looking disheveled. They met again at Rosalie’s one evening. A friend whom she does not identify except as “an English bourgeoise” “was satisfied when she saw me wake up from a sulk to be very glad with the bad garçon of a sculptor.” This is obviously Modigliani, though what she means by being awakened, a sulk, or even “to be very glad” is not explained. Her evanescent and coquettish literary style would give some of her columns such a maddening feeling of evasiveness that the wonder is that they were even published, much less read. She continued, “He [referring to Modigliani] has mislaid the last thread of that nutty rig he had recently, and is entirely back in cap, scarf, and corduroy. Rose-Bud was quite shook on the pale and ravishing villain.” Rose-Bud is Rosalie, and almost everyone in Hastings’s columns is disguised in such a way as to be understood by the “in” crowd. But then, she loved disguises, the more the merrier. Born Emily Alice Haigh, she soon became Beatrice Hastings. She wrote her column as Alice Morning and was, at various times, A.M.A., E.H., B.L.H., T.K.L., V.M., T.W., Beatrice Tina, Cyricus, S. Robert West, and on and on.

  There was nothing elusive about Modigliani when he was in love. Hastings might couch her feelings in coy fantasies, rolling her eyes and fluttering her Oriental fan; he was all masculine impetuosity. If the stories can be believed, and at least one has the ring of truth to it, he might even make a brazen date with a woman he fancied as her husband or boyfriend sat listening in amazement and disbelief. In the years since Akhmatova, he had taken and dropped as many delectable mistresses as Hastings claimed lovers. But he must have done so with exemplary tact, to judge from the willingness of said ladies to tearfully press him with parting gifts instead of the other way around. In all his dealings with women Modigliani was the conventional southern Italian male, as described by Barzini, pursuing tirelessly and then, particularly if he loved someone, jealous and possessive. Modigliani was also a charming suitor, known to offer books, pass beneath windowsills at night, and rob the graves of funerals for a flower to present with the breakfast café au lait. None of that was necessary in this case. What seeps through the recollections of Zadkine and Hamnett, who certainly saw the two together soon after they met, is what is not being said. Could it be that the onlookers jumped back in alarm, for fear of getting burned, when faced with the conflagration they had unwittingly unleashed, what the French call a “coup de foudre”?

  There is no doubt that Modigliani and Hastings had an almost uncanny number of interests in common. Here was the poet he had lost when Akhmatova walked out of his life. Well, unknown poet as yet, but of course she would soon be famous. Her name was Beatrice, that of Dante’s inamorata, another good omen that cannot have escaped his notice. She was a Theosophist, follower of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, in love with painting, sculpture, literature, and music, and a Socialist to boot, following international affairs with almost the same close interest as Emanuele Modigliani did. Garrulous in prose, she tended to be quiet and terse in conversation, practical and predictable unless she was drunk, as she sometimes was. She, too, experimented with drugs. She spoke excellent French and had arrived in Paris to observe and record cultural life. She was recovering from a seven-year affair with Orage and was now thirty-five, five years older than “the sculptor.” She was not short of money, which for a man who could barely support himself, let alone a mistress, must have been a relief. There remained that extra quality, that mysterious magnetism of the body and spirit that can never be accounted for. It just was, and it would be the beginning of a tumultuous two-year affair.

  They were meeting on the literal edge of war. At the end of June the heir to the Austrian throne, the Archduke Ferdinand, and his wife had been assassinated by a nineteen-year-old Serbian student at Sarajevo, a seemingly obscure event that set in motion a European conflagration. Austria declared war on Serbia on July 23 and André Gide wrote in his diary, “We are getting ready to enter a long tunnel of blood and darkness.” Jean Jaurès, the left-wing French leader, was dispatched to Brussels on a peacekeeping mission and on his return was shot in the back as he sat in a café. Russia was mobilizing. On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia; two days later, France and Germany were at war. England was about to take part. Gide, in Normandy, took the last civilian train back to Paris. Gris, in the south of France, had been advised to leave. Jean Arp took temporary refuge in the Bateau Lavoir before leaving for Switzerland. Matisse tried to join the military but was turned down. Picasso drove Braque and Derain to Avignon, where they joined their regiments. Within a month the German army would be closing in on Paris, the stock exchange would have moved to Bordeaux, 35,000 Parisian males would be conscripted, and as many inhabitants would have fled. Against this background Alice Morning made bright and inconsequential remarks, at least at the beginning.

  Hastings had found an apartment at 55 boulevard du Montparnasse. She had “two rooms and real running water and gas and crowds of chests of drawers and wardrobes, and only sixty-five francs a month. Anyone will know how cheap that is for Montparnasse.” Her concierge was also a gem (she used the word “duck”) and “everything’s very joyful except a large rat which is a shocking thief.” She was living opposite Brancusi, who sang at the top of his voice, and had a view, not of trees, “only ivy and roses, but lovely old red tiles and air and blue sky.” Her Paris—just three streets and a café—was full of gossip, much of it mean-spirited. “People don’t report on each other’s psychological frailties—they try to attack the spirit. Mention whomever you may, someone will tell you that he is finished, from Picasso to my friend the poor poet who has not very well begun. To escape being finished in Montparnasse, the only way is never to begin really.” The “poor poet” reference was to Max Jacob, whose unpublished French poems she was translating and sending off to London for publication as examples of the latest trend in French poetry. Jacob was to become the close friend and eyewitness to the relationship, making it curious that he would dismiss Hastings later as “drunken, musical (a pianist), bohemian, elegant, dressed in the manner of the Transvaal and surrounded by a gang of bandits on the fringe of the arts.”

  She went to an artists’ ball. “Much laughter, much applause for your frock if it is chic, three hundred people inside and outside the Rotonde, very much alive!” She started to attend the Tuesday poetry readings at the Closerie des Lilas where one could hear the last word in Symbolist verse. She sat in cafés for hours to keep warm, writing her columns beside an empty coffee cup or a glass of “mazagran” (half coffee, half milk). The June rain “stupefied” Paris. Madame Caillaux, wife of the minister of finance, against whom Le Figaro had been waging a scurrilous campaign, shot the editor, who shortly thereafter died. She was now on trial, and opinion was sharply divided about whether she should be sentenced or acquitted. Beatrice, making no bones about her bias, wrote, “Mad women ought merely to be handed over to their families with powers gently to chloroform them if necessary.” Then the New Age author goes into considerable detail about trying to light up a cigarette at another ball—a shocking act for a woman in public—and being surprised that she was herded into a corner by the uniformed attendant (where no one could see her), without any apparent awareness of the contradiction. That was the column (June 18 of 1914) when she opened with the news that “[t]he romantic world seems to have supposed that I kissed the sculptor
last week.”

  After various hints and transparent disguises, Modigliani appears under his own name early in July. “What beats me is when, for instance, an unsentimental artist like Modigliani” approved of Douanier Rousseau, whom she found “bourgeois, sentimental and rusé.” Modigliani really liked him. Speaking of Modigliani’s stone heads (which she wasn’t), one was standing below a painting by Picasso,

  and the contrast between the true thing and the true-to-life thing nearly split me. I would like to buy one of those heads, but I’m sure they cost pounds to make, and the Italian is liable to give you anything you look interested in.

  No wonder he is the spoiled child of the quarter, enfant sometimes terrible but always forgiven—half Paris is in morally illegal possession of his designs. “Nothing’s lost!” he says, and bang goes another drawing for two-pence or nothing, while he dreams off to some café to borrow a franc for some more paper! It’s all very New Agey, and, like us, he will have, as an art-dealer said to me, “a very good remember”…He is a very beautiful person to look at, when he is shaven, about twenty-eight, I should think, always either laughing or quarrelling à la Rotonde, which is a furious tongue-duel umpired by a shrug that never forgets the coffee.

  He took her around. “You’re only seeing Paris,” he said, referring to the obligatory tour. “Come, leave all these people—let us go and see Par-ee.” They went to the movies and he fell asleep on her shoulder. He “tutoyed” her “infamously.” He told her what to buy. He told her not to fall in love with him. On the other hand, perhaps she should. No, not; it’s no use, he said. The way she looked at him, responsively, reminded him of the gaze of his first statue. They were going everywhere together and eating cheap meals in the right places, which more or less guaranteed instant gossip and contradictory commentary. The writer Charles-Albert Cingria suggested with perfect seriousness, “he abducted her”—but did not explain. On the other hand others believed she had pounced on him. The sculptor Léon Indenbaum considered her to be Modigliani’s “wicked genius.” To Paul Guillaume, the fact that she was five years Modigliani’s senior made him her protégé. It is almost certain that he soon moved in with her and perhaps she paid for a studio as well. At one point, Guillaume says he rented a space at 13 rue Ravignon, and at others, that Hastings did. From the artist’s viewpoint, who paid did not matter, as long as he had a roof over his head and was reasonably sure of his next meal.