In 1981 our world, granted it is still orbiting, will celebrate Picasso’s centenary. Of course, because he has that kind of luck, the great man will be on hand; and available, as usual, to all mediums of publicity: very likely on this occasion television will display him in the buff, as befits a god-creature quite beyond the laws of human decorum. Born in Malaga, a country of figs and stone and guitars, Picasso was a child-prodigy who stayed one: that is, remained a prodigy and something of a child, a man inhabited by a boy’s fooling-around impatience, hatred of system, fresh-eyed curiosity: “Pablo,” to quote his oldest friend, Jaime Sabartes, “is preeminently a sum of curiosities. He has more curiosity than a thousand million women.” When Picasso was thirteen his father, an acrimonious Andalusian art-teacher who ground out greeting-card still lifes for the Barcelona bourgeoisie, gave over to his son his palette and brushes and never painted again; which was, in its way, Picasso’s first conquest—he went on to strew the century with painters overshadowed by him or altogether put to pasture. Queer, come to think of it, why some of these fellows have not united to assassinate this octopus of art; for, though not the master of Matisse and unpossessed by Braque’s compositional strength, Picasso has, via vivacious gall and a bottomless plethora of inventional surprises, outrun them all: he is the winner.
COCO CHANEL
Chanel, a spare spruce sparrow voluble and vital as a woodpecker, once, midnight in one of her nonstoppable monologues, said, referring to the very costly pauvre orphan appearance she has lo these decades modeled: “Cut off my head, and I’m thirteen.” But her head has always remained attached, definitely she had it perfectly placed way back yonder when she was thirteen, or scarcely more, and a moneyed “kind gentleman,” the first of several grateful and well-wishing patrons, asked petite “Coco,” daughter of a Basque blacksmith who had taught her to help him shoe horses, which she preferred, black pearls or white? Neither, she answered—what she preferred, Chéri, were the stakings to start a little shop. Thus emerged Chanel, the fashion-visionary. Whether or not the productions of a dressmaker can be called important “cultural” contributions (and perhaps they can: a Mainbocher, a Balenciaga, are men of more authentic creative significance than several platoons of poets and composers who rise to mind) is uninteresting; but a career woman impure and simple like Chanel arouses a documentary interest, the sum of which is partially totaled in these photographs of her changeling’s face, at one angle a darling dangling in a heart-shaped locket, at another an arid and avid go-getter—observe the striving in the taut stem of her neck: one thinks of a plant, an old hardy perennial still pushing toward, though now a touch parched by, the sun of success that, for those talented inconsolables primed with desire and fueled with ego and whose relentless energy propels the engine that hauls along the lethargic rest of us, invariably flourishes in the frigid sky of ambition. Chanel lives alone in an apartment across the street from the Ritz.
MARCEL DUCHAMP
Duchamp, born in Rouen, the third son of a multi-membered middle-class family, many of whom were artistically inclined, has lived in New York since 1915. During these forty-four years of American residence he has dabbled away at only one painting (Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even—an oil, on transparent glass, the size of a church window), and finished none; for all practical purposes, he abandoned painting in 1913, the year his Nude Descending a Staircase (of which a contemporary critic remarked, “Whirl around three times, bump your head twice against the wall, and if you bump hard enough the meaning will be perfectly obvious”) was the drunkmaking sensation of some sixteen hundred forerunner experiments on view at the historic Armory show. “But,” protests Duchamp, “not to paint doesn’t mean I’ve given up art. All good painters have only about five masterpieces to their name. The others are not vital. The five have the force of shock. Shock is good. If I’ve done five good things, it’s enough. Or you might say that instead of dying like Seurat at thirty-one, I am a man whose inspiration for painting stopped, eh?” His inspiration, at all events his talent, for playing games with art, wherein resides the kindergar-tenish and nowadays altogether shockless charm of his paintings, has not lain entirely fallow: in his infinite spare time he has concocted surrealist perfume bottles, made a pioneer abstract film, involved himself in interior decoration (ceilings swathed in coal sacks), devised a portable Duchamp museum fitted with miniatures of his best-known works (also a phial containing “Parisian Air”), and invented for himself other fraudulent forms of art-toy; but what seems to concern him sincerely is chess, a more serious style of fun, a subject around which he has improvised the most recherché volume possible: a thousand copies were printed in three languages, and (hold on to your berets) the title goes Opposition et Cases Conjuguées, Opposition und Schwesterfelder, Opposition and Sister Squares. Duchamp explains that “It all has to do with blocked pawns, when your only means of winning is by moves of kings. This happens only once in a thousand times. And why,” he adds, “why isn’t my chess playing an art activity? A chess game is very plastic. You construct it. It’s mechanical sculpture and with chess one creates beautiful problems and that beauty is made with the heads and hands. Besides, it’s purer, socially, than painting, for you can’t make money out of chess, eh?”
And supposing you could, undoubtedly Duchamp wouldn’t: he has often expressed anti-lucre sentiments amounting to a financial allergy (“No! Painting shouldn’t become a fashionable thing. And money, money, money comes in, and it becomes a Wall Street office”); certainly very little about his living quarters, a fourth-floor walkup in a soiled and sullen brownstone on an unprepossessing Manhattan sidestreet, implies limousine standards; the flat, done up in a sort of flapper-period of modern artiness, boasts nothing rain might harm, except a small Matisse and a large Miró: as a sanctuary, it speaks of a man who would be himself, reasonably free and unbeholden. Downstairs, there is on the mailbox a nameplate dingy but dazzling; it reads: “Matisse-Duchamp-Ernst.” Because, you see, the present Madame Duchamp is the former Madame Matisse, wife of the great man’s son Pierre; as for Ernst, that is boyishly pink and silvery Surrealist Max, the apartment’s onetime tenant. The order of the names, the billing, as it were, seems an appropriate artistic judgment.
JEAN COCTEAU AND ANDRÉ GIDE
André Gide, that moralizing immoralist, a writer favored with sincerity but denied imagination, quite disapproved of Jean Cocteau, whose gifts the mischievous muses had reversed, making of him, both as man and artist, a creature vastly imaginative but vivaciously insincere. It is interesting, then, that Gide should have authored the most accurate, and for that reason most sympathetic, description of our eldest terrible child.
Gide is writing in his journal; the time is August, 1914. “Jean Cocteau had arranged to meet me in an ‘English tearoom’ on the corner of the rue de Ponthieu and the avenue d’Antin. I had no pleasure in seeing him again, despite his extreme kindness; but he is incapable of seriousness, and all his thoughts, his witticisms, his sensations, all the extraordinary brilliance of his customary conversation shocked me like a luxury article displayed in a period of famine and mourning. He is dressed almost like a soldier, and the fillip of the present events has made him look healthier. He is relinquishing nothing, but simply giving a martial twist to his usual liveliness. When speaking of the slaughter of Mulhouse he uses amusing adjectives and mimicry; he imitates the bugle call and the whistling of the shrapnel. Then, changing subjects since he sees he is not amusing me, he claims to be sad; he wants to be sad with the same kind of sadness as you, and suddenly he adopts your mood and explains it to you. Then he talks of Blanche, mimics Mme. R. and talks of the lady at the Red Cross who shouted on the stairway, ‘I was promised fifty wounded men for this morning; I want my fifty wounded men.’ Meanwhile he is crushing a piece of plum cake in his plate and nibbling it; his voice rises suddenly and has odd twists; he laughs, leans forward, bends toward you and touches you. The odd thing is that I think he would make a good soldier. He asserts that he wou
ld and that he would be brave too. He has the carefree attitude of the street urchin; it is in his company that I feel the most awkward, the most heavy, the most gloomy.”
In the spring of 1950, in the piazza of a Sicilian town where Gide was vacationing (it was the last year of his life), he had another meeting with Cocteau, a farewell encounter which the writer of these notes happened to observe. It was Gide’s custom to dream away the morning hours propped in the piazza sun; there he sat sipping from a bottle of salt-water brought fresh from the sea, a motionless mandarin shrouded in a woolly wintry black cape and with a wide-brimmed dark fedora casting a shadow the length of his stern, brimstone countenance: an idle idol-saint (of sorts) un-speaking and unspoken to except for occasional consultations with those of the village Ganymedes who snagged his fancy. Then one morning Cocteau, whirling a cane, sauntered upon the piazza-scene and proceeded to interrupt the steely-eyed reveries of Il Vecchio (as the local ragazzi called the distinguished octogenarian). Thirty-five years had gone by since the wartime tea party, yet nothing in the attitude of the two men toward each other had altered. Cocteau was still anxious to please, still the rainbow-winged and dancing dragonfly inviting the toad not merely to admire but perhaps devour him. He jigged about, his jingling merriment competed with the bell-music of passing donkey carts, he scattered rays of bitter wit that stung like the Sicilian sun, he effused, enthused, he fondled the old man’s knee, caressed his hands, squeezed his shoulders, kissed his parched Mongolian cheeks—nay, nothing would awaken Il Vecchio: as though his stomach turned at the thought of digesting such fancy-colored fodder, he remained a hungerless frog upon a thorny frond; until at last he croaked, “Do be still. You are disturbing the view.”
Very true: Cocteau was disturbing the view. He has been doing so since his debut as an opium-smoking prodigy of seventeen. For more than four decades this eternal gamin has conducted a fun-for-all vaudeville, with many flashing changes of attire: poet, novelist, playwright, journalist, designer, painter, inventor of ballets, film maker, professional conversationalist. Most of these costumes have fit well, a few brilliantly. But it is in the guise of catalytic agent that he has been most capable: as an innovator for, and propagandist of, other men’s ideas and gifts—from Radiguet to Genet, Satie to Auric, Picasso to Bérard, Worth to Dior. Cocteau has lived absolutely inside his time, and more than anyone else, formed French taste in the present century. It is Cocteau’s kinship with his own epoch, his exclusive concern with the modern, that lay at the root of Il Vecchio’s aversion. “I do not seek to be of my epoch; I seek to overflow my epoch” was Gide’s declared ambition; a commendable one, too. But isn’t it possible that a man who has so enlivened our today will, if not overflow, at least trickle into somebody’s tomorrow?
MAE WEST
Once upon a time an outrageous young man of wide acquaintance thought to give an unusual tea party. It was to honor Miss Mae West, then appearing in a Manhattan night club. Dame Edith Sitwell was invited to pour, a task the Dame, always a devotee of outré incident, accepted. New York illuminati, titillated at the prospect of an interview between two ladies of such differently composed distinction, begged bids.
“My dear,” the young man was congratulated in advance, “it’s the camp of the season.”
But—everything went awry. At four the Dame, pleading laryngitis, telephoned her regrets. By six, with the party at midpoint, it seemed Miss West would disappoint, too. Muttering guests mentioned hoax; at seven the host retired to a private chamber. Ten minutes later the guest of honor arrived, and what remained of the assemblage were not sorry they had waited. Not sorry, but strangely confused. The familiar appurtenances were there: the brass wig, the scimitar eyes with sword-length lashes, the white skin, white as a cottonmouth’s mouth, the shape, that Big Ben of hour-glass figures, that convict’s dream—nothing was absent; except Miss West.
For surely this was not the real Mae. Yet it was indeed Miss West: an uneasy, a shy and vulnerable, an unclassifiably virginal woman whose tardy entrance was conceivably due to having lingered on the street before summoning the courage to ring the bell. As one watched her, a jittery moth of a smile leaping about her lips but never alighting, huskily whisper “Sopleastameetya,” and, as though too bashful to proceed, at once abandon her seat on the seesaw of any potential conversation, the tour de force nature of her theater-self, its eerie and absolute completeness, struck with force. Removed from the protecting realm of her hilarious creation, her sexless symbol of uninhibited sexuality, she was without defense: her long lashes fluttered like the feelers of a beetle on its back.
Only once did the tougher Mae reveal herself. The display was occasioned by an intense young girl who, approaching the actress, announced, “I saw Diamond Lil last week; it was wonderful.”
“Didja, honey? Wheredja see it?”
“At the Museum. The Modern Museum.”
And a dismayed Miss West, seeking shelter in the sassy drawl of her famous fabrication, inquired, “Just whaddya mean, honey? A museum?”
LOUIS ARMSTRONG
Surely the Satch has forgotten, still, he was one of this writer’s first friends, I met him when I was four, that would be around 1928, and he, a hard-plump and belligerently happy brown Buddha, was playing aboard a pleasure steamer that paddled between New Orleans and St. Louis. Never mind why, but I had occasion to take the trip very often, and for me the sweet anger of Armstrong’s trumpet, the froggy exuberance of his come-to-me-baby mouthings, are a piece of Proust’s madeleine cake: they make Mississippi moons rise again, summon the muddy lights of river towns, the sound, like an alligator’s yawn, of river horns—I hear the rush of the mulatto river pushing by, hear, always, stomp! stomp! the beat of the grinning Buddha’s foot as he shouts his way into “Sunny Side of the Street” and the honeymooning dancers, dazed with bootleg brew and sweating through their talcum, bunny-hug around the ship’s saloony ballroom. The Satch, he was good to me, he told me I had talent, that I ought to be in vaudeville; he gave me a bamboo cane and a straw boater with a peppermint headband; and every night from the stand announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, now we’re going to present you one of America’s nice kids, he’s going to do a little tap dance.” Afterward I passed among the passengers, collecting in my hat nickels and dimes. This went on all summer, I grew rich and vain; but in October the river roughened, the moon whitened, the customers lessened, the boat rides ended, and with them my career. Six years later, while living at a boarding school from which I wanted to run away, I wrote my former, now famous, benefactor, and said if I came to New York, couldn’t he get me a job at the Cotton Club or somewhere? There was no reply, maybe he never got the letter, it doesn’t matter, I still loved him, still do.
HUMPHREY BOGART
If one listens attentively to any man’s vocabulary, it will be noticed that certain key-to-character words recur. With Bogart, whose pungent personal thesaurus was by and large unspeakably unprintable, “bum” and “professional” were two such verbal signposts. A most moral—by a bit exaggerating you might say “prim”—man, he employed “professional” as a platinum medal to be distributed among persons whose behavior he sanctioned; “bum,” the reverse of an accolade, conveyed, when spoken by him, almost scarifying displeasure. “My old man,” he once remarked of his father, who had been a reputable New York doctor, “died ten thousand dollars in debt, and I had to pay off every cent. A guy who doesn’t leave his wife and kids provided for, he’s a bum.” Bums, too, were guys who cheated on their wives, cheated on their taxes, and all whiners, gossipists, most politicians, most writers, women who Drank, women who were scornful of men who Drank; but the bum true-blue was any fellow who shirked his job, was not, in meticulous style, a “pro” in his work. God knows he was. Never mind that he might play poker until dawn and swallow a brandy for breakfast; he was always on time on the set, in make-up and letter-perfect in his part (forever the same part, to be sure, still there is nothing more difficult to interestingly sustain than repetition).
No, there was never a mite of bum-hokum about Bogart; he was an actor without theories (well, one: that he should be highly paid), without temper but not without temperament; and because he understood that discipline was the better part of artistic survival, he lasted, he left his mark.
EZRA POUND
Born 1885, an Idaho boy. Taught school; was tossed out for being “too much the Latin Quarter type.” Soon sought solace amid similar souls abroad. Aged twenty-three, while starving himself fat on a potato diet in Venice, he published A Lume Spento, a first book of poems which instigated a fierce friendship with Yeats, who wrote of him: “A rugged and headstrong nature and he is always hurting people’s feelings, but he has I think some genius and great goodwill.” Goodwill: to say it slightly!—between 1909 and 1920, while living first in London, then Paris, he steadily championed the careers of others (it was to Pound that Eliot dedicated The Waste Land; it was Pound who raised the money that enabled Joyce to complete Ulysses). His generosity in this sphere is a matter on which even Hemingway, who does not often celebrate the kindness of others, has offered testimony: “So then, so far,” he wrote, writing in 1925, “we have Pound the major poet devoting, say, one fifth of his time to his poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends. He defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. He loans them money. He sells their pictures. He arranges concerts for them. He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying and witnesses their wills. He advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide. And in the end a few of them refrain from knifing at the first opportunity.”