Life with Picasso

  From time to time, he said to me, “You mustn’t think that I would ever get permanently attached to you.” That bothered me a little because at the start I had not expected that he would. I thought we ought to go along as we were, without asking where it was taking us. I felt that since I was asking for nothing, he had no reason to defend himself against me. I wasn’t the one who wanted him to burden himself with me; he was the one, I realized, who wanted that. I suppose that was why periodically he told me that he didn’t. He was struggling not against me but against the effect I was making on him. But since he was struggling with the effect, he found it necessary to struggle with me too.

  After a while when he said such things as, “Don’t think you mean anything to me. I like my independence,” I learned to say, “I do, too,” and then stay away for a week or two. He would be all smiles when I returned.

  One afternoon he said, “I don’t know why I told you to come. It would be more fun to go to a brothel.” I asked him why he didn’t, in that case.

  “That’s just it,” he burst out. “On account of you I don’t even have any desire to go. You’re spoiling my life.”

  Of course I knew he wasn’t all that fond of “public” girls. I think he wanted to sound rakish. One day he told me he had picked up a girl on the Boulevard des Capucines. “I took her into a bar,” he said, “and told her about all the trouble I have on account of women. She was very nice to me and she told me I have too strong a sense of duty. She’s a realist, you see. She understood. That’s probably the only kind of woman I could get comfort from.” I told him to go right ahead. I understood how it was.

  “But it doesn’t amuse me,” he said. “It bores me.” Having admitted that much, he then went on the defensive by tossing off one of his favorite quips: “There’s nothing so similar to one poodle dog as another poodle dog and that goes for women, too.” He was rather fond, also, of saying, “For me, there are only two kinds of women—goddesses and doormats.” And whenever he thought I might be feeling too much like a goddess, he did his best to turn me into a doormat. One day when I went to see him, we were looking at the dust dancing in a ray of sunlight that slanted in through one of the high windows. He said to me, “Nobody has any real importance for me. As far as I’m concerned, other people are like those little grains of dust floating in the sunlight. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go.” I told him I had often noticed in his dealings with others that he considered the rest of the world only little grains of dust. But, I said, as it happened, I was a little grain of dust who was gifted with autonomous movement and who didn’t, therefore, need any broom. I could go out by myself. And I did. I didn’t return for three months. It wasn’t that I didn’t admire his greatness; it was, rather, that I didn’t enjoy seeing it cheapened by a kind of imperialism which I thought incompatible with true greatness. I could admire him tremendously as an artist but I did not want to become his victim or a martyr. It seemed to me that some of his other friends had: Dora Maar, for example.

  Pablo had told me that when he first met Dora Maar, she belonged to the surrealist group. She had been friendly since girlhood with Michel Leiris, Man Ray, André Breton, and Paul Eluard. She was a bit younger than the poets of the movement but she was very much part of the milieu. Her father, a Yugoslav, was a rather successful architect. Her mother, according to Pablo, had been an exceedingly pious woman, who had belonged to the Orthodox church but had later been converted to Roman Catholicism.

  When Pablo met Dora she had been working as a photographer. Her photographs, he told me, had a quality he always associated with the early paintings of Chirico. They often showed a long tunnel with light at the end, and an object, rather difficult to identify, in the shadowy corridor between the lens and the light. He told me she had asked to make some portraits of him, and he had gone to her atelier for that purpose.

  “There are two professions,” he said, “whose practitioners are never satisfied with what they do: dentists and photographers. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and every photographer would like to be a painter. Brassaï is a very gifted draftsman, Man Ray is a painter of sorts, and Dora, too, was right in the tradition. Inside Dora Maar, the photographer, was a painter trying to get out.”

  It was Dora, he told me, who had found him the atelier in the Rue des Grands-Augustins. Soon after, she moved into an apartment around the corner, in the Rue de Savoie. She began to devote herself more and more to painting. Gradually, she gave up her photographic laboratory. Some of her equipment—spotlights, backdrops and so on—eventually found its way to Pablo’s studio in the Rue des Grands-Augustins. The black curtains came in very handy for blackouts during the Occupation, and he often painted at night by training Dora’s spots on his canvas.

  When I first went to the Rue des Grands-Augustins I saw the first two canvases she had given him. They were heads painted by someone with a strong feeling for the occult. They were symbolic and esoteric rather than pictorial and seemed to stem from psychic preoccupations. I felt they were related to work I had seen by Victor Brauner.

  Pablo told me that one of the first times he saw Dora she was sitting at the Deux Magots. She was wearing black gloves with little pink flowers appliquéed on them. She took off the gloves and picked up a long, pointed knife, which she began to drive into the table between her outstretched fingers to see how close she could come to each finger without actually cutting herself. From time to time she missed by a tiny fraction of an inch and before she stopped playing with the knife, her hand was covered with blood. Pablo told me that was what made up his mind to interest himself in her. He was fascinated. He asked her to give him the gloves and he used to keep them in a vitrine at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, along with other mementos.

  When I met Pablo, in 1943, I knew about Dora Maar because everyone did. After I began to see him regularly, I learned more about her, most of it from him. She did not come to the Rue des Grands-Augustins except on special occasions. Pablo would telephone to her when he wanted to see her. She never knew whether she would be having lunch or dinner with him—not from one meal to the next—but she had to hold herself in a state of permanent availability so that if he phoned or dropped by, he would find her there. But she could never just drop in to his place, or phone to say she would not be available for dinner that evening. The painter André Beaudin, who liked Dora, told me once that he had asked her to eat with him one evening. She told him she couldn’t say yes or no until dinnertime because if she made a date with him and then Pablo called to say he was coming to take her to dinner, he would be furious to learn she had made other plans.

  In the spring of 1945 Dora Maar had an exhibition of painting at Jeanne Bucher’s gallery in Montparnasse. I went alone to the exhibition and enjoyed it very much. I think the paintings she showed then were the finest she has ever done. They were almost all still lifes, very severe, most of them showing just one object. They may have reflected, in a measure, her community of spirit with Picasso, but they brought to that a feeling that was entirely different. The work was not derivative; there was nothing sharp or angular about her forms. In fact she had a way of handling chiaroscuro that was quite alien to his work. She had taken the most ordinary objects—a lamp or an alarm-clock or a piece of bread—and made you feel she wasn’t so much interested in them as in their solitude, the terrible solitude and void that surrounded everything in that penumbra.

  I went to the exhibition because I was interested to see what she was doing, and not at all because I thought Pablo might be there. As it happened, he arrived only a few minutes after I did. I was wearing a dress striped with all the colors of the rainbow, and the contrast between my dress and the severity of Dora Maar’s painting and of her dress—she was all in black—made me feel so much out of place that I slipped away and ran down the stairs. I thought that would save complications but it only created some, because Pablo ran down the stairs after me, hollering, “Where do you think you’re going? You haven’t even said ‘Hell
o.’ ” I stopped long enough to say “Hello,” hopped onto my bicycle and rode away.

  Pablo’s moods, in general, followed the weather. One late spring afternoon, about two months after Dora Maar’s exhibition at the Jeanne Bucher gallery, I decided to go see him—I assumed the weather might be helping him to be in a good frame of mind. When I phoned, he said, “Fine,” but he sounded a little unenthusiastic. I said I would be there at two. I arrived a bit late, as usual, and as I approached his building I looked up to the window that opened on the stairway leading from the first to the second floor of his apartment and saw him sitting there waiting for me, as he often did. (He had told me more than once, in his way of passing out left-handed compliments, that the nicest part of my visits was the time he sat on the stairway looking out the window, waiting for me to arrive. Generally his pigeons would fly up and perch on his shoulders as he sat there.) That afternoon I felt rather disappointed because it looked to me, from the expression on his face, as though my meteorological calculations were wide of the mark. When he let me in I asked him what was wrong. It was obvious that something was bothering him.

  “Come upstairs,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it.” We went into his bedroom and he sat down on the bed. I sat down not very far from him. He took my hand, something he was not at all given to doing, and sat there without speaking for two or three minutes. I realized then that he wasn’t angry with me but that he must be terribly shaken up. Finally he said, “I’m glad you’ve come. I’m a little calmer now. For two weeks I’ve had a feeling something was wrong but I wasn’t sure so I didn’t say anything about it. But now—well, you’ll see.

  “A very strange thing happened with Dora Maar about two weeks ago,” he said. “I went to her apartment to take her to dinner and found that she wasn’t home. I waited for her. When she finally showed up, her hair was all disheveled and her clothes were torn. A man had attacked her in the street, she said, and made off with her dog, a little Maltese lapdog I had given her and to which she was very attached.” The story might have been true, of course, but, as he pointed out, in those early months after the Liberation, everyone was happy; there weren’t even any clochards along the banks of the Seine as there are now. Pablo said he had been puzzled by the story. “I couldn’t believe it was true,” he told me. “Besides, why would anyone want to steal a little dog like that?” Then, two nights ago, he said, there had been another incident. Dora had been found by a policeman wandering along the quay near the Pont-Neuf in the same condition. She told him she had been attacked by a man who stole her bicycle. The policeman took her home, since she seemed very dazed. Later on, Pablo said, her bicycle was found, apparently untouched, right near the spot where she claimed to have been attacked. It looked as though she had just left it there, he said. He told me he began to wonder if she hadn’t made up the stories. “I thought she was looking for sympathy,” he said, “feeling that maybe I wasn’t so much interested in her as I had been. And since it’s her nature to do things in dramatic fashion, I thought this might be her way of attracting attention to herself. So I didn’t take it too seriously.

  “Last night I went to her place to take her to dinner. I found her extremely upset, moving about the room nervously. She began straight off to call me to account for the way I live. She told me I led a shameful kind of life, from a moral point of view, and that I should be thinking of what lies in wait for me in the hereafter. I told her I wasn’t in the habit of having that kind of talk from anyone. And then, as I thought it over, it seemed funny and I began to laugh. But she didn’t think it at all funny. I knew she had always had a mystical point of view and been drawn toward the occult but she had never tried to impose it on others. I wouldn’t have minded if she had said all that with a smile but she was in dead earnest. She told me I had better repent while there was still time. She said, ‘As an artist you may be extraordinary, but morally speaking you’re worthless.’ I tried to shut her up and told her that questions of conscience concern only the person whose problem they are, not others. ‘You work out your own salvation in the way you see fit and keep your advice to yourself,’ I told her, but she kept repeating those things over and over. Finally I got her to stop talking long enough to say we’d go have dinner and talk about it another time. During the dinner she talked of other things but in a kind of hallucinatory way. At times I couldn’t understand what she was talking about. I knew she hadn’t been drinking, so I decided something must be very wrong. I took her home after dinner and told her I’d be back in the morning to see her.

  “This morning, after I got up, I was worried about her and I called Eluard and asked him to come right over. I knew he was fond enough of Dora to be concerned about something like that and I wanted to get his idea on it. After he got here, I had just started to tell him what had happened, when Dora came in. When she saw us together she began to talk in a very strange way.

  “You both should get down on your knees before me, you ungodly pair,” Pablo quoted her as saying. Both Paul and Pablo had always been atheists but Dora had always had religious tendencies, semi-philosophical in nature at first and then veering more and more toward Buddhism. “I have the revelation of the inner voice,” Pablo said she told them. “I see things as they really are, past, present, and future. If you go on living as you have been, you’ll bring down a terrible catastrophe on your heads.” She grabbed them by the arms and tried to force them to their knees, Pablo said. He wanted to call Doctor Lacan, the psychoanalyst he used for most of his medical problems, but he didn’t want to telephone in front of Dora, so he sent Sabartés out to call, he said. Lacan came at once.

  “After Lacan had left with Dora, Eluard was so upset he accused me of being responsible for her state because I had made her so unhappy,” Pablo said. “I told him that if I hadn’t taken her up, she’d have reached that state long ago. ‘If anyone is to blame, it’s you and the rest of the surrealists,’ I told him, ‘with all those wild ideas promoting antirationalism and the derangement of all the senses.’ Eluard said that any influence they had had on her was indirect, since it was all theoretical, but that I had made her unhappy in a very concrete way. He was so angry he picked up a chair and smashed it against the floor.

  “What I do know,” Pablo told me, “is that after she met me, she had a more constructive life than before. Her life became more concentrated. Photography didn’t satisfy her. She began to paint more and was making real progress. I built her up.”

  I told him that perhaps he had built her up, but only to let her down afterward. She had made progress, no doubt, but just at that moment he had begun to detach himself from her, I pointed out.

  “One doesn’t go to pieces all of a sudden without an underlying cause,” he said. “It’s like a fire that smoulders for a long time and then, when the wind picks it up, begins to rage. Don’t forget that the leading surrealists, the ones who survived the heyday of the movement—Breton, Eluard, Aragon—have very strong characters. The weaker ones who trailed after them haven’t always fared as well: Crevel committed suicide, Artaud went mad, and there are plenty of other cases. As an ideology, it sowed disaster pretty generally. The sources of Surrealism are a rather dubious mixture. It’s not strange that with a hodgepodge like that, so many lost their way.”

  I felt very upset about his story. I suggested that now that we had talked about it, he might like to be alone. He said, “No. The present always has precedence over the past. That’s a victory for you.”

  I suppose we must have talked about Dora Maar for two or three hours. The longer we talked about her, the more I associated myself with the situation in which she now found herself. When I spoke of that to Pablo, he brushed it aside. “Let’s drop the whole matter,” he said. “Life is like that. It’s set up to automatically eliminate those who can’t adapt. And there’s no sense talking a minute longer about what happened today. Life must go on, and life is us.” I said that seemed a quick, easy way to eliminate from one’s life whoever might be passing throu
gh a weak moment. I said I didn’t think it was right to say, when someone fell by the wayside, “I’m going to keep on walking. It’s up to her to do the same.”

  “That kind of charity is very unrealistic,” he said. “It’s only sentimentality, a kind of pseudo-humanitarianism you’ve picked up from that whining, weepy phony, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Furthermore, everyone’s nature is determined in advance.”

  I think that with the Spanish sense of pride, Pablo considered that weakness on Dora’s part was inexcusable. She had lost face with him. In her weakness there must have been the smell of death for him, and as I came to see later, Pablo found that, too, inexcusable.

  Doctor Lacan kept Dora at the clinic for three weeks. At the end of that period he let her go home. He continued to treat her and she underwent analysis with him.

  When she first came back from the clinic, she seemed very little changed, Pablo said. She wasn’t quite well for a while but she began to paint again as her analysis progressed. Pablo continued to see her, as he always had. I told him I thought he ought to be very solicitous of her well-being and not let her feel, at least for the time being, that there was anyone else in his life that meant anything to him. I told him I was prepared to see less of him if that would help.

  “All right,” he said. “I told her I would take her to the Midi during the vacation.” He had also accepted an invitation to stay a while with his old friend the art collector Marie Cuttoli at Cap d’Antibes. I went off to Brittany for the summer, feeling that everything was as it should be. I had hardly arrived when I got a letter from Pablo saying he had rented a place for me in the house of another old friend of his, an engraver named Louis Fort, at Golfe-Juan. “Please come at once,” he wrote. “I’m terribly bored.”