Meryle Secrest

  As for Madam Pompadour, this extraordinary achievement has been admired and analyzed ever since its debut at the Lyre et Palette. Hastings is seen full face and wearing a hat that looks more like a boat. The eyes are steady and direct, the nose flattened, and the lips pursed, almost as if at the end of an argument she has conclusively won. Many of Modigliani’s portraits of her lack any sense of her personality but this one, Werner Schmalenbach comments, is one of his most delightful works, “one example (among many) of the extraordinary formal grace that is so enchanting a feature of the portraits of 1915 and 1916.” Modigliani’s career as a sculptor had come and gone but a seminal change had taken place. He was launched on “the series of major portraits that show the artist immediately at the peak of his genius.”

  Pierrot, often described as a self-portrait, was painted by Modigliani in 1915. (image credit 10.11)

  What was to be done, however, about Maldoror? His shadow stood between them, and quite soon, because Alice Morning devotes considerable space to his spectral presence in the autumn of 1914. This precocious poet Isidore Ducasse, the so-called Comte de Lautréamont, was, as she must have known, her lover’s ghost, and his obsession. What a “poor, self-tormented creature” Maldoror was, after all. Had he lived, “no earthly refuge for him was possible but an asylum.” Modigliani was just now drawing his portrait, “with the head of an ostrich and a eunuch’s flank and trying to hide in the sand!” And how puerile Maldoror’s thoughts were. “One would not wonder that the ‘O silken-eyed poulp!’ and similar sentences of the seventeen-year-old … seemed mysteriously ironic to people who will never get past this nebular age.” She was using the only kind of exorcism she knew: “Imagine ‘Maldoror’ in Paris today bleating at seventeen about the war—‘This stupid, uninteresting comedy. I salute you, ancient sea!’ and so on.” Was her lover laughing? Oh well, there was no accounting for an adolescent Frenchman; they were always peculiarly unbalanced. The point to make was that Maldoror had outlived whatever purpose he once served. It was time to bury him.

  CHAPTER 11

  “A Stony Silence”

  To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrifying of those extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE, Tales of Mystery and Imagination

  IN DECEMBER 1914, Alice Morning recorded that they were gay enough to go to a play, even though “only the fittest” could survive the performances of all the Allied national anthems. They had adopted, perhaps for the duration, a hungry artist who was turned away from an American soup kitchen, “so now we have to feed him between us.” There were beginning to be problems with these charitable soup kitchens. One, started by a “Swiss-German” (therefore not Vassilieff), had an uneventful start, “until stray visitors began to miss things. You couldn’t find your own hat at the hour of parting, and your purse was entirely unsafe.” Her passport was stolen, then offered to her for sale. She refused. Luckily, that crucial piece of identification was turned in at the Préfecture.

  One could not go outside without constant daily reminders of the war. Half the drivers on the road were wearing uniforms, ambulances were everywhere, along with battalions of cavalry horses and sad, drifting, wounded men. She saw two cripples helping each other along the sidewalk and ran after them through the dusk. “Two fractures in the leg, one, and the other—you couldn’t say what he had; he laughed it off.”

  Mesa, the rotund and genial Spaniard who dominated the Montparnasse balls dressed as a sultan, or Bacchus, had volunteered for active duty and been killed. The very idea of the Montparnasse party was dying with him, or so it seemed. That could have been the reason why Alice Morning gave a “mad party” on Christmas Eve. “Half the guests turned out to be mortal enemies of the other half, which meant guitar music, songs, games, cakes, and drinks in propitiation until everyone had forgiven everyone else.” Someone named Sylvia, wearing a green hat, arrived, “and we lowered the lights while she recited de Musset’s ‘Nuit de mai.’ And I wept nearly,” Alice wrote. “But what a poem!”

  The comments were published early in January 1915 and the tone was elegiac. The author prefaced her account by recalling a dream about a friend who had recently died. She had not died, after all, and she was more real than she had been before. Paris was brown and gloomy and one thought of last, unspoken words. Since they lived literally around the corner from the Montparnasse cemetery they could hardly avoid thinking about funerals, and all of Montparnasse turned out if the deceased was interesting enough. This most recent funeral was for an Arab soldier. “Instead of dreadful, boozy, chattering undertakers in front of the hearse, which was hidden with flags and flowers, a troupe of Arabs preceded, chanting all the way!” she wrote. “Behind the hearse marched an escort of French, and then the usual procession. Black is not so absolutely de rigueur at French funerals as at English [ones]. In a long procession many a colour may pick up the hues around the coffin. They have a hideous fashion in bead wreaths and crosses woven and coloured to imitate flowers.”

  Her friend the poet, Max Jacob, was being painted by Picasso. The style, so it was rumored, is causing “all the little men … to say that of course Cubism was very well in its way but was never more than an experiment. The style is rumoured to be almost photographic, in any case very simple and severe.” She did not know, having been barred from Picasso’s studio for laughing at a Rousseau. “There are some people in Paris who will tell you that I am simply nothing, nobody, because of my opinion about Rousseau.” This portrait, pencil on paper, was subsequently called the first and finest of Picasso’s “Ingresque” drawings although when it was published a year later, in 1916, “the more dogmatic cubists inveighed against it as a counterrevolutionary step,” Richardson wrote. Max Jacob was merely amused. He looked “simultaneously like my grandfather and an old Catalan peasant,” a reference to Picasso’s natal province in Spain. Jacob, a close friend of Picasso’s as well as a dear friend of Modigliani’s, was a direct link between them and repeatedly painted and sketched by them both. Modigliani and Jacob would eventually fall out: in 1943, a year before he died in a concentration camp Jacob wrote, “Modigliani was the most unpleasant man I knew. Proud, angry, insensitive, wicked and rather stupid, sardonic and narcissistic.” But in those years of common danger during World War I they saw each other almost daily.

  It was a danger Alice Morning tried to make light of. “Now they are going to make us shut all shutters at night for fear of the Zeppelins,” she wrote at the end of January 1915. That was ridiculous but only the beginning of inconvenience and downright disaster. The new State cigarettes were made of saltpeter; “and the bacon is old string; and you can’t buy a glass of English tongue for love or money; and coal at five francs a bag, all but a halfpenny or so, is all dust and doesn’t warm you at all.”

  People did not seem quite as ill-nourished, but the only customers of restaurants nowadays were American. “Nearly everyone feeds at some or other cantine, either free or for the bare price of food. I see a terrible change in many faces here. People have got suddenly old.” It was a ridiculous moment to be thinking about love, but she was. “A creature,” meaning Modigliani, whom she also called “the Commissaire,” had a cynical theory, which was that lovers ate from the same plate so as to prevent each other from using it as a weapon. Despite her protestations, “he stuck to it that they do eat off the same plate and break it on each other’s head afterwards.” She gave up trying to change his mind. But a year later she was professing maxims as jaded as anything imagined by George Bernard Shaw: “Both love and work run through the same stages. Both start as a pleasure, continue as a duty, and remain as a necessity.”

  They expected Zeppelins in May 1915, but in the end “they only got to Saint-Denis [on the northern edge of Paris] where they killed some people. All the street lights were lowered at seven o’clock and half the population went down into the caves, while the other half gladly took advantage of the excuse for staying out of doors to look at
the aeroplanes circling round the city. At eleven o’clock the lights went up, so we became very ungrateful to people who had offered to stop the night with us and be killed together, and sent them home.”

  Glimpses of their life together, as described in “Impressions of Paris,” are further described in Madame Six, Hastings’s short, autobiographical novel about a cancer ward written in 1920. While hinting at the complexities of their relationship they give scant insight into Modigliani’s state of mind at this period. The only utterances from him are usually appended to paintings and drawings, and are either cryptic quotations from Dante or other poets, in French, Italian, or Latin. For instance, “Don’t say: ‘Don’t do that’; say, ‘Do that.’ ” Or, “3 designs: 3 worlds: 3 dimensions.” Or, on his self-portrait as Pierrot he asked, in Italian, “Will he flower?” None of which takes us very far. There is a slightly more revelatory passage in a letter he wrote to his mother in 1916 sometime after his aunt Laure entered an insane asylum.

  A rare postcard attending to the damage from distant German guns during the bombardment of Paris, 1918 (image credit 11.1)

  He wrote, “As to Laure, I am greatly touched that she thinks of me and remembers me even in the state of forgetfulness of human affairs in which she now finds herself. It seems impossible to me that she cannot be brought back to life, that such a person cannot be brought back to normal life.” The repetition of “I can’t believe it” surely also refers to the recent news that Aunt Gabrielle had killed herself. Modigliani’s tactful remarks give no clue to indicate what had happened. Some slight evidence of the events leading up to the joint tragedy is contained in Eugénie’s diary for March 1920, two months after Dedo’s death. In it she muses about Gabrielle’s suicide and Laure’s breakdown. Speaking of the former, she wrote, “I was not able to reply to her requests for advice, which was perhaps an appeal, except by affectionate letters meant to make her understand that the harsh words of our final contacts had been wiped out.” And how forgiving Gabrielle was, at the end. “She, poor girl, even at the moment of her greatest despair, had left everything to Laure and myself in her will.” After the way Laure had behaved one could hardly say that she deserved the generous gesture. “Her air of self-absorption, her ferocious egotism, should have opened my eyes … I did not understand, and it was only when she had a crisis of delirium that I understood.” Laure had been in her “maison de santé” for the past six years, a fate that was worse than death, in Eugénie’s view. Now she was “wizened, maniacal, dreaming of reforming the world by some kind of all-encompassing mother love—she who has never loved!”

  This relentless assessment provides some insight into the hornet’s nest of tangled relationships between the three women that probably existed for decades. What Modigliani must have witnessed in the form of confrontations, simmering resentments, and bitter recriminations cannot be known. But if he had some idea of what, or who, could have driven his aunts to such a state, he never mentioned it.

  Alcohol, that ever-available antispasmodic, was blamed by Hastings for the marked change in Modigliani’s character that she sometimes saw, especially when “Hashisheus,” as she coined the term, was added to “Morpheus.” He became “a craving, violent bad boy, overturning tables, never paying his score and insulting his best friends, including me. I used to burn with rage and the impossibility of leaving him to his fate,” she wrote. Her Maldoror (coined from “mal d’aurore,” or “bad dawn”) had now become Pâtredor. Was this a contraction of “Pas très d’or,” or “Not much money,” a joke that was rather going sour? Was Modigliani taking her generous help rather too much for granted and becoming a luxury she could no longer afford? She seemed to mind the cocaine habit rather less. At least he talked stars and strange worlds and sang strange songs, just like her hero in Minnie Pinnikin. He never stopped drawing or painting, but “rarely did anything good when drugged.”

  After a year or so references, direct or otherwise, to their life together peter out in “Impressions of Paris.” Beà seems to have transferred them to a notebook which became the basis for Madame Six, disjointed comments that nevertheless give a clue, however jaundiced, to the man she was living with. He was always suspicious, she wrote without elaborating. He was always going around telling tales about her. He would say, “Here’s another one”; she never knew what he meant and “was too arrogant to ask.” As for all the paintings and drawings of her, “I never posed, just let him ‘do’ me as he pleased, going about the house. He did the Mary portrait of me [not explained] in a café where I sat thinking what a nuisance he was with his perennial need of more pastels” (which she, presumably, also bought) “wondering if I should get my ‘Impressions of Paris’ written in time for the post, hearing, not listening, to his spit as he lowered his eyebrows on the aesthetic canaille [rabble] who all went to his funeral along with his friends—and next day, beginning to wonder why they had done so, looked around for revenge and advised the world to sell his stuff ‘while the vogue lasts.’ ” With his perpetual complaints, his grievances, and his constant demands of one sort or another, he was no fun anymore. Meantime she had to get something written, or neither of them would eat.

  They had moved to a pretty little cottage at 13 rue Norvins just off the Place du Tertre in Montmartre, and very close to Max Jacob. The poet “went to Mass at six every morning, worked all day in his famous den in the rue Gabrielle, and came in between ten and eleven with all the news and ten anecdotes of people who had dropped in on him during the day.” She came to depend on his visits.

  If Max were there when Dedo arrived—he was Dedo to us and no one else—the chances were not altogether against a peaceful conversazione and the witty exit of Modigliani to his own atelier close by. Alone, I could not be depended on to take things lightly. My health was run down. I was getting to dread, therefore hate, therefore ragefully resent the swoop of the Assyrian on my fold. Once, we had a royal battle, ten times up and down the house, he armed with a pot and me with a long straw brush. After that he broke the shutters outside, which interested directly the landlord who stood guard for several nights over his property, finally securing my peace.

  The symbolic battle between the brush and the pot might have been a fairy fantasy of Minnie Pinnikin’s, but hinted at a darker reality. In “Impressions of Paris,” Alice Morning had declared that it was perfectly acceptable for a woman “in a moment of rage” to destroy things; acts done in heat had “little psychic consequence.” Modigliani, as a southern Italian male, likely believed that an unfaithful wife/mistress had done serious damage to his honor, not to mention his wounded pride, and that, as the injured party, he had a right to retaliate. Much of Minnie Pinnikin, chapter four, has to do with accusations of unfaithfulness and protestations of innocence. One may deduce that in this case art was following life to the letter. Hastings was already involved with someone else. And she had bought a gun.

  Charles Eliot Norton, the American scholar and art historian, wrote in the 1860s that he was still haunted by Jane Morris. She was the wife of William, the English designer and entrepreneur, and Norton had visited them at home in London. “A figure cut out of a missal—out of one of Rossetti’s or Hunt’s pictures—to say this gives but a faint idea of her, because when such an image puts on flesh and blood, it is an apparition of fearful and wonderful intensity … Imagine a tall lean woman in a long dress … with a mass of crisp black hair heaped into great wavy projections on each of her temples, a thin pale face, a pair of strange sad, deep, dark Swinburnian eyes, a mouth like the ‘Oriana’ in our illustrated Tennyson, a long neck, without any color…—in fine complete.”

  Jane Morris, one of the models immortalized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (another was his wife, Elizabeth Siddal), exhibited the “cadaverous body and sensual mouth” of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic. That, as René Dubos wrote, was related, directly or indirectly, to the romantic notion of the consumptive woman. “The fragile silhouette, with long limbs, long fingers, long throat, the tired head leaning on a
pillow, with prominent eyes and twisted sensual mouth, became the unhealthy, perverted symbol of Romanticism.” Certainly, Rossetti’s portrait of Elizabeth Siddal, Beata Beatrix, painted a year after her death at age thirty, is one of the high achievements of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in its depiction of the transfiguring effects of illness. Since Pre-Raphaelites were among the painters Modigliani admired, one may safely assume that he knew the painting, dated 1872, and would have appreciated the hopeful ending Rossetti also pictured, that there would be a “Vita Nuova” and that Dante and his Muse would be reunited in Paradise.

  The concept of the languishing beauty had been current for at least a century. It began in France shortly after 1800 when so many young women in the Napoleonic era dressed in the flimsiest fabrics, cotton, linen, and silk, no matter what the weather, that the affectation led to an outbreak of influenza in Paris in 1803. That is thought to have caused an epidemic of pulmonary tuberculosis shortly afterward. That, in turn, led to a progressive emaciation: sunken chests, elongated necks, protruding shoulders, pale skin, cheeks and eyes flushed with fever. Edgar Allan Poe’s first wife, Virginia, another sufferer, was wont to hemorrhage on her white silk dress as she sang and played the harp, an act that the audience admired for its strange additional charm. How doomed, how tragic; how admirable. Byron, looking in the mirror one day, found that he looked pale. This pleased him. He hoped he would die of consumption so that all the ladies would remark about how interesting he looked. “We wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief …”