Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde Part 1 by francis booth

Copyright © Francis Booth 2018 The right of Francis Booth to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication can be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.

In this book there will be discussion of pairs of people and their relations. . . everybody I can think of ever, narrative after narrative of pairs of people. Gertrude Stein, A Long Gay Book

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baton was passed from the past to the future. Many of the people we are going to How do you get from Igor Stravinsky to Elvis Presley via Benny Goodman and the King of Thailand? From Henry Miller to Patti Smith via Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass? Ezra Pound to Coco Chanel via Shakespeare and Company? James Joyce's daughter to Peggy Guggenheim via Samuel Beckett? How did the most beautiful woman in the world come to design a radio-controlled missile with the bad boy of music? Did Jackson Pollock learn his drip technique from the man who tried to assassinate Trotsky? Did Stalin turn the inventor of electronic music into a Soviet spy? This book tells the stories – sometimes unlikely but always fascinating – of first meetings between members of the twentieth century avant-garde, who were all connected to each other in a complex web of relationships; stories of how the artistic 4

meet had books published in 1922, often said to be the year that modernism began. Many questioned the past and looked to the future: James Joyce's Ulysses; ee cummings' The Enormous Room (which takes off from John Bunyan in the way Ulysses takes off from

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Homer) and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's

one in philosophy, one in art and one in

Room looked to the future of the novel while TS Eliot's The Waste Land looked

music. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus showed that much

to the future of poetry. But while these works were pushing the boundaries of artistic form and expression, three

previous philosophy was not so much false as meaningless. 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof

other works published in English that year tried to define those boundaries –

one must be silent', said Wittgenstein, but Eliot, Joyce, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke and others took no notice. As the poet William Carlos Williams put it: 'It is to divorce words from the enslavement of the prevalent clichés that all the violent torsions (Stein, Joyce) have occurred; violent in direct relation to the gravity and success of their enslavements.' In Paris the surrealist poets were also trying to get away from enslavement by any form of literary structure; they held their first formal group session of psychic automatism at nine o'clock on the evening of September 25, 1922 at André Breton's apartment. In 1922 the boundaries were also being drawn in the visual arts. In England, CK Ogden, the translator of 5

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Wittgenstein's Tractatus, published the

basic rules, starting from the basics and

Foundations of Aesthetics with IA Richards, which attempted to find a

taking nothing for granted. 'And again and again to begin at the beginning; again

scientific basis for artistic criticism and define its boundaries. But in contrast both to the formal experimentation of

and again to examine anew for ourselves and attempt to organise anew for ourselves. Regarding nothing as given

the avant-garde and to Wittgenstein, Ogden and Richards with their scientific

but the phenomena.'

approach, 1922 was also a good year for the spiritual side: Herman Hesse's novel Siddhartha introduced the Buddha into Western literature and PD Ouspensky's Tertium Organum introduced many of the avant-garde to the thinking of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff who sought to reinvent not just art, but mankind itself. Many of those avant-garde writers devoted large parts of their life to Gurdjieff and his teachings. In music everything was changing too. Arnold Schoenberg's Harmonielehre, translated as The Theory of Harmony, had been published earlier but it was the 1922 edition that was widely distributed. Like Wittgenstein and Ogden, Schoenberg wanted to establish certain 6

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In 1922 America was only just waking

works, Mavra and Le Renard [The Fox]

up to the new music from Europe. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which had

were premiered in Paris the same year. In 1922 the French-American

caused the riot of spring in Paris in 1913, was premiered in Philadelphia on March 3, 1922. There were no

composer/mystic Dane Rudhyar published 'The Relativity of Our Musical Conceptions' in America, hardly in the

recordings of it at that time; Americans knew of the scandal surrounding it but

same league as Schoenberg's work in terms of its international influence, but

had previously only heard it, if at all, in

very important to the home-grown

the two-piano version. Stravinsky's latest

American avant-garde at the time. Like Rudhyar, Edgard Varèse was an ultra-modernist French composer who moved permanently to America. He published his first entirely American work, Amériques, in 1922. It is huge, truly American in scale, calling for around 150 musicians in its original version, including 9 percussionists, sometimes playing fire brigade sirens. In the same year the New York-based International Composers Guild, cofounded by Varèse gave its first performances. Its mission was to give premieres of works by living composers. In its manifesto it says: 'Dying is the

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privilege of the weary. The present day

tender these tales of the Jazz Age into

composers refuse to die.' But not everyone was taking life so

the hands of those who read as they run and run as they read.' In the

seriously in 1922. French composer Darius Milhaud was in New York that year, having a great time visiting Harlem

introduction to one story he tells us how he revelled in 'a story wherein none of the characters need be taken

and listening to jazz. Unlike Varèse and Rudhyar he didn't stay in New York but

seriously.' And in 1922, lovable rogue Frank Harris's scurrilous and not at all

took its music back to Paris with him in

serious My Life and Loves was privately

the form of the ballet La Création du

printed by lovable rogue Jack Kahane.

Monde [The Creation of the World], based on a libretto by Blaise Cendrars – arguably the first modernist poet in Europe – which drew on African folk mythology and black American jazz rhythms. George Gershwin's opera Blue Monday, the first work of symphonic jazz, opened on Broadway on August 28, 1922. Also influenced by jazz was F Scott Fitzgerald, who published both The Beautiful and the Damned and his collection of short stories Tales of the Jazz Age in 1922, capturing the excitement and rhythm of jazz in his writing. In the introduction he said 'I 8

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In the more serious international art

We proclaim that at this time of social

world, Mexican communist painters including Diego Rivera, David Alfaro

change from a decrepit order to a new one, the creators of beauty must use

Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco issued in 1922 'A Declaration of Social, Political and Aesthetic Principles' which

their best efforts to produce ideological works of art for the people; art must no longer be the expression of individual

concluded:

satisfaction which it is today, but should aim to become a fighting, educative art for all.' In the Soviet Union the Fourth Congress of the Communist International initiated the United Front strategy in 1922, calling on all socialists worldwide to join the fight against capitalism and fascism. Now, more than ever, the strictest international discipline is necessary, both within the Communist International and in each of its separate sections, in order to carry out the united front tactic at the international level and in each individual country.

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Also in Russia in 1922, Leon Theremin

Theremin would become a Soviet spy

demonstrated the first electronic musical instrument to the Soviet leader,

and would collaborate with Varèse in America. The theremin would go on to

Lenin – it was and is the only instrument you play without touching it. Theremin first demonstrated it to the public in

be used in all kinds of electronic and avant-garde music up to the present day. The company that marketed it said it

Moscow that December. Later,

could replace the radio in people's homes but it didn't; on October 18, 1922 the British Broadcasting Company was founded in London by a group of

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wireless manufacturers including

race in poetry.' This may be debatable

Marconi. The Jamaican-American writer Claude

but nevertheless the publication was one of the key events of the early

McKay's poetry collection Harlem Shadows was published in the same year. In the introduction, Max Eastman says:

Harlem Renaissance. Also in 1922, Jean Toomer, another leading light of the early Harlem Renaissance, finished his

'These poems have a special interest for all the races of man because they are

major work: the avant-garde novel Cane. He wrote to his friend and editor

sung by a pure blooded Negro. They are

Waldo Frank, whose own novel Rahab

the first significant expression of that

had been published that year, on December 12, 1922. 'My brother! CANE is on its way to you! For two weeks I have worked steadily at it. The book is done.' 1922 was a good year for the CzechGerman poet Rainer Maria Rilke too. In a burst of creativity, he finished one of the great pillars of modern poetry: the Duino Elegies, first begun in 1912. In the same year, Insel-Verlag of Leipzig also published his Sonnets to Orpheus as well as reissuing his New Poems and Early Poems. He wrote to his muse Lou Andreas-Salomé: Lou, dear Lou, look now: At this moment, this Saturday, 11 February, at 6 11

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o'clock, I lay aside my pen, having accomplished the last elegy, the tenth. . . Just think! – I have survived to this point. Through everything. Miracle, grace. In France, Marcel Proust had been working on his enormous novel sequence In Search of Lost Time even longer, since 1909. But by 1922 he was seriously ill and knew he didn't have long to live. One day that spring he called to his long-serving and long-suffering maid Céleste Albaret: 'A great thing happened during the night. It is great news. Last night I wrote the word "Fin". Now I can die.' He did, on November 18, 1922. We will meet all these people and more as we unravel the connections between them that made the twentieth century avant-garde.

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the premieres of the ballet Le Renard and the opera Mavra, performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to new music A few months before he died, Proust was at the Majestic Hotel in Paris on the night of May 18, 1922 for an after-party hosted by the art patrons Violet and Sydney Schiff. The party was being held in honour of Serge Diaghilev, the great Russian ballet impresario, to celebrate

by Igor Stravinsky. The Schiffs had invited forty or so guests to the afterconcert supper, including the four living artists they most admired: Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Part Two of Proust's Sodom and Gomorrah, the last part of In Search of Lost Time, had been published in April 1922, just after Joyce's Ulysses and just before the Schiffs' party. The Schiffs were among Proust's greatest admirers; Sydney, the wealthy son of a merchant banker was, or at least aspired to be, a novelist himself. Sydney and Violet knew and admired Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, but Proust was in a different league as far as they were concerned: more like a god to them than a friend. The Schiffs collected artistic friendships in the way some rich people collected art; they invited many artistic people to their 13

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home in Eastbourne on the south coast

central character in the first volume of

of England, where everyone played games involving what Sydney described

Proust's gigantic novel sequence, had affected them. The letter invites Proust

to Proust as the 'exchange of personalities'. Eliot said: 'London life would be more tolerable if there were

to stay with them in London, but even then Proust hardly went out and he certainly didn't stay with people.

more people like the Schiffs'; he wrote to Violet on 21 July, 1919 saying 'I must

Nevertheless, Proust does seem to have been touched by their admiration for

write to tell you how thoroughly we

him. The Schiffs and Proust first met in

enjoyed our holiday with you'. But he

person sometime in 1919. It was in a

was probably just being polite: his wife Vivien, who was always ill and always

private room at the Ritz hotel in Paris;

tired, wrote in her diary: 'Rather unsatisfactory weekend. Schiffs very fatiguing and irritating to me. T. got on all right.' The Schiffs first met Proust by letter, writing to him as fervent admirers. He replied on April 14, 1919 that he was very flattered but couldn't provide anything for the London magazine Arts and Letters, which they had asked for. This began an exchange of letters – in French because Proust didn't read English – which begins with Sydney describing how Charles Swann, the 14

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on the rare occasions Proust did leave

apartment – a rare honour – where they

his apartment it was to dine at the Ritz. The waiter took them over after dinner

talked most of the night. This was the first of several late-night meetings. The

to meet him. Violet introduced herself, saying she thought Proust looked too young to be the author of such works.

adoring Violet wrote later: The strange enchantments of the

She thought he was 'remarkably handsome and quite unlike anyone else.'

nights we passed with Marcel Proust made us believe that no daytime

He invited the Schiffs back to his

meetings could have equalled them. . . Nothing he said was trivial or unimportant, not that he was by any means serious all the time. His astringent satire left one with no feeling of sadness or bitterness. He put himself into his conversation as he did into his books, but not by talking about himself. He made it clear that what mattered to him was the motive of people's acts and words. He was always seeking the truth about everything and everybody. He was bored by insincerity. In May 1922, in a letter praising Sodom and Gomorrah Part Two, which they had recently received, Sydney invited Proust 15

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to the Diaghilev party, knowing how ill

Most of the guests had come directly

he was and assuming he would not accept.

from my premiere at the Grand Opéra, but Marcel Proust arrived

Thursday evening we are going to the Premier of a new Stravinsky ballet,

from his bed at the Ritz, getting up as usual late in the evening. Elegantly dressed, wearing gloves and a cane,

and some old Russian ballets. Afterwards, we are having Diaghilev

he was as pale as a mid-afternoon moon. I remember that he spoke

and some members of the ballet to

ecstatically about the late Beethoven

supper at the Hotel Majestic where I

quartets, an enthusiasm I would have

have taken a salon because Elles [of the Ritz] does not permit music after 12:30 am. There is no one worthy of meeting you except those you choose, but if, by a miracle, you decided to come you would find us on the main floor around 12:30. Sydney didn't mention that Joyce, Picasso and Stravinsky would be there. Surprisingly for everyone, Proust did come and was seated between Stravinsky and Sydney Schiff; Stravinsky later remembered the meeting with Proust:

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shared if it had not been a

published in 1922 and a great admirer of

commonplace among the literati of the time, not a musical judgement

Proust himself, was also there. He reports that Proust was 'infinitely

but a pose. James Joyce was there that night too, but in my ignorance I did not recognise him.

gracious' and was only trying to pay Stravinsky a compliment.

Clive Bell, brother-in-law of Virginia

'Doubtless you admire Beethoven, he began. 'I detest Beethoven' was all he

Woolf, whose Jacob's Room was

got for an answer. 'But, cher mâitre, surely those late sonatas and quartets . . ? 'Pires que les autres,' [worse than the others] growled Stravinsky. [The conductor, Ernest] Ansermet intervened in an attempt to keep the peace; there was no row but the situation was tense. Proust and Stravinsky had actually met before; Proust had been at the notorious, riotous premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913. There was a supper after that premiere too, which Proust attended, along with Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau. He fictionalised the party in Sodom and Gomorrah, in which he praises both the Ballets Russes and Stravinsky. 17

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Proust and Joyce both had novels

Two stiff chairs were obtained and

published that year and it is easy to think of Proust as the last great novelist

placed, facing the one the other, in the aperture of a folding doorway

of the nineteenth century and Joyce as the first great novelist of the twentieth, though their dates of birth don't bear

between two rooms. The faithful of Mr Joyce disposed themselves in a half-circle in one room: those of

this out: Proust was born in 1871, Diaghilev in 1872, Picasso in 1881, and

M.Proust completed the circle in the other. Mr Joyce and M.Proust sat

both Stravinsky and Joyce in 1882. There are several accounts of the awkward, self-conscious meeting between the two great writers. Like two prize fighters they had been lined up to face each other in what was being anticipated as the literary bout of the century. It was a short bout, not even going beyond round one. They hardly even came out of their corners. Ford Madox Ford, editor of The English Review, and later of The Transatlantic Review, friend to Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway and a great gossip, wasn't there in person but he claimed to have heard the story from Joyce himself.

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upright, facing each other, and

silence. Proust then apologised for being

vertically parallel. They were invited to converse. They did.

late, he said it was because of his liver problem. Joyce, another hypochondriac

But not much. According to Ford, Proust began by referring to his Swann's

(though he did have genuine problems with his eyes), told Proust he had exactly the same symptoms. The two

Way. Joyce said he had not read it. Joyce then referred to Ulysses. Proust said he

then talked for the rest of the night about their respective illnesses, real or

had not read it. There was an awkward

imagined. This is Ford's version, but Ford was known to be, at the very least, an embellisher of stories; many of his friends doubted his strict adherence to the truth. For example, Ford had a very soft voice and wheezed as he talked, he told everyone that this was because he had been gassed in the war. 'Gassed in the war? Don't let him kid you. He was never gassed in the war', Ernest Hemingway told his friend Morley Callaghan. And Robert McAlmon said that Ford was 'not necessarily to be believed . . . It is quite impossible to talk of a place or a person without Ford topping your story.' McAlmon, of whom we will hear more later, retells Ford's 19

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version of the Joyce/Proust story in his

determined not to be drawn into

autobiography Being Geniuses Together but adds a caveat: 'Mr Ford's account,

literary or philosophical conversations. He had in fact read some Proust, and

however, as he tells it and writes of it, is highly fictionalised, as are many of his "memories"'. McAlmon's friend, the poet

wasn't particularly keen on it; hardly surprising that he didn't want to talk to about the works to their author.

William Carlos Williams, who we will also hear a lot more of later, was also

Margaret Anderson, editor of Little Review, which had published sections of

not there; he heard a slightly different

Ulysses before it came out as a book –

second-hand version of the story, which he relates in his own autobiography. In his version, Joyce says to Proust: 'I've headaches every day. My eyes are terrible.' Proust replied, 'my poor stomach. What am I going to do? It's killing me. In fact, I must leave at once.' 'I'm in the same situation,' replied Joyce, 'if I can find someone to take me by the arm. Goodbye.' 'Charmé', said Proust, 'oh, my stomach, my stomach.' Joyce apparently resented the attempt to match him with Proust and was 20

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we will be seeing more of her later too

But I am being unkind.

– recalls the evening as Joyce himself described it to her in her autobiography

Sometimes he tells stories like this one:

My Thirty Years' War. James Joyce talks little. He curtails

some friends were eager that he and Marcel Proust should meet. They arranged a dinner, assured that the

his wit, his epithet, his observation by stopping short in the middle of a

two men would have much to say to each other. The host tried to start

pungent phrase and saying:

them off. I regret that I don't know Mr Joyce's work, said Proust. I have never read Mr Proust, said Joyce. And that was the extent of their communication. Joyce himself gave another version to two other friends: Proust: Ah, Mr Joyce, you know the Princess . . . Joyce: No, Monsieur. Proust: Ah. You know the Countess . . . Joyce: No, Monsieur. Proust: Then you know Madam . . . Joyce: No, Monsieur. 21

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Neither of the Schiffs gave an account of

second to light a cigarette. Sydney

the evening but Violet noted what happened after the party broke up. In

shut the window and asked Joyce to throw away the cigarette, knowing

the early hours of the morning the Schiffs left with Proust; Joyce followed them, uninvited.

that Proust dreaded air and smoke on account of his asthma. Joyce watched Proust silently, while he

As soon as our guests had gone we

[Proust] talked incessantly without addressing Joyce.

followed Proust to his taxi and Joyce

got in after us. Joyce's first gesture

And that was the last time the Schiffs

was to open the window and his

saw Proust before he died.

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met Stravinsky after the premiere of The Rite of Spring. Afterwards Proust wrote to her expressing his appreciation. 'The Russian ballet, supper at your house, bring back to life so many cherished memories and make one almost believe Misia Sert wasn't at the Schiffs' party on May 18, 1922, but at least three of her artistic intimates were: Proust, Diaghilev

in a recurrence of happiness.' Misia was a serial muse, one of a long

and Stravinsky. She had arranged the party in 1913 where Proust had first

affairs with the greatest thinker of her

line: in the ancient world Thaïs had age, Ptolemy and the greatest warrior of her age, Alexander the Great. Cleopatra, also spanning the Mediterranean, had affairs with the two greatest warriors of her age, destroying one of them in the process. Centuries later, Alma Mahler, daughter of a painter, married a composer, Gustav Mahler, a novelist, Franz Werfel, and an architect, Walter Gropius, as well as having affairs with another painter, Gustav Klimt and another composer, Alexander Zemlinsky. Cosima Wagner, daughter of the greatest pianist of her age, Franz Liszt, married the most influential conductor of her age, Hans 23

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von Bülow, before marrying the greatest

Montparnasse. Gala was Paul Éluard's

composer of her age – in his eyes anyway – Richard Wagner, while being

wife and Max Ernst's lover before she married Dali.

adored by its greatest philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had a stormy relationship with Lou Andreas-

Misia Sert topped all of them. She is best remembered today for her first meeting with Coco Chanel, which we

Salomé, who was also muse to Rainer Maria Rilke and a confidante of Sigmund

will come back to, but in her younger days she was muse to a long list of

Freud. (Nietzsche's first meeting with

artists, musicians and writers. She was

Salomé is worth noting: it was in the

often painted, and sometimes courted,

vast, resonant space – literally and metaphorically – of St Peter's in Rome. He said 'from what star have we fallen together?' She replied 'I came from Zürich'.) And whatever else she was to them, Alice Lidell was muse to both Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and John Ruskin. Later, like Salomé, Anaïs Nin was muse to two writers, Antonin Artaud and Henry Miller, and a psychoanalyst, Otto Rank. Lee Miller was lover and muse to both Man Ray and Roland Penrose, while being at least their equal as an artist; Man Ray also loved and portrayed serial muse Kiki of 24

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by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

'My God! Why won't you show your

(especially in the famous poster for La Revue Blanche), Pierre Bonnard and

breasts? It's criminal!' Several times I saw him on the verge of tears when I

Éduard Vuillard, whose lifelong love for her was unrequited. Auguste Renoir painted her many times too, always

refused. No one could appreciate better than he the texture of skin, or, in painting, give it such rare pearl-like

wanting her to expose her breasts. She never did, though much later in life she

transparency. After his death I reproached myself for not letting him

regretted it.

see all he wanted. Sert also knew many famous musicians throughout her life. As a child piano prodigy she sat on Liszt's knee and played him Beethoven; her first music teacher was Gabrielle Fauré. Ravel, Fauré's pupil, dedicated La Valse to her; it was Misia who encouraged Diaghilev to work with Ravel, as well as Jean Cocteau and Claude Debussy. She first heard Debussy's opera Pelléas and Mélisande in a private apartment with him playing the piano and singing all the parts. She didn't like it at the time but when she heard it played in the theatre with full orchestra she was overwhelmed. She went to see it at 25

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every possible opportunity and played it

poem of Stéphane Mallarmé, another

regularly on the piano. Earlier, in 1894, Debussy was in her box for the dress

admirer of Sert's. Diaghilev's lover Nijinsky choreographed and danced the

rehearsal of the ballet set to his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn, inspired by a

role of the fawn, interpreting the words of the poem in an explicitly erotic

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manner, especially the line une écharpe

As well as painters and musicians,

oublieé satsifait son rêve [a forgotten scarf satisfies his dream]. Debussy was

Misia inspired several writers. She was friendly with the poet Paul Verlaine early

shocked, Misia tried to calm him down. 'The fawn has married the veil he tore from the nymph' she explained. 'Go

on and often met him in a cafe opposite the offices of the Revue Blanche [White Review], the literary magazine her first

away, you are horrible' he said and stormed out. We will meet both

husband ran. 'Usually between benders, and always sad, he would come in the

Debussy and his opera again later, in

early evening, sit down with me, drink,

relation to another strong-willed muse.

read me beautiful poems, and weep.' Mallarmé and Cocteau didn't just read poems to Misia, they wrote them to her; both presenting them to her on Japanese fans. Mallarmé's went (my translation): Aile que du papier reploie Bats tout si t'initia Naguère a l'orage et la joie De son piano Misia Wing as paper unfolds Fight all if you initiated Once a storm and the joy Of her piano Misia

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Cocteau and Proust both fictionalised

pleasure is not to be found in things

Sert in their novels, both portraying her as a woman of high birth and high social

themselves but in the way you take them. . . She touched what was not

standing, though she was in fact neither noble nor royal. She was born Marie Godebska to a wealthy family of Polish

to be touched; she opened what was not to be opened. She walked and talked on a tightrope in the midst of

descent in Saint Petersburg in 1872. In Cocteau's fictional version of her, in his

a glacial silence, with everyone hoping she would break her neck.

First World War novel Thomas the

Having first amused people, she then

Impostor she is a princess.

disturbed them. Her colourful highrelief personality offended some but

The Princesse de Bormes was Polish. Poland is the country of pianists. She played with life the way a virtuoso plays the piano. Like a virtuoso, she was able to create great effects as easily with mediocre as with the most beautiful music. Her duty was pleasure. It was thus that this excellent woman would say, 'I don't like the poor. I hate the sick.' It is hardly astonishing that these words were considered scandalous. She wanted to be amused and she knew how to be. She had understood, unlike most women in her set, that 28

YOUR CRUEL AND BEAUTIFUL FACE

seduced others. These others were

In Proust's novels Misia's character is

the elite. Thus from imprudence to imprudence she unknowingly wove a

divided into two halves, one represented by the beautiful young Princesse

magic spell. Mediocre people avoided her and only people of quality remained with her. Seven or eight

Yourbeletieff and the other by the very unsympathetic arriviste Madame Verdurin. Proust later said to Misia that

men, two or three warm-hearted women became her intimates.

her face was beautiful and cruel, representing these two aspects of womanhood to the homosexual Proust.

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In his fictional version of it the Rite of

touchy. . . In the end the phrase 'are

Spring supper is held by both women. As a young man, the aspirational Proust was

you a snob?' pleased me, like one of your last year's frocks because I

desperate to meet Misia and be part of her literary circle at least as much as her social one, though she said Proust 'only

found that it suited you. But I assure you that the only person whom my frequenting could make people say I

liked me because I was rich'. Much later, Misia accused him of being a snob, which

am a snob would be you. And even that would not be true. And you

he undoubtedly was, despite his

would be the only one to think that I

fondness for young, working-class men.

visit you out of vanity rather than

He replied to her:

admiration. Do not be so modest.

If, among the few friends who have not dropped the habit of coming to enquire after me, an occasional Duke or Prince comes and goes, they are counterbalanced by other friends, of whom one is a footman and the other a chauffeur, and with whom I take more trouble. Besides, there is not much to choose between them. The footmen are better educated than the Dukes, and speak pretty French; but they are more punctilious about etiquette, less simple, more

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It may seem rich of Misia to accuse

seen. Therefore artists loved her.' It was

Proust of snobbishness, since she was at the centre of such an affluent circle. But

through Misia that Cocteau first met Diaghilev; he describes that time in The

she was more interested in artists than rich people. Cocteau said of her fictional alter ego in his novel that she 'could not

Difficulty of Being. The Russian ballet of Serge de

care less about having the seat of honor at a fête; she preferred the best seat. It

Diaghilev. . . was splashing Paris with colour. The first time I attended one

is generally not the same. At the theatre

of his performances . . . I was in a

she wanted to see rather than to be

stall rented by my family. The whole thing unfolded far away behind the footlights, in that burning bush in which the theatre blazes for those who do not regularly go backstage. I met Serge de Diaghilev at Madame Sert's. From that moment I became a member of the company. I no longer saw Nijinsky except from the wings or from the box in which behind Mme Sert, topped with her Persian aigrette, Diaghilev followed his dancers with a pair of tiny mother of pearl opera glasses. What memories I have of all this! What could I not write about it!

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Cocteau knew Proust too; although he

shadows. He stood erect against the

does not recall their first meeting, he does have a very evocative description

chimney-piece in the drawing room of this Nautilus like a character out of

of him in My Contemporaries: It is impossible for me to remember

Jules Verne, or else, near a picture hung with crêpe, wearing a dress coat, like Carnot dead.

any first meeting with Proust. Our group has always treated him as a

Once, announced by Céleste's voice over the telephone, he came to

famous man. I see him, with a beard,

collect me at three in the afternoon

seated on the red cushions at Larue's (1912). I see him, without a beard, at Madame Alphonse Daudet's, with Jammes plaguing him like a gad-fly. I find him again, dead, with the beard he had at the start. I see him, with and without a beard, in that room of cork, dust and phials, either in bed, wearing gloves, or standing in a sordid washroom, buttoning a velvet waistcoat over a poor square torso which seemed to contain his mechanism, and eating noodles standing up. I see him among the dust sheets. They lay over the chandelier and the armchairs. Naphthalene lit up the 32

YOUR CRUEL AND BEAUTIFUL FACE

so that I could go with him to the

Mantegna's painting is now considered a

Louvre to see Mantegna's Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. . . Proust was like

gay icon, but it may not have been then; Cocteau's story could be a simple

a lamp lit in broad daylight, the ringing of the telephone in an empty house.

recording of the facts rather than a metaphor. Cocteau also tells a nice story about Proust and the concierge at the Ritz Hotel where, as we know, Proust was an honoured and regular guest: Proust apparently asked the concierge if he could lend him fifty francs. 'Here you are, Monsieur Proust', says the concierge. 'Keep it, it's for you', says Proust. According to Cocteau, the concierge 'was to receive three times the amount next morning'. Proust had first contacted Misia and her first husband Thadée Natanson in writing while he was still living with his parents, who perhaps prohibited young Marcel from any face to face contact with the couple because they were considered too scandalous at that time; in any case Misia met Proust's works before she met him and she liked them; Thadée published some of Proust's earliest pieces in Revue Blanche. 33

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

Sert met Proust again in August 1907,

Frenchwoman and a Greek). Last

after her second husband Alfred Edwards started having an affair. She

night the rumour spread that Mme. Edwards had killed Edwards (the

took a break in Normandy, where many of her friends were. She stayed at the Grand Hotel in Cabourg; Marcel Proust

Englishman, who is really a Turk), but there was nothing in it, nothing at all.

was there, as was her first husband Thadée. Proust wrote breathlessly that night to his lover, the composer Reynaldo Hahn, that he had seen her there. The hotel looks like a stage set . . . And in it are assembled, as if for the third act: Edwards. Lantelme, his mistress. Mme. Edwards (Natanson) [Misia], his last wife, separated from him. Natanson, 1st husband of Mme. Edwards. Doctor Charcot, 1st husband of the next-to-last Mme. Edwards (the 4th of the species, as he had already married 2 Americans, 1 34

Much later, in 1920 when Misia finally married the Catalan artist José-Maria

YOUR CRUEL AND BEAUTIFUL FACE

Sert y Badia after living with him for

Maria] Sert have found, and you

twelve years, Proust wrote to congratulate her, though in what may

what husband, so predestined, so uniquely deserving of one another?

very well be an ironic tone. Chère Madame,

By 1921, when Proust was trying to hold onto life long enough to finish his huge

I was very touched that you took the

novel sequence and saw very few people, Misia was one of the few he

trouble to write and tell me of this

missed: 'how stupidly my life is arranged

marriage which has the majestic

that I never see Misia, whom I love'. His

beauty of something wonderfully unnecessary. What wife could [José-

last letter to her, long after she had divorced José-Maria, was in response to her invitation to a Christmas Eve party. It is a good many years since I have gone to a party and I do not think that I could begin again on December 24th. But for the first time I am tempted. Nothing would please me more than to come to you, than to see you. It is one of the very few things that would give me pleasure. . . There are days when I recall your cruel and beautiful face with astonishing clarity. Other times, less. Are you still a friend of M. Sert? I 35

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

admire him prodigiously, but he is

the stage should have allowed Marcel

rather disagreeable with me and has said that no one is more antipathetic

Proust to die at a ball.

than I. What exaggeration. Misia said that even though Proust was

But he didn't. Perhaps God preferred Molière to Proust, who died in bed at home, dictating corrections his novels

dying 'he still had the courage to be flirtatious about [José-Maria] Sert', who

right up until his last night. Man Ray, who didn't even know Proust, took the

seems to have attracted gay men.

famous photo of him on his deathbed

Although he admired Misia, Proust, like

two days later; Paul Morand, who wrote

André Gide and Cocteau, was probably more physically attracted to José-Maria.

down Coco Chanel’s memoirs, did a less well-known drawing.

Misia said his cultivation and Jesuit training made it possible for him to slip in and out of the labyrinth of Proustian complications as easily as a fish in water. My health, my laughter, my gaiety shocked Proust a little . . . Perhaps he admired me a bit, but I was too all-of-a-piece, too violent in my tastes and preferences for his subtle, devious mind not to rebel . . . The same God who arranged for Molière to draw his last breath on 36

BE RUSSIAN! REMAIN RUSSIAN!

1908 in Paris at the first performance outside Russia of Diaghilev's production of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, the

Apart from Proust, Misia Sert had two

highlight of that year's spring season. Diaghilev gathered an imposing list of patrons including grand dukes and

other close friends present at the Schiffs' party in 1922: Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev. Stravinsky had first been

duchesses, princesses and countesses as well as practically every contemporary

commissioned in 1909, as a young, littleknown composer, by Diaghilev, who was then revolutionising the Russian ballet.

Saint-Saëns, Vincent d'Indy, Paul Dukas,

Diaghilev was born in the same city, Saint Petersburg, in the same month of the same year as Misia. They first met in

Rimsky-Korsakov. Misia was with her lover and future husband – twelve years in the future – José-Maria Sert. He had

composer: Debussy, Fauré, Camille André Messager, Alexander Glazunov and Stravinsky's former teacher Nikolai

met Diaghilev the year before and invited him to join them. Misia was not shy about telling Diaghilev of her enthusiasm for the opera – the music, the performance and the decor – with what was no doubt a much deeper understanding than any woman he had met before. He asked her to lunch the next day; it was the beginning of a long, intimate artistic friendship. The dandy Diaghilev with his 37

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

outfits by Worth and Patou, which Misia

recognised as masters in their own

no doubt admired, had been openly gay in Russia, and Misia was equally

spheres.' Stravinsky attended all the rehearsals with Diaghilev and Nijinsky

scandalous in her own way: separated from two husbands, at one time the mistress of the second while still living

whom Diaghilev was then trying to mould into the role of choreographer and ballet master. Stravinsky wrote in

with the first and now the mistress of the third while still married to the

his autobiography:

second. They were also both involved in

Here I must say more of Diaghilev,

the avant-garde from its early days:

because the close association I had

Misia's first husband had founded Revue Blanche and Serge had founded the

with him during the first

magazine Mir Istkutsva [World of Art] in Saint Petersburg. The next year, 1909, Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky and others to orchestrate short pieces by Chopin for his ballet but he then commissioned a full ballet score from Stravinsky – The Firebird – for the season at the Paris Opera House in the spring of 1910. 'It was highly flattering to be chosen from among the musicians of my generation, and to be allowed to collaborate in so important an enterprise side-by-side with personages who were generally 38

BE RUSSIAN! REMAIN RUSSIAN!

collaboration revealed the very

once our differences had been

essence of his great personality. What struck me most was the

overcome.

degree of endurance and tenacity that he displayed in pursuit of his ends. His strength in this direction

These differences occurred often and on one occasion Misia tried to bridge the troubled waters, but only succeeded in

was so exceptional that it was always somewhat terrifying, though at the

making matters worse. After the riotous Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring on

same time reassuring, to work with

May 29, 1913 but before the London

him. It was terrifying because

premiere, which Stravinsky was not

whenever there was a diversion of opinion it was arduous and

attending, she intervened with the principal parties, trying to smooth over

exhausting to struggle with him. But it was reassuring to know that the goal was certain to be reached when

the difficulties between Stravinsky, Diaghilev and the conductor Pierre Monteux over cuts that Diaghilev wanted to make. She cabled Stravinsky to tell him that Diaghilev had lost confidence in him; no one else would have dared say that to Stravinsky but Stravinsky had a lot of respect for Misia's understanding of what he was trying to do in his music and he also understood how influential she was with Diaghilev. Robert Craft, Stravinsky's long-time collaborator said 'sometime in 1911 Stravinsky realised the extent of 39

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

Misia's power over Diaghilev and by the time of the premiere of Le Sacre [The Rite] he saw that her comprehension of it was more profound than his.' She wrote to Stravinsky a long letter in which she said: 'Serge has always protected your interests, which are his own.' She urged him: 'Be Russian! Remain Russian! Diaghilev can only be the soul of Russianness.' The two men were reconciled and by July 1913 Stravinsky was writing a cheery note to Misia from his sickbed in the Ukraine asking: 'Our Serge, what is he doing, where is he? I have no news and that torments me, you have no idea.

Write to me dear old boy, write!'

THE ALLURE OF CHANEL

Chanel and had a milliner's shop in the Rue Cambon. She seemed to me gifted with

At the table my attention was

infinite grace and when, as we were saying good night, I admired her ravishing fur-trimmed red velvet coat,

immediately drawn to a very darkhaired young woman. Despite the fact that she did not say a word, she

she took it off at once and put it on my shoulders, saying with charming

radiated a charm I found irresistible. She made me think of Madame du Barry. Therefore I arranged to sit

too happy to give it to me. Obviously

next to her after dinner. During the exchange of banalities appropriate to a first meeting in a salon, I learned that she was called Mademoiselle

completely bewitching and thought of nothing but her.

spontaneity that she would be only I could not accept it. But her gesture had been so pretty that I found her

Misia Sert went to Chanel's shop the next morning, upset to find that people were calling her Coco. 'I don't know why the use of this name upset me so, but my heart sank: I had the impression that my idol was being smashed. Why trick out someone so exceptional with so vulgar a name? I was indignant!' This was in 1917, before Misia married Sert, though after they had become lovers. He was jealous, she was surprised at 41

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

herself. 'Sert was really scandalised by

Oedipus poorly dressed.' Vogue

the astonishing infatuation I felt for my new friend. I was not in the habit of

magazine loved it; Chanel was more than just a dressmaker now, she was an

being carried away like this.' Coco was infatuated with Misia but disgusted by Sert; she called him: 'This huge, hairy

artist. Coco soon became involved in a triangular relationship, though not a sexual one, with one of Misia's close

monkey, with his tinted beard, his humped back . . . He slept in black

friends: Diaghilev. Behind Misia's back she offered to finance a revival, in 1920

pyjamas, never washed, and, even naked,

of The Rite of Spring, to the tune of

looked as though he was wearing a fur

300,000 francs. In his 1935

coat, so hirsute was he . . . He had hair everywhere, except on his head.'

autobiography Stravinsky thanked her humbly. 'I should like especially to

Nevertheless, he took Coco and Misia on walking trips and into museums as Coco became closer to Misia and her

mention Mlle Gabrielle Chanel, who not only generously came to the assistance

circle. Chanel soon began to insinuate herself into Misia's artistic world, having been introduced by her to some of the leading figures on the Paris scene. In 1922 Cocteau asked her to design the costumes for his stage version of Antigone with music by Arthur Honegger and sets by Picasso; Cocteau said 'she is the greatest couturière of our age and it is impossible to imagine the daughters of 42

THE ALLURE OF CHANEL

of the venture, but took an active part

completely out of money. It was there

in the production by arranging to have the costumes made in her world-famous

that he composed his Symphonies of Wind Instruments, originally

dressmaking establishment.' That's all he says about Chanel, but in fact she did even more for him, allowing

commissioned as a memorial to Debussy, and a key piece of modernist music, simplifying radically the

him and his family to stay at her villa in the winter of 1920/21 when he was

conventional symphony orchestra by completely removing all the strings. No one knows whether Coco and Igor had an affair at her villa while his wife Catherine was ill in bed upstairs, but that's what the gossip said at the time. It's also made explicit in the 2009 film Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, based on Chris Greenhalgh's novel, which has several sex scenes between them. But Misia herself may have spread the rumours out of jealousy at the way Coco was usurping her friendships and assuming the role of the central woman in the avant-garde that she had built up for herself. When Coco's friend Paul Morand wrote down her reminiscences in 1946, he remembers her saying: 'without being jealous, Misia began to spread gossip. She had sensed that 43

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

something was happening without her

her.' Chanel says that Misia had 'spent

knowing.' Whatever happened at that earlier

fifty years living among the greatest artists and she is completely uncultured.

time, by 1946, Chanel seems to have lost any affection she might have had for Stravinsky. She told Morand that when

She has never opened a book.' According to Chanel, Misia destroyed rather than created.

she met him he was 'still not very cosmopolitan, and he was very Russian

Misia is to Paris what the goddess

in his ways, with the look of a clerk in a

Kali is to the Hindu pantheon. She is

Chekhov short story. A small moustache

simultaneously the goddess of

beneath a large rat-like nose. He was young and shy; he found me attractive.'

destruction and of creation. She kills and scatters her germs, without

She claims that he pursued her but that she refused, if only because his wife was living in her house and was bound to

realising. [Erik] Satie calls her 'mother kill-all', and Cocteau 'the back-street abortionist'. That's unfair.

find out. According to her, Stravinsky said to Chanel: 'she knows I love you.

Misia certainly doesn't create, but in certain dim lights, she performs her

To whom else, if not her, could I confide something so important?'

useful and kindly act like a glowworm in the dark.

In her memoirs Coco was also very uncomplimentary about Misia. Although she said Misia was 'my only woman friend', she was scathing and almost bitter about her. 'We only like people because of their failings: Misia gave me ample and countless reasons for liking 44

If that's what Misia's best friend said about her, goodness knows what her enemies said.

TWO KINGS AND A CLARINET

Gershwin felt inferior in the company of 'proper' composers. He was always looking for a serious classical teacher and had already been turned down by Serge Prokofiev when he met Maurice Ravel in New York on March 7, 1928 – For much of his short life George Gershwin was immensely popular and tremendously wealthy, perhaps the wealthiest musician of his age. But

Ravel was over from Paris for his fifty third birthday. Ravel was asked what music he would like at his party; he said he would like to 'hear and meet George Gershwin’. He got more than he wished for. The hostess of the party said: ‘George that night surpassed himself, achieving astounding feats in rhythmic intricacies so that even Ravel was dumbfounded’. On March 25 Gershwin then arrived in Paris, where several of his works were due to be played. He visited Ravel’s home and asked if he could take lessons with him; Ravel is supposed to have said: ‘Why be a second-rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?’

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

On May 5 Gershwin was in Vienna and met Alban Berg, pupil of Arnold Schoenberg (who painted Berg’s portrait} and writer of very austere music; Gershwin had studied his scores and was in awe of his technical skill. It was later said that Gershwin had two pictures on his wall: a signed photo of Berg and one of the boxer Jack Dempsey. While he was in Vienna, Gershwin went with Berg to hear one of Berg's chamber pieces. Afterwards Berg asked Gershwin to play some of his music. Gershwin was embarrassed by his own compositions, but played anyway. Berg was very appreciative and very knowledgeable about Gershwin's work. Gershwin was taken aback but Berg said to him: 'Music is music.' Back in Paris, Gershwin met Igor Stravinsky. Gershwin of course asked if he could take lessons with him. Stravinsky asked Gershwin how much he earned. Gershwin didn't really know but had a guess; it was a lot, especially for Paris in the 1920s. Stravinsky was 46

impressed: 'Perhaps I should study with you,' he said. Gershwin did eventually

TWO KINGS AND A CLARINET

find a serious music teacher, back in the

If Gershwin wanted to be more

United States in the 1930s, a very serious music teacher indeed: Arnold

classical, Stravinsky wanted to be more jazz. His Ebony Concerto was written for

Schoenberg, Stravinsky's rival as the cornerstone of twentieth century avantgarde music. Schoenberg and Stravinsky

the jazz clarinettist Woody Herman in 1945 and recorded by him in 1946. It was recorded again on April 27, 1965

were later to be near neighbours in Los Angeles for many years, though they

with Stravinsky conducting and another jazz clarinettist and bandleader, Benny

famously never met. As well as giving

Goodman, as soloist. Around the time

Gershwin composition lessons the

Ebony Concerto was written, Goodman

formidable Schoenberg played tennis with him once a week on the private

had met a Thai prince, Bhumibol Adulyadej, who was born in Cambridge,

court at Gershwin's Beverly Hills estate.

Massachusetts but grew up in Switzerland. The playboy prince was in America, playing the saxophone, driving fast cars and dating beautiful women. Goodman asked him to play in his band. Soon afterwards the Prince unexpectedly became the King, returned to Thailand and married one of the beautiful Thai women. At the time of writing (late 2016) he has just died, after 70 years as the only reigning monarch in the world to have played in the Benny Goodman band.

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

After he became King, Bhumibol

King and Queen of Thailand, Elvis

played again with Goodman in Bangkok in 1956 and later played in Goodman's

Presley and Juliet Prowse on the set of the movie GI Blues. Elvis had already met

home in New York on a 1960 state visit. On that same visit, the King of Thailand met another king: Elvis Presley. There is

another kind of royalty: one of the daughters of the royal family of country music, the Carter family. June Carter

a famous (in Thailand, anyway) photograph and a YouTube video of the

later married Johnny Cash but before June met Johnny she met Elvis.

TWO KINGS AND A CLARINET

He was stooped down on one knee

Who is Johnny Cash I asked Elvis

and grasping a guitar trying to tune it to somewhere near the correct pitch

Presley, and I grabbed the guitar away from him. Mother Maybelle

to make a correct chord ring – 'Everybody knows where you go when the sun goes down, Ah-ummm - A-

would never let me or Elvis go on the stage with a guitar that was that far out of tune! What's the a-um-a-um

ummm' and he'd strike the guitar again. Plink: plunk: 'A-ummm . . .'

for? 'That's what drives the girls crazy' Elvis said. 'Cash don't have to

What are you trying to do, I asked.

move a muscle, he just sings and

'I'm trying to tune this blame guitar,

stands there'. I don't know this

honey, and I'm trying to sing like Johnny Cash'.

Johnny Cash I said, and Elvis said: 'oh you will know Cash. The whole world will know Johnny Cash. He's a friend of mine'. Elvis introduced June to Johnny and the rest is history, or at least a movie: Reese Witherspoon played June Carter Cash in the film about her and Johnny, Walk the Line. In the Stax Museum in Memphis there is a dulcimer that the Carter family gave to Elvis – a kind of symbolic baton passed from the past to the future of music.

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

Thomson, whom we will meet several times in this book, said that Antheil was 'the first composer of our generation'.

After the premiere of Le Renard in Paris, Stravinsky went on a concert tour of Central Europe. While he was in Berlin he met one of the most entertaining characters in this book: the American composer George Antheil. Antheil was born in New Jersey in 1900, a secondgeneration American of German extraction. His first symphony, like William Carlos Williams' book-length poem Paterson, which we will look at in detail later, was intended to portray his native state. Arguably – at least Antheil himself argued – he was America's first modernist composer. The critic Paul Rosenfeld called him a 'youth from the Trenton suburbs who seems the most musically talented creature this country can have produced'; Aaron Copland called him 'this extremely talented young American composer' and Virgil 50

Antheil's autobiography, Bad Boy of Music was published in 1946; the blurb inside the front cover begins: 'No musician has ever written memoirs such as these, perhaps partly because few musicians can write, and chiefly because

I AM AN AMERICAN COMPOSER

no musician, not even the most wild-

Stravinsky scores – the very latest,

haired, has had a life like the one George Antheil is currently enjoying.' For once,

scarcely yet in print. They are "Renard" and "l'Histoire du Soldat" [The Soldier's

a book's blurb is not exaggerating. Like all true 1920s modernists Antheil lived in Paris for a while but before he

Tale], both of which are tragic and funny'. Le Renard, as we know, premiered the next year, on the night

went there he was in Berlin, where he met his idol, the not at all wild-haired

Stravinsky met Proust. In that year, 1922, Antheil was living in the Berlin

Igor Stravinsky. Antheil had admired

suburb of Dahlem with Cæsar

Stravinsky for some time. He wrote to

Searchinger, the Berlin correspondent of

his American patron, Mary Louise Curtis Bok in December 1921: 'I am, beyond

The Musical Courier. Antheil describes his first meeting with Stravinsky in Bad Boy

other things, also becoming acquainted – at odd moments with several new

of Music. Over breakfast one day Searchinger told him that Stravinsky had arrived in Berlin and was staying at the Russicher Hof. Without further ado I went out to the Dahlem underground station, took a subway for the Wilhelmstraße Bahnhof and arrived inside the Russicher Hof within twenty minutes. I had not the remotest idea of how I would introduce myself. At the desk, quarrelling with the desk clerk, I saw a smallish man whose 51

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

photograph I had studied a thousand

breakfast, but I cheerfully ate

times. I walked up to him, touched him on the shoulder.

another. Stravinsky . . . was intrigued. He

'Herr Stravinsky, I am an American composer . . .' This particular introduction proved

asked me if I happened to have any of their music with me.

to be 100% the correct one. Future musicologists may even analyse it as

Antheil, a tireless self-promoter, took out his own Symphony for Five

the beginning of a Stravinskian

Instruments, a homage to Stravinsky's

American trend – for today he lives

Symphony for Wind Instruments, though

five blocks away from me in Beverly Hills, California, and has become an

not a slavish copy. [There are several

American citizen to boot. Stravinsky was surprised to find that there was, according to Antheil, a group of 'enterprising, new-spirited composers in America'. 'Oh yes, Herr Stravinsky, a whole large group. I am a typical representative – you would be interested to hear about us . . ?' He was. He invited me to breakfast. I already had had my

I AM AN AMERICAN COMPOSER

videos of both works on YouTube.] Stravinsky looked at it carefully and with great interest.

'Oh yes,' I said emphatically, 'very much in the same manner!' 'Come to lunch tomorrow,' he

When he turned to me again he was obviously friendly. 'Very, very

suggested; and thereafter, for two straight months, he and I had lunch together (and also, more often than

interesting! not at all like contemporary German, English or

not, breakfast, dinner and supper), talking about everything in the

Italian music. And' – questioningly –

contemporary world of music.

'all of you, in America, compose somewhat in this manner?'

Stravinsky knew everything about music but nothing about America; Antheil was just the man to teach him. He portrays Stravinsky as wary of all other Americans and paranoid about strangers. One day, according to Antheil, the great British-born conductor Leopold Stokowski, who became one of Stravinsky's leading interpreters, came to see him at his hotel. Stravinsky had never heard of him and would not let him in. Stokowski insisted he was the conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Stravinsky said

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

he had never heard of Philadelphia.

the day of the premiere of Stravinsky's

Stokowski went back to his own hotel and brought some recordings. He

Les Noces [The Wedding] by the Ballets Russes. Antheil should have been there

handed them through the door to Stravinsky, who played them before letting him in. As always with Antheil, a

the previous Christmas, to play a piano concert organised for him by Stravinsky but true love had intervened. George

large pinch of salt is needed; Stokowski conducted the premiere of The Rite of

had met Böski formally on the same day he received the letter from Stravinsky

Spring in America on March 3, 1922, so

telling him about the Paris concert. He

the timing seems impossible. Still,

had already seen her in a cafe and been

Antheil was a great storyteller. He tells other good stories about Stravinsky too,

deeply intrigued by her.

such as: 'Music,' he once told me, 'should be written in exactly the same manner that one makes sexual love. And, if one is not good enough, one should be kicked out of the side of the bed.' Stravinsky soon left Berlin for Paris – his departure 'left a big hole' in Antheil's life. But the hole was soon filled, not by a musician but by a woman: Böski Markus. Antheil and his new, eighteen year old lover moved to Paris on June 13, 1923, 54

I AM AN AMERICAN COMPOSER

evidently brothers and astonishingly A girl and two men soon entered the door of this cafe and sat down quite

enough resembled twin Mephistos. They looked as if they were Mongols.

near me. The girl was dark, with high cheekbones, but otherwise was delicately, rather sensitively beautiful.

In fact they were Hungarian. George was desperate to meet the girl, but didn't

She was dressed in a black dress and blouse, with no cosmetics whatsoever.

know who she was. He asked Eva Weinwurstel, who worked in an

The two men with her were young,

Expressionist art gallery, Der Sturm [The Storm], and seemed to know everyone, if she knew the mysterious girl. She did. He asked Eva to bring her to a concert at which his first Symphony was being played. (There seems to be no record of Eva apart from Antheil's autobiography; her name, which means Winesausage, seems unlikely. But far be it from me to ruin one of George's stories, especially since it is one of the best first-meeting stories in this book.) The next day I went around to the Sturm gallery. I asked Eva if she and Fräulein Markus had attended my concert. 'Oh yes,' she replied suavely. 55

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

'And where were you both after the concert? I thought you and I had arranged to get all three of us

and short, very short! She took off her coat, a long

together after the concert?' 'I tried to,' Eva replied. 'But Böski pulled me away; she just wouldn't

winter one. The dress! Her dress. It was a green plaid one, with red and yellow

keep the appointment.' 'Why not?'

stripes! The dream! I knew this was it.

'Well . . . She didn't like your music.' Antheil didn't give up. Finally Eva phoned him on December 23, saying that she had at last persuaded Böski to have dinner with the two of them. Antheil was due to catch the Paris train at midnight to play in the Stravinsky concert but decided he had time to meet Böski first. I met them both at the Sturm gallery at closing time and took them to the best restaurant in Berlin, Horchner's. We sat in an alcove, Böski Markus took off her hat.

Her hair was as black as a raven's;

I AM AN AMERICAN COMPOSER

It was. For both of them. George invited

but happy Christmas together on her

Böski to come with him to Paris but, being Hungarian, she couldn't get a

Polish farm; George didn't make it to Paris for the concert. When they got

French visa – the two countries had until recently been enemies. They went to Poland for Christmas instead. In

back to Berlin there were five terse telegrams from Stravinsky waiting for him. Still, when George and Böski went

trying to convince the radical Böski that he wasn't an American capitalist, he told

backstage in Paris on that night of June 13, 1923, after the premiere of Les

her he had poor relatives in Poland. He

Noces, Stravinsky was perfectly happy to

had: aunt Kolinski. They spent a poor

see them. 'Antheil!' He cried, 'Antheil!' Then he rubbed his eyes. 'Or your ghost! Don't tell me that you have come to Paris at last?' I introduced him to Böski and he shook hands with her warmly then he invited us to come around to Pleyel's [the piano rooms where Chopin practised] where, he said, he would play the rolls of the pianola version of Les Noces for us. Antheil may have been deceiving himself, and his readers, about Stravinsky's admiration for him. Even Antheil had his 57

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

doubts. A mutual friend told George

mutual language), to which he also

that he had been talking to Stravinsky about him at a party, asking Stravinsky

made no answer. Months later I encountered him at

whether he was as big an admirer of Antheil as Antheil himself said. 'I thought him a fine pianist, but I scarcely know his

a concert, but his steely monocle bored straight through me.

compositions', Stravinsky replied. The friend continued:

By 1923, at least according to his letters to Ezra Pound, Antheil believed that Stravinsky was by now copying him: he

it went on, from bad to worse, Stravinsky asked other people present about you, but their opinion about you wavered. It was just an inexplicable anti-Antheil landslide and without rhyme or reason. I thought I'd better tell you . . . before. . . er . . . you continue to go about saying that Stravinsky is one of your best friends.' 'But he is!' I protested. 'Not any more.' I phoned Stravinsky immediately, but received no answer. I left my own hotel phone number at Pleyel's, but received no call back. I wrote him a letter of explanation in German (our 58

I AM AN AMERICAN COMPOSER

tells Pound that Stravinsky was 'learning

WAS GONA CUT THE STRAWINSKY

pseudo-classicism and going on to write his next work like [Antheil's] II Violin

OUT OF IT . . . STRAWINSKY COULD NOT HAVE WRITTEN THE

Sonata'. And in a letter to Pound of 1924 he has become thoroughly fed up of people comparing him to Stravinsky

FIRST SONATA IF HE TRIED . . . HAS A SINGLE WORK OF STRAWINSKY ANY GUTS . . . ANYMORE???????? if

and of Pound's attempts to move him away from Stravinsky's influence.

you answer that question we will stop the discussion.

Please get me straight. This is the

[There are videos on YouTube of both

last time I am ever gona mention Strawinsky's name in my life in this

Antheil's violin sonatas.] Antheil still defended Stravinsky against the attacks

connection. I AM NOT GONA REVISE THE FIRST SONATA. I NEVER SAID I

by the circle around Schoenberg, though Stravinsky resented Antheil's constant comparisons of him and Schoenberg, which he thought made the issue worse. In a letter to the Chicago Tribune on February 17, 1924 George wrote angrily in defence of the man he obviously still considered a friend. Let me come to the point straightaway. Stravinsky is the greatest living composer. He has absolutely no competition; all of the various cults centred about other 59

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

composers, and to whom we give importance today, cannot hold a candle to his tremendous innovations . . . It is a shame and significant of the muddy critical atmosphere of the age to throw Stravinsky in the same boat with Schoenberg, and let them go floating about upon the sea of public opinion without effort to distinguish master from craftsman, genius from talent . . . In reality Schoenberg is a bore, and recognised as a bore by really intelligent critics. But Antheil wasn't really Stravinsky's friend and Stravinsky didn't welcome his support. In his autobiography, Chronicles of My Life, Stravinsky doesn't mention Antheil once.

12, RUE DE L'ODÉON

three-room or even a two-room apartment and eventually compromised on a one-room provided it had facilities for cooking and space for a piano. We eventually did discover just such a place, above the bookshop run by Sylvia Beach. . . [When George forgot his key, he scrambled up to the balcony.] When we walked up those stairs for the first time I did not realise how important this place would be for me. It would mean, in the first place, that the most important years of my youth would be spent there sitting still, working – instead of wasting too many fruitless hours chasing after girls, drinking, or reckless speculations about art with other lonely artists. . . When Böski After they moved to Paris in 1923, George Antheil and Böski Markus needed somewhere to live. But Paris was expensive, much more expensive than Berlin. They could not afford a

and I first saw the room at 12, Rue de l'Odéon it looked impossibly small, as if Böski and I could just barely squeeze ourselves in – let alone a piano or cooking utensils. The place did have a small alcove for cooking, 61

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

but Sylvia doubted that she could

Library in Paris, when she donated the

allow us a piano. I thought quickly and decided that

remaining books from Shakespeare and Company to them.

I could compose without a piano. To have Sylvia Beach, American exambulance driver and present

I am the daughter of the late Rev. Sylvester Woodbridge Beach who was

publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, as a landlady seemed so enormously

pastor of the first Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey:

attractive that I immediately stated that I was willing to forgo the other. Sylvia Beach had indeed just become the publisher of Ulysses, though sections of it had been published previously by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap's Little Review [all issues of Little Review can be viewed online at modjourn.org]. And 12, Rue de l'Odéon, the home of Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company, was already famous as a meeting place for the avant-garde of Paris. Beach, a native of New Jersey like Antheil, wrote a résumé on herself towards the end of her life in a letter dated April 23, 1951 to the American 62

12, RUE DE L'ODÉON

opened an American bookshop-

brought out James Joyce's Ulysses in

lending library on the left bank, Paris in 1919 – called Shakespeare and

1922, which had been suppressed in the United States, Ireland and

Company: which was rather famous as a result of writers. Some of those who were connected with it from the

England. Beach's partner, Adrienne Monnier had

beginning and as you might say grew up with it, were Robert McAlmon,

her own, French-language bookshop, La Société des Amis du Livre [The Society

Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder,

of Friends of the Book] across the

Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald McLeish,

street and published her own literary

Kay Boyle – to name only a few: their elders were Sherwood Anderson,

magazine Le Navire d'Argent [The Silver Ship]; she also published the French

Gertrude Stein, TS Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound: Shakespeare and Company

translation of Ulysses. The American composer and friend of George Antheil, Virgil Thomson 'often loafed at Sylvia Beach's shop, where I had the privilege of borrowing books free'; Thomson contrasts the two women in his autobiography. If angular Sylvia, in her boxlike suits, was Alice in Wonderland at forty, pink and white, buxom Adrienne in her grey-blue uniform, bodiced, with peplum and a long full skirt, was a

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

French milkmaid from the 18th-

At a table sat a young woman. A. Monnier

century.

herself, no doubt. As I hesitated at the door, she got up quickly and opened it,

Adrienne had her bookshop on the Rue d l'Odéon first; that was where she first met Sylvia, who had moved from New

and, drawing me into the shop, greeted me with much warmth. This was surprising in France, where people are as a rule reserved

Jersey to Paris via Spain in 1917. Beach had found a reference in the National

with strangers, but I learned that it was characteristic of Adrienne Monnier,

Library to a volume of verse by Paul

particularly if the strangers were

Fort and was told the book could be

Americans. I was disguised in a Spanish

purchased at A. Monnier's bookshop at Rue d l'Odéon. She did not know the

cloak and hat, but Adrienne knew at once that I was American. 'I like America very

district, but set out across the Seine to find it. As soon as she entered the street it reminded her of the colonial houses in Princeton, where she had grown up. She peered in through the shop window, excitedly looking at the 'shelves containing volumes in the glistening "crystal paper" overcoats that French books wear while waiting, often for a long time, to be taken to the binders.' In her autobiography Shakespeare and Company Beach describes their first meeting.

12, RUE DE L'ODÉON

much,' she said. I replied that I liked

brushed back from her fine forehead.

France very much. And, as our future collaboration proved, we meant it.

Most striking were her eyes. They were blue-grey and slightly bulging, and

Beach was still standing by the open door when the wind blew her hat off into the middle of the street. Adrienne

reminded me of William Blake's. She looked extremely alive.' They started to talk about books and immediately

rushed after it, 'going very fast for a person in such a long skirt. She pounced

became friends, a friendship that lasted until Adrienne's death and survived

on it just as it was about to be run over,

Sylvia opening her own bookshop across

and, after brushing it off carefully,

the street.

handed it to me. Then we both burst out laughing.' Sylvia describes Adrienne

Another New Jersey native, the poet William Carlos Williams first met

at that time as 'stoutish, her colouring fair, almost like a Scandinavian's, her cheeks pink, her hair straight and

Adrienne when he visited Shakespeare and Company in 1924 while on a trip to Paris with his wife; he found her 'extremely cordial'. Adrienne Monnier, a woman completely unlike Sylvia, very French, very solid, whose earthy appetites, from what she told us, made her seem to stand up to her very knees in heavy loam, came in from across the street to make our acquaintance. Somehow we got to talking of

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

Breughel, whose grotesque work she

Someone told us, I have forgotten

loved – the fish swallowing a fish that itself was swallowing another. She

whom, that an American woman had started a lending library of

enjoyed the thought, she said, of pigs screaming as they were being slaughtered, contempt for the animal

English books in our quarter. We had in those days of economy given up Mudie's, but there was

– a woman toward whom it was strange to see the mannishly dressed

the American Library which

Sylvia so violently drawn. Adrienne gave no quarter to any man. Once, when Bob [McAlmon] in a taxi had taken her in his arms and kissed her, she sunk her teeth into his lips so that he expected to have a piece torn out before she released him. A woman, however, of unflinching kindness. One of Shakespeare and Company's earliest visitors was art collector and avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein. In The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, speaking in her partner Alice's voice, she describes how they first encountered it.

12, RUE DE L'ODÉON

supplied us a little, but Gertrude

grateful.

Stein wanted more. We investigated and we found Sylvia

Everyone met everyone in Shakespeare

Beech [sic]. Sylvia Beech was very enthusiastic about Gertrude Stein and they became friends. She was

and Company. Virgil Thomson says that it was in Beach's 'hospitable bookstore . . . That I made friends with the

Sylvia Beech's first annual subscriber and Sylvia Beech was

composer George Antheil, truculent, small boy-genius from Trenton, New

proportionately proud and

Jersey, and the very personal protectorate of Sylvia, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.' They went on to become friends and mutual admirers. 'I envied George his freedom from academic involvements, the bravado of his music and its brutal charm. He envied me my elaborate education, encouraged me to sit out patiently the sterile time it seemed to have brought.' In a letter to a friend of 1926, Thomson said: Antheil is the chief event of my winter. He has admired me, he has quarrelled with me about theories, he has criticized my pieces, he has consulted me about his, he has defended me to my enemies, to his 67

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

enemies, to my friends, to his friends.

Approaching the desk, I introduced

He has forced my acceptance by people who intuitively feared me,

myself and wondered if she could give me Hemingway's address. Without

notably Mrs Antheil and Sylvia Beach. He has talked, wined, and drunk me by the hour. He has lodged me and

batting an eyelash, she told me she wasn't sure whether Hemingway was in town, nor if he were, whether she

fed me and given me money.

would be able to locate him before she heard from him. But if I would

Sylvia Beach wasn't always so hospitable

leave my own address she would

or so welcoming to newcomers as she

make an effort to see that it was

was to Antheil and Thomson, preferring to protect the people she already knew.

passed on.

One writer who got Sylvia's cold shoulder was Morley Callaghan, a Canadian writer who had been a reporter with Ernest Hemingway in Toronto. He had gone to Paris knowing Hemingway was there but not knowing how to contact him. He knew of Shakespeare and Company, and of Sylvia Beach. In That Summer in Paris Callaghan tells the story of how he went there, hoping she would put the two writers in touch again. She didn't.

12, RUE DE L'ODÉON

Callaghan knew that she was not

was. Joyce was very upset; he had

going to pass his details to Hemingway and he was right. She was

never met Moore and very much wanted to.

so protective of her flock that one day, when Joyce was in the back of the shop, the Irish writer George

Beach remembers, in Shakespeare and Company, her own first meeting with Joyce in the summer of 1920, when her

Moore appeared, looking for him. She told him she didn't know where Joyce

bookshop was in its first year; Beach had had A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the window of her shop not long before and she loved Joyce's writing. They met at the apartment of a poet friend, André Spire, at 34, Rue du Bois de Boulogne. Joyce had not been invited or expected but her host whispered to her: 'The Irish writer James Joyce is here'. I worshipped James Joyce, and on hearing the unexpected news that he was present, I was so frightened I wanted to run away, but Spire told me it was the Pounds who had brought the Joyces – we could see Ezra through the open door. I knew the Pounds, so I went in.

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

Before the formal meal Sylvia talked to

his limp, boneless hand in my tough

the wives of Pound – Dorothy Shakespear – and Joyce – Nora Barnacle

little paw – if you can call that a handshake.

– but not to the great man himself; Spire sat them all down for supper before she had chance to meet him. Afterwards she

He was of medium height, thin, slightly stooped, graceful. One noticed his hands. They were very narrow. On

went into 'a little room lined to the ceiling with books'.

the middle and third fingers of the left hand, he wore rings, the stones in heavy settings. His eyes, a deep blue,

Trembling, I asked: 'is this the great

with the light of genius in them, were

James Joyce?' 'James Joyce,' he replied.

extremely beautiful. I noticed, however, that the right eye had a

We shook hands; that is, he put

slightly abnormal look and that the

12, RUE DE L'ODÉON

right lens of his glasses was thicker

nose was well shaped, his lips narrow

than the left. His hair was thick, sandy-colored, wavy, and brushed

and fine-cut. I thought he must have been very handsome as a young man.

back from a high, lined forehead over his tall head. He gave an impression of sensitiveness exceeding any I had

'What do you do?' Joyce asked her. She told him about her bookshop; he

ever known. His skin was fair, with a few freckles, and rather flushed. On

seemed amused by both her name and the name of the shop. 'Taking a small

his chin was a sort of goatee. His

notebook out of his pocket and, as I noticed with sadness, holding it very close to his eyes, he wrote down the name and address. He said he would come to see me.' He did, and the rest is history. What is less well known however is that George Antheil was working at one time on an opera based on Ulysses, though he only got as far as setting a part of the ‘Cyclops’ episode. He did however set Joyce’s ‘Nightpiece’ to music for the Joyce Book in 1932 and earlier he was planning to write a symphony based on Anna Livia Plurabelle, the work which eventually became part of Finnegans Wake; we know this because in a letter of 23 September, 71

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

1930 Joyce asked Antheil how the

on a ballet based on the children's games

symphony was progressing. Unfortunately it wasn't.

chapter of Finnegans Wake. Thomson refused for fear of upsetting Gertrude

Joyce also talks in detail in this letter about his earlier suggestion that Antheil should write an opera based on Lord

Stein, with whom he had produced the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; more of that later. As Stravinsky and Schoenberg

Byron's Cain, in which the devil is a character, something that might be

were the opposite poles in modern music, Stein and Pound were the

expected to have interested the bad boy

opposite poles around which the Paris

of music. George was initially

literary scene revolved; a person had to

enthusiastic but later said he would only do it if Joyce himself wrote the libretto.

choose between them. Thomson chose Stein, Antheil chose, or rather was

Joyce thought this would be 'disrespectful' to Byron and if George could not do the job with 'enthusiasm

chosen by Pound. Thomson could have been chosen also: Pound said to him one day 'if you stick around with me

and with spiritual profit' he would find somebody else. Later Joyce said that he

you'll be famous'. But Thomson thought Pound was too domineering and

thought Ezra Pound was behind George's refusal; we will see why he

resisted him. Years later Ford Madox Ford told Thomson that Pound had

thought that later.

once pointed him out: 'You see that

In the mid-1930s Joyce asked Virgil Thomson to work with him, this time

little man there? That's the enemy.'

PLANETS OF EQUAL MAGNITUDE

'Joyce and Stein, I must explain, were rivals in the sense that, viewed nearby, they appeared as planets of equal

As well as the Stein/Pound axis in Paris

magnitude. Indeed the very presence of them both, orbiting and surrounded by satellites, gave to Paris in the 1920s and

literary circles, Virgil Thomson talked in his autobiography about the other axis:

30s its position of world-center for the writing of English poetry and prose.' Robert McAlmon – of whom much more later – described the difference between them beautifully in his book about his years in Paris, Being Geniuses Together: Unlike as Stein and Joyce are as regards personality, mind, outlook, and writing, people will bracket them. They are as unlike as the North Pole is from the equator. Joyce knows words, their rhythms, colors, assonances, capacity to evoke, their histories, and their emotional significations. Stein fumbles and mauls them. Stein's wit is sluggish; Joyce's is almost too quick and, around a limited range of experience, 73

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

variable. He is not afraid of being

and she smelled of tea roses when she

unmasked, for he is sure of himself, and I have never known him to boast

moved.' Boyle was introduced to Joyce by Eugène Jolas, editor of the radical

without immediately withdrawing the boast in a 'what do we all know about it?' manner. That cannot be

magazine transition.

said about poor Gertrude. She boasts, and is hurt if her listener does not

a sudden pause in the talk and the movement of guests in the two

boost her boast.

crowded rooms. It was as if heralding

McAlmon's friend, the novelist Kay Boyle tells a very vivid story of Joyce and Stein almost literally being magnetic poles in a room in her edition of Being Geniuses Together, where she inserted chapters about her own experiences. It happened at Boyle's first meeting with Joyce, in May 1928 at a party she describes as being in a 'music room and salon that overlooked the Place des Invalides', where Joyce was present, 'he with a black patch over one eye and his long hands folded on his cane', his wife Nora with 'a complexion of indescribable youthfulness and radiance, and a sociable, relaxed and chatty way, 74

Then, that evening in Paris, there was

PLANETS OF EQUAL MAGNITUDE

bugles had sounded, and it was not

arose. Maria Jolas [wife of Eugène]

unlike a parade advancing as the abruptly silenced guests fell back,

graciously led the way, and behind her came the unmistakable figure of

holding their champagne glasses in their hands. A passage was now cleared for the personages to proceed

Gertrude Stein in a severe and nunlike dress of purple silk, followed by Alice B Toklas in a tight little

in single file toward two armchairs from which the occupants, as if

jacket with the winged shoulders of the turn of the century, and a long

touched by an unseen finger, quickly

skirt under which a bustle would have been at ease. Unlike at the Schiffs' 1922 party, no one has tried to arrange a meeting between the two literary heavyweights. Joyce and Nora appear not to see the grand arrival and immediately afterwards Sylvia Beach, who is there with Adrienne Monnier comes over to them in her 'grey, mannish suit' and sits down on a footstool. Nora Barnacle introduces Boyle to Joyce: 'isn't she the thrue picture of an Irish Colleen, with her dark hair and her misty blue eyes?' 'The Rose of Sharon' replies her husband. 'What about my broken nose?' Boyle asks. Joyce is interested and asks her how it 75

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

happened; she tells him about being on a

vocabulary: a barrier as

sledge in the Poconos mountains of Pennsylvania and nearly being killed by a

imponderable, and yet as concrete, as the manner of the revolution of the

horse-drawn sleigh. Nora says: 'I can't help thinking, Jim, that our own lives haven't been very eventful.' Joyce

word. Kay Boyle did meet Stein later, though

replies: 'it's true, but the Americans are that way. Look at McAlmon fighting bulls

only once: the editor Archibald Craig took her to tea at Stein's famous

in Spain and thinking nothing of it. But,

apartment at 27, Rue de Fleurus. Boyle

on the other hand, Bach for one led a

thought that she and Alice Toklas were

very uneventful life'. I did not meet Gertrude Stein or Alice Toklas that night. Indeed, it would have seemed almost a disloyalty to have crossed the room and genuflect before Miss Stein. But it was strange to know then, and even stranger to reflect now, that it was neither Joyce's partial blindness nor the movement of the guests between them that made it difficult for Gertrude Stein and James Joyce to see each other seated there. It was, deep and impassable, their opposed concepts of a new syntax and a new 76

PLANETS OF EQUAL MAGNITUDE

having a nice talk about cookery but in

secondhand, and it may be confused

fact Stein didn't like Boyle and told Craig not to bring her again: Boyle was 'as

with the Joyce/Proust story. Thomson says that 'since Joyce was by that time

incurably middle-class as Ernest Hemingway'. In his autobiography Virgil Thomson

almost blind, Miss Stein went into another room to meet him, rather than that he should be led to her. But when

gives a different version of the Joyce/Stein non-meeting, or it may be a

they had approached, exchanged greetings and good-will phrases, they

different story: it seems to be

had nothing to say to each other, nothing at all.' In The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Stein, writing as Alice, hardly mentions Joyce; one of her few references is: 'Kate Buss brought lots of people to the house. She brought Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy and they had wanted to bring James Joyce, but they didn't.' Djuna Barnes, later the author of Nightwood, but then a reporter, first met James Joyce when she interviewed him in Paris in 1922 for the American magazine Vanity Fair. Sitting in the café of the Deux Magots, that faces the little church of St. Germain des Près, I saw 77

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

approaching, out of the fog and

hotel where Nora worked. They

damp, a tall man, with head slightly lifted and slightly turned, giving to

arranged to meet on the 14th but Nora didn't turn up, and they finally went on

the wind an orderly distemper of red and black hair, which descended sharply into a scant wedge on an out-

their first date on the 16th, the day on which all the action in Ulysses happens, now known and celebrated as

thrust chin. He wore a blue grey coat, too

Bloomsday. She famously did not read Jim's works; Kay Boyle says she once

young it seemed, partly because he

heard Nora remark to Maria Jolas: 'to

had thrust its gathers behind him,

tell ye th' truth, m' dear, I was never

partly because the belt which circled it, lay two full inches above the hips. At the moment of seeing him, a remark made to me by a mystic flashed through my mind “A man who has been more crucified on his sensibilities than any writer of our age,” and I said to myself—“this is a strange way to recognize a man I never laid my eyes on.” Barnes’ sketch of Joyce is possibly the best portrait of him that we have. Joyce first met his wife, the longsuffering Nora Barnacle on June 10, 1904 on a Dublin street outside the 78

PLANETS OF EQUAL MAGNITUDE

very much intherested in me husband's

Bloom's thoughts. Her comment was

work.' And Robert McAlmon records someone asking her if she had read

short, but to the point, 'I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty

Ulysses:

mind he has, hasn't he?'

Norah [sic] said, 'Sure, why would I

He certainly had. The last section of

bother? It's enough he talks about that book and he's at it all the time.

Ulysses is a stream of consciousness representing the thoughts of Molly

I'd like a bit of life of my own.' Later,

Bloom, Leopold's husband, while she is

she admitted she had read the last

lying in bed next to him. Molly was

pages of Ulysses, portraying Molly

clearly modelled on Nora. Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I make him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and 79

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

make him do it in front of me serve

Gertrude', as McAlmon calls her,

him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the thing in the

'fumbles and mauls them' with her 'sluggish wit'.

gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they hide it I suppose that's what a woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part then Ill tell him I want £1 or perhaps 30/ Placed next to this passage from Ulysses, a contrasting quote from Gertrude Stein's early, unclassifiable work, Tender Buttons, published in 1914, will neatly illustrate McAlmon's point about the way the two great modernists used language, how words for Joyce have 'emotional significations', where 'poor 80

PLANETS OF EQUAL MAGNITUDE

NOTHING ELEGANT

established color and cunning, a

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then

slender grey and no ribbon, this means a loss a great loss in

certainly something is upright. It is

restitution. A METHOD OF A CLOAK

earnest.

A single climb to align, a straight exchange to a cane, a desperate

MILDRED'S UMBRELLA A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra a

adventure and courage and a clock,

loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac and an

all this which is a system, which has feeling, which has resignation and success, all makes an attractive black silver. A RED STAMP If lilies are lilywhite if the exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue.

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

call. George, always game but wary, took the liberty, since he had been sent for, of bringing me along for Virgil Thompson first met fellow Harvard graduate Gertrude Stein through George Antheil. George had been summoned to her presence and had decided to ask his friend Virgil to come along for support. He needed it. My friendship with Gertrude Stein dates from the winter of 1925 and '26. Though addicted from Harvard days to Tender Buttons and to Geography and Plays (almost no other of her books was yet in print), I still had made no effort toward the writer. I wanted an acquaintance to come about informally, and I was sure it would if I only waited. It did. Having heard in literary circles that George Antheil was that year's genius, she thought she really ought to look him over. So through Sylvia Beach she asked that he come to 82

intellectual protection, writing to me in Saint-Cloud a pneumatique [the Paris-wide compressed air delivery system] that said, lest I hesitate, 'we' had been asked for the evening. Naturally I went. Alice Toklas did not

ACTS OF THE SAINTS

at first view care for me, and neither

Stein, who was fifty one, became close

of the ladies found reason for seeing George again. But Gertrude and I got

friends, correspondents and collaborators. Antheil is only mentioned

on like Harvard men. As we left, she said to him only good-by, but to me 'we'll be seeing each other.'

once in the many letters between Stein and Thomson. On May 6, 1927 she wrote to him: 'saw George Antheil and

And so they did. But not with Antheil.

wife, they looked rather sad'. At first, as Virgil suspected, Gertrude's partner,

Thomson, who was twenty five, and

Alice was suspicious of him, possibly even sexually jealous. Thomson said in a much later letter to a friend: Gertrude was warm and she had an aura of sex around her. It worked on men, women, children, and dogs. And Gertrude liked young men. She didn't go to bed with them but she was attracted to them, and Alice was always afraid it might happen. There was probably never any danger of that: Thomson was not attracted to women, not that Gertrude was a conventional woman, with her mannish hair and frumpy dress. Still, Gertrude knew that Alice didn't like her new 83

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

composer friend. In The Autobiography of

anyone before, musically or otherwise.

Alice B Toklas, speaking in Alice's voice, Stein mentions an art show where

As one would expect, the opera they produced together, Four Saints in Three

'Gertrude Stein met George Antheil who asked to come to see her and when he came he brought with him

Acts bears very little resemblance to a formal opera; it has no linear narrative, Stein aiming to 'tell what happened

Virgil Thomson. Gertrude Stein had not found George Antheil particularly

without telling stories'. Thomson's musical setting is also unconventional,

interesting although she liked him, but

concentrating on the rhythm of the

Virgil Thomson she found very

'word-groups', making the words come

interesting although I did not like him.' Their musical collaboration began when

before the music; as Ezra Pound said of his own opera: 'setting the music to the

Thomson played Stein his arrangement of her Susie Asado. It starts:

words not the words to the music'. We will hear more about Pound's operas

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Susie Asado which is a told tray sure. A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers. Possibly no other composer would have thought of setting her radical texts, and Stein had never collaborated with 84

ACTS OF THE SAINTS

later. Thomson explained in a

toward the emotional conventions,

newspaper article:

spend my whole effort on the rhythm of the language.

with meanings jumbled and syntax violated, but with the words themselves all the more shockingly

The casting of the opera was unconventional too, consisting entirely

present, I could put those texts to music with a minimum of temptation

of black singers and dancers, despite the text having nothing to do with race;

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

quite shocking for 1934. The costumes

friends to what Thomson called a '"drag"

and cellophane sets by New Yorker Florine Stettheimer and the

or travesty ball, in Harlem.' Artistic New Yorkers would often go 'slumming' in

choreography by the Englishman Frederick Ashton were equally unconventional. Thompson had met

Harlem, listening to jazz and blues singers like Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, or watching black

Ettie Stettheimer, Florine's sister, in New York at a party which was

dancers like the erotic, semi-nude Josephine Baker. After the trip uptown

followed by a trip with a group of

Ettie invited Virgil to meet her sisters.

ACTS OF THE SAINTS

The sisters were three – Ettie,

being laid out rather in the marble

Florine, and Carrie – all of uncertain age; and they lived with their invalid

and gold and red velvet Germanroyalty style with a fluffy overlay of

mother in the most ornate apartment house I have ever seen – a florid Gothic structure called Alwyn

modern Baroque. There were crystal pendants everywhere and gold fringes and lace and silk curtains so much

Court, at Fifty-eighth Street and Seventh Avenue. Their own flat was

longer than the windows that they stood out in planned puffs and lay no

ornate too but nowhere near Gothic,

less than two feet on the waxed floors. Throughout the house were pictures by Florine, a painter of such high wit and bright colorings as to make Matisse and Dufy seemed by comparison somber. Ettie, the youngest, a PhD from Heidelberg, had published two novels about intellectualized love; and Carrie, the eldest and usually the hostess, had spent twenty years on a doll's house (now in the Museum of the City of New York). . . One never saw the invalid mother. One felt, however, her presence in the house and knew her appearance (white hair and black lace) from paintings by Florine. The three sisters never went out all at the 87

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

same time, each in turn staying home

The cellophane, which looked and

so that their mother should never be left alone.

behaved fine in the shoe boxes was very difficult to scale up, and it is hard to

It is easy to imagine the rather camp Thomson being impressed by both

imagine a greater fire hazard, but she persisted and they managed. For the choreography, Thomson

Florine's work and her home environment. He asked Florine to do

asked the young British choreographer Frederick Ashton. They had met in

both sets and costumes for the opera,

London, where Thomson played part of

though she was neither a set designer

the opera for him and asked him if he

nor a costume designer. 'So I did sing it for her one afternoon, and she did accept designing it as a possibility, and she did start finding ideas right away for making it look like the Cathedral façade in Avila executed in crystal and ostrich feathers and red velvet and gold fringe.' He didn't want it to look like a conventional stage set and it didn't. Thomson asked Florine for sketches but he didn't get them; instead she made models in shoe boxes that she carefully wrapped to show to Virgil. 'She built herself a little theatre and filled it full of dolls and cellophane and feathers and crystal. She never put brush to paper.' 88

ACTS OF THE SAINTS

would like to collaborate. Ashton, who

Stravinsky's and Antheil's more

was gay, said 'oh, yes and with delight'. There is a photograph of Ashton with

outrageous works but there wasn't. In fact the audience and most other

three of the nude, young, black, slim, good-looking, male dancers. His delight is evident. The all-black singing and

musicians and writers who were there were ecstatic; on the opening night there was half an hour of curtain calls.

dancing cast must have shocked the audience more than the music did; one

[There is a video on YouTube showing excerpts from the original 1934

might have expected a riot on the first

performance.]

night to match the premieres of

Henry McBride wrote to Stein, who wasn't there: 'the word miracle is the only one that describes what happened'. McBride, a senior critic, advocate and friend of both Stein and the Stettheimer sisters had already heard Thomson playing and singing the work at the Stettheimers' New York apartment as early as February 1929. He describes the evening in a letter to Gertrude in Paris of May 10. We've had lots of fun and one of the pleasantest things was the hearing of your poems to the music of Virgil Thomson. We roared with enjoyment but Carl van Vechten [author of 89

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

Nigger Heaven and a key promoter

work was far more than just translation.

of Stein's work; he became her literary executor. Florine painted a

There are several versions of what happened next but probably the most

portrait of him that you can find online], who sat opposite me, pulled a serious face and shook it at me

accurate is given by Maurice Grosser, Thomson's long-term partner, whom he met at Harvard; Grosser designed the

approvingly as though to say we were not taking it in the right way. But

scenario for Four Saints after the falling out.

young Virgil Thomson really is a wonder. I never saw such selfpossession in an American before. He is absolutely undefeatable by circumstances. When singing some of the opera to me he was constantly interrupted but never to his dis-ease; he will stop, shout some direction to the servant, and then resume absolutely on pitch and in time. Virgil and Gertrude remained close until her death in 1946, with just one break in their friendship. Stein had objected to the way her name appeared on the title page of a book of poems by Georges Hugnet that she had translated: she wanted equal billing, feeling that her 90

ACTS OF THE SAINTS

Christmas was approaching and

name the date of the work's

Gertrude and Alice invited Virgil and me to pass Christmas Eve – this was

composition. Gertrude agreed to the compromise, apparently so did Alice,

1930 – with them in their flat. We were four. We exchanged gifts, were given a ceremonial dinner, and

and we left with the impression of having spent with them a pleasant and friendly Christmas Eve.

passed a very pleasant evening. The subject of Hugnet came up, and

Virgil then came down with his usual winter bronchitis and stayed at

Virgil, who did not at all approve of

home in bed, his throat wrapped in

the behavior of either party, proposed

flannel. One morning, a week or ten

a compromise, which he had already persuaded Hugnet to accept –

days after Christmas, he received in the mail a small stamped and

something about adding after each

addressed envelope containing a calling card which read: 'Miss Gertrude Stein' (this engraved) and underneath in Gertrude's spidery handwriting, 'Declines further acquaintance with Mr Virgil Thomson.' That was all. Virgil was too hurt to answer or protest, and they did not see each other or speak again until the fall of 1934 when Four Saints was revived in Chicago and Alice and Gertrude came there to see it. The whole affair, aimless, silly, and

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

wounding, I can explain only as

evening. Nothing seemed very

another example of Alice's jealousy working on Gertrude's literary vanity,

comfortable and there were some Picassos and a good many Juan Gris

here acting to persuade her that Virgil had gone over to the enemy's camp.

hanging around. Gertrude was a dominating personality, massive, powerful and always, I would

Someone else who met Gertrude Stein

suppose, by way of indirection. I felt that she might have been a

through George Antheil was the

Bethlehem Steel magnate – she had

American artist George Biddle, at the time visiting Paris. He said in his autobiography An American Artist's Story that at that time George was 'very much the rage' across Europe if not in America. He was almost better known in Germany than in Paris. This made his position among the intelligentsia unique, he was constantly being written up in Queerschnitt [sic] or Ford Madox Ford's Transition. . . George played around with Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound, Man Ray, Fernand Léger and Gertrude Stein. He took me to the latter's house one 92

ACTS OF THE SAINTS

the same thin lips and breadth

'in the presence, in this unostentatious

between the temples; better still a labor politician or a Catholic cardinal.

and somewhat uncomfortable house, of the early, unpublished masterpieces of a

Stein asked the two Georges if they would like to see some of her early

very great creator.' Before they left, Stein asked Biddle what he was working on himself. Having just seen the Picassos

Picasso drawings. 'They were quite unknown to the outside world, she said,

he was wary of talking about his own work to the woman who had recognised

looking even more sapient and

another talent so early.

impenetrable.' George the artist was impressed; he recognised that they were

Miss Stein, who in her own massive and rarefied manner had also perhaps been inwardly smoldering, broke out in an Old-Testamentprophetic indictment of my attitude toward art and my own limitations. I would never 'understand' or 'realize,' because of my birthplace, my background, my family, my morals, the Quaker, the Puritan in me. I have forgotten just what. We shouted at each other. I argued with her coldly. I think she called me a lawyer. We parted not entirely on unfriendly terms.

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

Gertrude Stein and listened and looked. They talked then, and more and Gertrude Stein was one of the first people Ernest Hemingway met in Paris. She liked him; soon she was 'instructing me about sex', as he said in his memoir of that time, A Moveable Feast. Hemingway of course was what Stein 'would probably call now a square about sex and I must admit that I had certain prejudices against homosexuality'. They were certainly an odd couple, opposites both as regards sexuality and writing, but their friendship was very close and was maintained for many years. Stein writes about first meeting him in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. I remember very well the impression I had of Hemingway that first afternoon. Hemingway was twentythree, rather foreign-looking, with passionately interested, rather than interesting eyes. He sat in front of 94

more, a great deal together. He asked her to come and spend an evening in their apartment and look at his work. Hemingway had then and has always a very good instinct for finding apartments in strange but pleasing localities and good femmes

A SQUARE ABOUT SEX

de ménage and good food. This his

there and he and Gertrude Stein

first apartment was just off the Place du Tertre. We spent the evening

went over all the writing he had done up to that time. He had begun the novel that it was inevitable he would begin and there were the little poems afterwards printed by McAlmon in the Contact Edition. Gertrude Stein rather liked the poems, they were direct, Kiplingesque, but the novels she found wanting. There is a great deal of description in this, she said, and not particularly good description. Begin over again and concentrate, she said. And of course he did. His writing became lean and spare, the opposite of Stein's; she showed him the way, though not by example. Hemingway, like many impoverished writers in Paris, used Sylvia Beach's bookshop Shakespeare and Company as a lending library. He remembers it as a 'lovely, warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window and 95

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

photographs on the wall of famous

Cardinal Lemoine, could not have

writers both dead and living.'

been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and

Sylvia had a lively, very sharply cut face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal's and as gay as a

welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching out into the back room which gave onto the inner

young girl's, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine

court of the building, were the shelves and shelves of the richness of

forehead and cut thick below her

the library.

ears and at the line of the collar of the brown velvet jacket she wore. She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me. I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished. There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 Rue 96

A SQUARE ABOUT SEX

Ernest and Sylvia's friendship lasted for

than he had' because he could always get

many years also. Much later, Hemingway's son Bumby knew and liked

a loan from Sylvia. Hemingway tells a good story about his first meeting with

her too; like Joyce, Bumby thought her name was amusing; he called her Silver Beach. In those later years, when he was

Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast. The first time I ever met Scott

on one of his many trips with F Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway said he knew it

Fitzgerald a very strange thing happened. Many strange things

would be 'okay to spend more money

happened with Scott but this one I was never able to forget. He had come into the Dingo bar in the Rue Delambre where I was sitting with some completely worthless characters. . . Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well-built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the colouring, the very fair hair and the 97

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

mouth. The mouth worried you until

face so that it was the color of used

you knew him and then it worried you more.

candle wax. This was not my imagination, nor have I exaggerated

At this first meeting, Scott quizzed Ernest on whether he had had

in describing it. He became a true death's head, or death mask, in front of your eyes.

premarital sex with his wife. Hemingway pretended not to remember. 'Don't talk

Hemingway got Fitzgerald into a taxi and

like some limey' said Scott but during

the next time they met, a few days later

the conversation he was starting to

he was fine. Ernest asked if he was okay

sweat, drops appearing on his 'long, perfect Irish upper lip'.

after the previous night but Scott remembered nothing being wrong; 'I

I looked back at his face again and it was then that the strange thing

simply got tired of those absolutely bloody British you were with and went home.' Almost a quarter of Hemingway's

happened. As he sat there at the bar holding

autobiography is taken up with descriptions of his trips with Scott; he

the glass of champagne the skin seemed to tighten over his face until

loved him as a person but was disappointed in him as a writer: he

all the puffiness was gone and then it

thought Fitzgerald had never fulfilled the

drew tighter until the face was like a death's head. The eyes sank and began to look dead and the lips were drawn tight and the color left the

promise of The Great Gatsby. He was right.

COMPOSER EATEN ALIVE BY LIONS

many of his pieces there, including his Second Symphony and his most famous composition, Ballet Mécanique, without a piano at home, though Adrienne Monnier sometimes let him use the piano in her apartment. He started by writing works that didn't need a piano. 'As Böski is not very large and our single room apartment in the Rue de l'Odéon was extremely small, I commenced a miniature-sized quintette to fit and express us, a piece for flute, bassoon, trumpet, trombone and viola.' Beach remembers (not entirely accurately) the first time George walked into her bookshop. One of my very first American customers, however, came from Berlin. This was George Antheil, the George Antheil and Böski did take the room at 12, Rue de l'Odéon that Sylvia Beach offered them; they were to stay there for ten years. George composed

composer. George and his wife, Böske, [sic] walked into the shop, as I remember, one day in 1920, [sic] hand-in-hand. George was stocky in build, had tow-colored bangs, a smashed nose, interesting but 99

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

wicked-looking eyes, a big mouth and

because Sylvia was interested in every

a big grin. He looked like an American high-schoolboy, of Polish

kind of artistic endeavour. . . But also because George was a Trentonian

origin, perhaps. Böske, who was Hungarian, was small and pretty, dark-haired, and spoke broken

(even though a refugee, as Sylvia was a refugee of Princeton) and their vocabulary, their physical landscape

English. Antheil's ideas interested me, and

of youth was the same.

the fact that he was also from New

Beach became very fond of both George

Jersey was a bond between us.

and Böski; he was a very regular visitor

George's father was the proprietor of The Friendly Shoestore in Trenton,

to the shop downstairs.

next door to Princeton, and now George was about to be my neighbour in Paris. . . Böske's job was

George had a big appetite for books and devoured every one of the volumes in my library. Customers

to provide goulash for two people with so few pennies. I entered into all

looking at the pictures on the walls would invariably ask who that was in

of George's problems.

the photograph by Man Ray – that fella with bangs. At that very

In her unpublished memoirs Böski

moment, the side door of the library

recalls the apartment and Sylvia Beach very fondly: Sylvia and George immediately took a shine to each other, not only because

might open and the fellow himself come in, carrying armfuls of books. George gave me a valuable suggestion for getting rid of my books. He offered to give all the

George was American, not only

volumes in the window more exciting

100

COMPOSER EATEN ALIVE BY LIONS

titles. They would sell right off, he

and Böske was out, he would climb

said, and when I heard some of the unmentionable titles he proposed, I

up, with the help of the Shakespeare sign, and hoist himself through his

thought it quite likely that they would. If George had forgotten his key

window on the second floor. Passersby stopped to look. Böski also made use of the library; George encouraged her to read detective stories in English to help her learn the language. I was very shy about my not knowing English and I was the most taciturn little thing for over a year until I finally ventured to say a few words in English. I am sure a lot of George's friends (who did not speak French which I spoke well) were surprised that the little Hungarian savage could talk.

101

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A couple of years later Antheil went on

STOP LOVE EVER SO MUCH STOP

a trip to North Africa with the violinist Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound's long-term

GEORGE

mistress, for whom Pound had commissioned him to write two violin sonatas. 'She was a dark, pretty Irish girl,

She didn't tell anyone, so no one knew George was in Budapest; everyone thought he was lost in Africa. A story

about twenty-five years old and, as I discovered when we commenced playing

appeared in an American newspaper published in Paris with the headline

a Mozart sonata together, a consummate violinist.' As Beach described their bizarre trip: 'George Antheil has disappeared into the African jungle "in search of rhythms"; he found a spot where the music was "nothing but sticks." Then no more was heard of him.' While they were there, Rudge persuaded him that he should marry Böski – despite what Sylvia Beach and others thought, they were not in fact married. He agreed and sent Böski a telegram. MEET ME IN MARSEILLE HOTEL CALIFORNIE NEXT WEEK STOP WE ARE GOING TO BUDAPEST TO GET MARRIED STOP DON'T TELL ANYBODY 102

COMPOSER EATEN ALIVE BY LIONS

COMPOSER EATEN ALIVE BY LIONS IN THE SAHARA.

Only Sylvia Beach knew where they were; she sent him a telegram of her own.

George came back, now a married man. Sylvia continued her warm relationship with George, even after he went back to Berlin, leaving Böski behind. She also continued, as she did with many of

FOR GOODNESS SAKE GEORGE COME

her writer protégés, to collect money for him. In her last letter to

BACK TO PARIS IMMEDIATELY AND

George to survive, dated March 25,

DENY THIS IDIOTIC NEWSPAPER

1928 she says:

STORY LIONS ATE YOU IN AFRICA OR ELSE YOUR NAME WILL BE MUD FOR

Dearest George,

EVER STOP TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE

Miss Harriet Weaver sent me 55 for you and I got a letter today from Florence Williams [his wife] saying

STOP SYLVIA BEACH

that Bill [Carlos Williams] was sending $100 to Meatham for you hooray! I enclose a list of contributors with their addresses but a good deal of the results are due to McAlmon's efforts. Adrienne and I went with Böski and Ber to the Clurgot service. Gee what a bourgeois atmosphere! It was the best joke to hear your music struck up in such a house. A very 103

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

good thing for your social career. Mlle

know what I'm writing, a lot of work

Clurgot and Madame Jacob played the first movement of your fine

and visitors interrupting all day long. I never see Böski but she says she is

concerto, not wobbly at all. I thought it sounded very well and it is so interesting. . . I wish you would stop

coming to have a serious talk with me sometime? ? ? With very much love

making those melodies though, George. The more you put of them in your work the more it doesn't suit it, and they do give me slightly a bellyache. Excuse me for being so frank dearest George, it's for your good! . . . I am so tired I don't

104

Sylvia

A YOUNG WOMAN WHO POSSESSED A BRAIN

studying with Ernest Bloch, who is now best known as the composer of Schelomo, but who also wrote America, An Epic Rhapsody for Orchestra. Like Antheil and many others he was laying his claim to be a true American Before George Antheil first left New Jersey for Europe, he had been to stay with Margaret Anderson, editor of Little Review, which first published sections from Ulysses, at her home in Bernardsville, New Jersey, his and Sylvia Beach's home state. Antheil had been

composer, trying to write a fresh new kind of music, uninfluenced by the European tradition. Antheil says in Bad Boy of Music that when Bloch found out how poor he was he returned almost all the money Antheil had paid him in tuition fees. This windfall allowed George to compose full-time and accept Anderson's invitation. 'Margaret invited me only for a week-end but I had not understood this clearly, so I stayed for six months.' Anderson and all her friends seem to have been very fond of George, and not at all to have minded his overstaying his invitation. She said of him: 'I have never known anyone who could change his point of view on every subject every day and still remain interesting.' In her

105

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

autobiography My Thirty Years' War,

strides and began to beat upon it a

Anderson remembers meeting Antheil for the first time.

compelling mechanical music. . . He used the piano exclusively as an

We had heard that there was a young composer of promise living not

instrument of percussion, making it sound like a xylophone or a cymballo. . . Georgette Leblanc invited him to

far from Bernardsville. One is unoptimistic about young composers

stay with us. He took the invitation so urgently that he rushed away that

of promise, but we decided to invite this one to come to see us. He wrote that it would please him to come if we were interested in modern musics. It was the musics that made us await his appearance with a certain expectancy. His name was George Antheil. He appeared on a Sunday afternoon, carrying a large suitcase of music. He was short, his nose had been maltreated in an airplane accident, he was unprepossessing except for his vitality and his air of concentration. As we began talking he happened to be sitting across the room from the piano. We asked him to play. He reached the piano in two 106

A YOUNG WOMAN WHO POSSESSED A BRAIN

night and rushed back the next day

story. Leblanc remembered the first

carrying another large suitcase filled with a few clothes and a great

time she saw Antheil in her second autobiography The Courage Machine

quantity of music paper.

(which has a preface by Jean Cocteau).

Georgette Leblanc, French actor and

An astonishing young person arrived,

singer – diva is not too strong a word – had been the long-term partner of the

short, square-shouldered and with the spotty complexion of adolescence.

famous playwright Maurice Maeterlinck;

But he carried within him that silent

she and he will both reappear in this

assurance which is the mark of a precocious self-awareness. The disproportion of his body and head, the fixed intense expression of his eyes, his fierce preoccupation with his own thought gave me an impression of genius. He shook hands with each of us without curiosity, as if he had left us the day before. Then, seeing the piano across the room, he rushed at it. For two long hours we listened to him, mesmerised. In his music was his explanation and his reason for being. When he played his face changed completely, he was no longer red and ugly; an even pallor spread 107

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

over his features and they became

Margaret was evidently a young

almost classic. . . He had brought all his possessions in a cardboard

woman who possessed a brain – which was all the more remarkable,

suitcase – manuscripts, music paper, pencils, India ink and rulers. In the midst of these treasures were one

when you pause to think about it, for Margaret was a young and beautiful creature who could easily have

shirt and two pairs of socks, since he had neither pyjamas nor bathrobe he

walked right into the Ziegfeld Follies. I remember that when I first saw

accepted one of our bathrobes and a

Margaret at her place in

pair of sandals. Antheil remembered that first meeting in Bernardsville fondly too, if in a typically patronising and sexist way, especially considering Anderson was at the centre of such a forward-thinking, feminist, avant-garde and largely lesbian circle – not that George seems to have understood Margaret's sexual preferences – even more so since this was around the time when women in America were first given the vote: the Nineteenth Amendment was passed by Congress on June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920.

108

A YOUNG WOMAN WHO POSSESSED A BRAIN

Bernardsville, New Jersey, I very

with Margaret's ménage he played the

nearly swooned (she had just the day previous dyed her hair red and the

piano every day and played a concert every night for the houseguests. In

effect was unimaginable), so somehow or another I just had to stay on: and Margaret was either too

particular, George regularly played extracts from Claude Debussy's opera Pelléas and Mélisande – a favourite of

sensitive or too puzzled to ask me to leave.

Misia Sert, as we know – which has Maeterlinck's play of the same name as its text, with Georgette singing both

For the two months that George lived

roles. There was a story behind this.

109

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

by eastern modes and scales – you may remember that Misia Sert was with him for the premiere of the exotic (and in

In 1901, Claude Debussy asked Maurice Maeterlinck, then Georgette Leblanc's partner, for permission to set his recent play Pelléas and Mélisande as an opera. The attraction for Debussy was obvious: the medievalist romance of the play suggested the new, modal kind of music he was writing at the time, as had Wagner's medievalist romance Tristan and Isolde. Arguably the first modern composer, Wagner had set music free from the tyranny of tonality in 1865 with the famous Tristan chord (F, B, D♯, and G♯), which has no definite tonal centre. Debussy was a leading member of the first generation of composers to exercise this freedom. And since he had heard Indonesian Gamelan music at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1889 Debussy had been writing music that was influenced not just by Wagner but 110

that case erotic) Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn in 1894. Maeterlinck was not yet 40 at the time but was already famous, wellrespected and wealthy. His career had taken off early, when Octave Mirbeau's

THE COURAGE MACHINE

1889 review of his first play Princess

to loud noises and was what was then

Maleine, another medievalist romance, said: 'M. Maeterlinck has given us the

called neurasthenic; he and Georgette lived in a remote Benedictine abbey in

greatest work of genius of our time, and the most extraordinary and the most simple also, comparable, and I shall dare

Normandy rather than in noisy Paris or Brussels (Maeterlinck was Belgian). But Maeterlinck agreed to Debussy's request

say it, superior in beauty to whatever is most beautiful in Shakespeare.'

and set him no preconditions except that Georgette should sing the role of

Maeterlinck, like that other famous

Mélisande. She rehearsed it with

playwright Henrik Ibsen, didn't much like

Debussy several times but he later

music of any kind – he was very sensitive

changed his mind about her and cast someone else in the role, without telling her. When Maeterlinck found out he was outraged; he went to see the composer to 'give him a drubbing to teach him what was what'. In her first autobiography, Maeterlinck and I Georgette tells what happened next. As soon as he entered the salon he had threatened Debussy, who dropped into a chair while Madame Debussy distractedly ran toward her husband with a bottle of smelling salts. She had begged the poet to go

111

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

away, and my word! there was

evening I had arrayed myself in a

nothing else to do. Maeterlinck, who did not like

costume highly Mélisandesque and harmoniously absurd. On my

musicians any more than music, kept saying as he left, 'They're all crazy, all off their heads, these musicians!'

forehead blazed brighter than ever the diamond which had already scandalised Brussels. Like wood

Georgette also makes a fascinating and suitably theatrical story out of her first meeting with Maeterlinck in 1895 – she was at least as good a storyteller as Antheil. Leblanc was already a wellknown opera singer and a very glamorous figure and Maeterlinck was already a well-known playwright when she was invited one night to an aftertheatre party in Brussels hosted by the lawyer Edmond Picard. She made a suitably theatrical entrance after midnight. At my host's request, I was the last to arrive. When I was announced all eyes turned toward me. For so great an

112

shavings, my hair quivered in curls about my head and a trailing gown of

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gold-flowered velvet prolonged my

There before the fireplace stood a

person indefinitely. Thus decked, like Cleopatra embarking on her galley, I

man wearing a cape. He was smoking a pipe. He was tall and

advanced upon the conquest of my fate, outwardly assured but inwardly trembling. At once Picard led me to

broad-shouldered. I scarcely saw the fleeting glance, the smile cut short, the hand timidly offered.

the opposite end of the room.

'Georgette Leblanc . . . Maurice Maeterlinck . . .' In spite of myself I cried, 'How wonderful. He is young.' And the poet, abashed, took refuge in the smoking room. But when we sat down to supper Maeterlinck was opposite me and I could examine his face without embarrassing him, for his eyes were always lowered – they had never borne the weight of another's gaze. Leblanc lived with Maeterlinck until 1918, after which she moved to New York, where she first met Margaret Anderson. In her second autobiography, The Courage Machine, which Anderson translated, Leblanc remembers first

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arriving in New York, speaking very little

Georgette's view, on sensationalising her

English and knowing very few people.

story. Maeterlinck was well-known in America by then – at one time, because

1919. I stood on Brooklyn Bridge in New York. A hard wind was beating against me and I held my coat with

of his play The Blue Bird (from which we get the phrase 'the bluebird of happiness'), which had been turned into

both hands to protect my body. A body was all I possessed – nothing

movies in 1910 and in 1918, and was again to be in 1940, he was the richest

when you have everything, everything when you have nothing. I had been wandering among giant things. Now I watched the crowd hurry across the bridge. I did not understand its intentions, I did not understand its words. From a distance I stared at the extraordinary city. Through the bridge's cables on that white winter morning its spires and towers looked like chessmen for Titans. She had come to sell her memoirs, which eventually became the book Maeterlinck and I to the Sunday American; they had promised her a large advance. But they insisted, in 114

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and most famous playwright in the

husband's death and was a fan. She

world. The paper was looking for salacious gossip but Leblanc refused to

offered Georgette the use of her box whenever she wanted it.

allow the newspaper's alterations and forfeited the advance. She had no money but she did have some friends in New

One night there she met Allen Tanner, the pianist. He introduced himself to her in broken French; he was

York. One was Oscar Hammerstein's widow, who was managing the

also a big fan and remembered seeing her in Maeterlinck's Monna Vanna in

Manhattan Opera Company after her

Boston in 1912. He told her that he had been walking along Sixth Avenue in New York singing Pelléas 'in full voice' when he saw her coming out of a restaurant in a leopard coat; he had recognised her immediately but had been too shy to speak to her. He wrote her a letter in the same broken French, which amused her; she invited him to tea. In his fantastic French, Allen told me of his friends on Eighth Street, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. In the summer, he said, they lived in a wild place, near the sea, where there were no roads, nothing but trees; they had built their house themselves and even made their own 115

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

furniture. Listening to his

of the other a tiny red spot. It was as

extraordinary descriptions, I pictured two prehistoric creatures brandishing

if we had always known each other.

axes in the woods, building their hut, sleeping on planks, living on roots and leaves. 'But what do they do in

Georgette spoke no English and Margaret spoke no French but 'there was no barrier between us. The

winter?' I asked. 'Oh, in winter they come to New York.' They were two

intensity which characterised her

intellectuals and published an art magazine! Tanner took Leblanc to meet Anderson, who had moved to New York from Chicago with Heap (we will come back to her) to run Little Review from there. On the evening of that first spring day, Allen asked me to come down to the lobby of the Commodore where Margaret Anderson was waiting to meet me. As I stepped out of the elevator I saw a sky-blue silhouette, a white glove waving and a lovely smile of welcome beneath a fur toque. Two sky-blue arms opened and we embraced, each leaving on the cheek 116

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needed no words to find and join my

her first autobiography, My Thirty Years'

own.' With a friend as interpreter, Georgette began a relationship with

War to Georgette, 'the only human being I have known who has none of the

Margaret and Jane Heap. 'For the first time in many years – ever since the disintegration of the great motifs upon

human bêtises'. At first, Margaret was wary of Georgette's reputation, but was surprised by the person she met.

which Maeterlinck and I had built our existence – I found myself again living for

She had a mysterious, beautiful and

the life of the mind.' Margaret dedicated

theatrical face, and I was prepared for the theatrical nature that was generally attributed to her. I went to the meeting without much interest. Again I found the popular legend absurd – in this case because, as Georgette Leblanc says, of the 'disastrous discrepancy between my appearance and my nature.' She had been called the Tiger woman. But at those times when she was supposed to be devouring men she could be found at home devouring cold carrots prepared by a vague and literary femme de chambre; reading the philosophers, writing moral essays, laughing at the infinite amusement of life, and not remarking that the 117

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

carrots were cold. . . Her knowledge

was a mystery which only time and

of human stupidity I found to be comprehensive – which may explain

knowledge would help me to understand. This quality was so

why she never indulges in it. In the second volume of her

evident that one almost stopped thinking of how beautiful her face was; I found that I was responding

autobiography, The Fiery Fountains, Margaret has a more romantic and

above all to the touching charm in which her personality was enveloped

fatalistic memory of her first meeting

– a personality, I felt, of such

with Georgette. 'We cannot have met by chance, Georgette and I, since we knew at once that we were to join hands and advance through life together. Ah I said, when I first saw her marvellous mystic face: this is the land I have been seeking; I left home long ago to discover it'. Anderson's final account of her meeting with Georgette comes in her first-person novel The Forbidden Fires, unpublished until 1996, in which she fictionalises Georgette and Jane Heap. My first impression. . . was that she possessed some special human inspiration, some illumination, that 118

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strength and sweetness that it could

to run Little Review and they lived there

only be founded on some great purity of nature.

for the rest of Georgette's life. Virgil Thomson recalls meeting them in France

Margaret and Georgette eventually became lovers, Georgette replacing Jane Heap in Margaret's affections. They moved to France together, leaving Jane

on a trip to the south in 1939, just before the Nazis closed access to the coast. I met the one-time editor of Chicago's Little Review, Margaret Anderson, hoping to procure somehow an American visa for Georgette Leblanc, ex-companion of Maurice Maeterlinck, ex-singer who was old, ill, and French – conditions, all of them, that Washington's representatives viewed unfavourably. He failed to get the visa and Georgette remained in France where she died in 1941, the same year as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce; as Thomson says 'Margaret Anderson remaining with her to the end.' Margaret was much missed on the Paris scene. When Sherwood Anderson (no relation) reviewed her autobiography My Thirty Years War in 119

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

the New Republic he referred to her

The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas

glowingly, as if paying homage to a legendary figure from the past:

Gertrude Stein also bought a car: 'a new eight cylinder Ford and the most

Did you know, Margaret, that I loved you, that a thousand men, a

expensive coat made by Hermes'.) Jean Cocteau paid his own homage to Georgette Leblanc, also speaking of her

thousand women have loved you. . . You inspired love and devotion. You

as a legend, in his preface to The Courage Machine:

weren't after anything. You never did push yourself forward. You didn't

She lived in soul-destroying villas,

have to. You had but to walk through the streets, through a hotel lobby . . .

cruel hotels, abandoned lighthouses. From morning to night her trailing

You were not like the rest of us, struggling down there in the Chicago mud, going constantly, falteringly, in

gown swept aside the dead leaves of daily events. Her inner goal was little concerned with the sweepings. She

and out of our unreal world. You were unreal. You were a character in

strode ahead. She advanced, she challenged, she sought to convince,

a play. You were a novel or a painting come to life.

she struggled. She met in gratitude, laughter, the silence of hard hearts. She was a courage-machine, fed by a

(With the money Margaret got from the advance on the book she bought a Citroen and she and Georgette moved into Georgette's sister's semi-derelict château where Louis XIV had first met Marie Antoinette. With the money from 120

secret electricity.

I PREDICT A RIOT

While he was living in Paris, George Antheil renewed his friendship with Margaret Anderson and Georgette Leblanc; it was Anderson who introduced him to Erik Satie at Francis Picabia's house. Sylvia Beach had put them in touch while Anderson was in town. Margaret invited George to tea with herself and Georgette and asked him to play on the opening programme of the Ballet Suédois, the Swedish Ballet company on October 4, 1923. This was an important event in the Paris calendar, second only to the Ballets Russes. It turned into a riot, even rowdier than the one ten years earlier that accompanied the premiere of The Rite of Spring in the same venue, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Actually, it didn't just spontaneously turn into a riot, it had all been orchestrated – pun intended – without George's knowledge, or so he claimed. Other people seemed to be in the know though: Henry McBride wrote in a letter of June 16, 121

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

1926: 'Saturday afternoon we all go to

They had not come to hear me, but to

hear Antheil's concert in the Théâtre Champs-Élysées, in which a feature is his

see the opening of the ballets.' Antheil's piano was placed in the centre of the

Ballet Mécanique and which it is hoped, will provoke a riot.' Adrienne Monnier wrote about the occasion.

stage in front of a huge curtain containing a Cubist painting by Fernand Léger – maker of the film to which

Georgette Leblanc, back from America, knew through her friend Margaret Anderson that Antheil's music always caused a scandal; and if it caused a scandal in New York, what was it going to be like in Paris! . . . Antheil believed that they had seriously asked him to play his most 'advanced' music; when he saw the trick, he was not angry, he had a lot of fun. Antheil himself noted that the concert was attended by 'the most famous personages of the day, among others Picasso, Stravinsky, Auric, Milhaud, James Joyce, Erik Satie, Man Ray, Diaghilev, Miro, Artur Rubinstein, Ford Maddox Ford and unnumbered others. 122

Antheil wrote his most famous work, Ballet Mécanique – and he began playing.

I PREDICT A RIOT

Rioting broke out almost

The riot continued as long as Antheil's

immediately. I remember Man Ray punching somebody in the nose in

playing did. Antheil himself, although he had (according to him at least) not been

the front row. Marcel Duchamp was arguing loudly with somebody else in the second row. In a box nearby Erik

expecting it, was unperturbed: he always carried a gun. He had showed it to Böski on their first date when he was trying to

Satie was shouting: 'what precision, what precision!' and applauding.

convince her he was an anti-bourgeois radical. I felt for the automatic under my arm and continued playing. I had gone through riots in Germany, but this promised to really become something. The French are a different, more passionate race, descendants of the mobs who had followed the tumbrels to the guillotine! Catastrophe breathed down my neck. But catastrophe and myself at concerts were old pals. This was 'home' to me. When I was sure, I suddenly became relaxed, efficient, 'Superman Riding the Waves.'

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Besides, I could always shoot my way

most dangerous menace to present-

out. I even had time to listen to myself

day compositions, was to play one of his compositions. A bomb was to be

and think, 'what a marvellous pianist you are, Antheil, you dog!'

exploded irregardless of motionpictures. The composer was George Antheil, the young Polish-American

Indeed he was. Cæsar Searchinger, with whom you may remember George had been living in Berlin when he met

fresh from riot upon riot in Budapest, Berlin and Vienna. In one box above sat Ezra Pound,

Stravinsky, wrote a review of 'the

Léger, Erik Satie, and Milhaud.

greatest musical riot since the performance of the Sacre du Printemps

During the literal riot that ensued Pound relates how Milhaud futilely

[Rite of Spring]'; he titled his review 'The Greatest Coup of the Age'.

tried to prevent Satie from clapping. . . Whistling and yelling was drowned out by valiant defenders, and in the

The elite of Paris were invited and came. They came while the invitations were printed in such a way as to suggest that a moving picture was to be made of them, and that a program including the Swedish Ballet was to be given. But a few of the greatest artists came because it had been given out that a young pianistcomposer who had been creating riots all over Central Europe, and the 124

I PREDICT A RIOT

din the pianist remained a faraway

he had first become notorious; the same

automatic figure playing upon a keyboard from which no one could

was absolutely true of Stravinsky.' According to Antheil, neither

hear a note. (There is a commercial recording of

Margaret nor any of her friends let George in on the secret, even afterwards. He only found out a year

Antheil playing his own piano pieces available to download – they wouldn't

later when he went to see a film starring Georgette Leblanc called l'Inhumaine.

cause a riot today.) George claimed he

The film featured a riot among various

only found out later that the riot had

well-known artists and writers, filmed in

been staged. He wasn't upset. 'I knew that, for a time at least, I would be the

close-up and apparently directed against the character whom Leblanc is playing:

new darling of Paris. I was notorious in Paris, therefore famous. Picasso would not have become famous in Paris unless

an 'inhuman' singer. George then remembered that Leblanc had walked up to his piano while the floodlights from the balcony lit them both; he hadn't realised they were being filmed. He asked Anderson if she had been behind it. 'She said yes, it had been a sort of plot at that, but a plot in which she and Georgette had been sure I would greatly profit. (How right they were!)' When he wrote Bad Boy of Music Antheil looked back fondly on his relationship with Anderson.

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From a very great distance I adored

started taking over in Europe some had

Margaret and, viewed from 1946, she undoubtedly had a very great

gone to fight in the Spanish Civil War but most others had left for home. In a

influence upon my earliest ambitions, for through her I first became acquainted with the entire

letter to Böski of November 3, 1936 Beach says that 'Paris is rather sombre' and that the Americans are not coming

contemporary world – sacks of mail came into the house at Bernardsville

back, despite the rise in the dollar. 'I'm glad to hear you and George have found

from all over the world, but

a good place to live in and that he is

particularly from London and Paris,

prospering in Hollywood. That's

bearing manuscripts, reproductions of new paintings, news of new art

splendid. I don't see any use of not getting some of their money away from

movements, among these manuscripts Jean Cocteau and Ezra Pound.

them whenever possible.' George, of course, was always happy to take anyone's money; he might have been the

George and Böski continued corresponding with Sylvia Beach long after they moved to California and he started to work as a composer in the movie industry. In a nice twist, they offered Sylvia the use of their apartment while she was visiting New York in 1936, though she never took it up. These were dark times for the expat creative scene in Paris: after the fascists 126

bad boy of music, but he could be as good as gold if someone was paying his bills as handsomely as Hollywood did.

I PREDICT A RIOT

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Neither Williams nor Antheil record this conversation in their

One of George Antheil's supporters, or so he claims, was Robert McAlmon, who said in Being Geniuses Together that he 'got Antheil subsidised for two years.' Now, I must confess that George always struck me as a bit too deliberately boyish, naive and ingenuous, for the lad never neglected to cultivate, in his naive manner, whoever might serve his ends. . . William Carlos Williams was in Paris, and sat one day with Hemingway, myself, and two other writers. Williams confided that George Antheil had appointed him to write the libretto for an American opera, as he, Williams, was the one writer most sure to get into the spirit of America. Hemingway and I exchanged knowing glances. 128

autobiographies, so it may be fanciful. McAlmon and Antheil both presented themselves as lovable rogues – what McAlmon says about George is exactly what others might have said about

BEING GENIUSES TOGETHER

McAlmon. Williams however was

Gershwin and had been performed in

definitely not a rogue, and he does mention talking about opera, specifically

1922.

jazz opera, with fellow New Jersey native Antheil in The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. Here he recalls

That evening we went with Bob to meet the excitingly young and provocative American composer

meeting the Antheils with his wife Flossie and Bob McAlmon in 1924, when

George Antheil and his wife Bjerska [sic]. George was wearing his hair in

they visited Paris; remember that the

a bang over the forehead; Bjerska, a

first symphonic jazz opera was by

small, foreign-looking 'child', hardly opened her mouth the whole evening. The talk, at a modest restaurant on the Rue Blanche was of music – the jazz opera, especially the forthcoming jazz opera which George was to write, was in fact writing while young French composers would be leaning over his shoulders to steal what they could from his score. Stravinsky, a cousin, had sponsored him. Ezra Pound had written prominently of him. Stravinsky wasn't George's cousin but Ezra Pound did write prominently of him, as we will see shortly. Later, while 129

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

still in Paris, Williams was with Antheil

was. McAlmon remembered their first

in a restaurant where he met Philippe Soupault, who was a dadaist before he

meeting in Being Geniuses Together.

founded surrealism with André Breton and Louis Aragon when they started the magazine Littérature in 1919. In 1929

I could understand that he was a bit of a character and perhaps difficult, but I'm not easy myself.

Williams translated Soupault's novel, Last Nights of Paris, which had been

We met and had lunch together. Ezra hemmed and hawed and talked

written the year before. The two

of writing, being very instructorial

writers make a fascinating conjunction:

indeed. I was merely wanting to find

the most American of poets and a key figure in two of the most European of art movements. Earlier, Soupault had translated William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience into French, another fascinating conjunction, making Blake a possible precursor of Surrealism. Robert McAlmon, on arriving in Paris, had first introduced himself to Pound by letter as a friend of Pound's old friends Williams and Hilda Doolittle (HD). McAlmon didn't much like Pound's poetry or his criticism. Both Williams and HD explained that Ezra could be difficult but one had to take him as he

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BEING GENIUSES TOGETHER

out about Paris and its pastimes.

salesman, and between times more

Over coffee he sat back from the table, hemmed and hawed, threw

or less a hobo of a not too sublime order, I may have been forced to hide

one leg over the other, then reversed. He had a Vandyck-ish beard and an 1890-ish artist's getup. I did detect

shyness more than Ezra, who has been mainly and perhaps too exclusively literary and the poet, a bit

that Ezra was shy (and, within limits, kindly) but I have that conceit also, if

troubadourish.

anybody will believe it, and know it is

McAlmon first met Ernest Hemingway in

vanity. Having been a reporter and

1923 when he was passing through

an advertising copywriter and

Rapallo in Italy, where Ezra Pound was then living. Pound was not there but at the hotel McAlmon met Hemingway and his wife Hadley completely by chance. He had not heard of them at that time, Hemingway did not publish his first full novel, The Sun Also Rises, until 1926. Hemingway was a Middle Western American who worked for a Canadian newspaper, and he was a type outside my experience. At times he was deliberately hard-boiled, casehardened, and cold; at other times he was the hurt, sensitive boy, deliberately young and naive, wanting 131

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

to be brave, and somehow on the

did; McAlmon himself couldn't and didn't

defensive, suspicions lurking in his peering analytic glances at the

want to keep up: 'didn't you notice about the beer and how he made it plain

person with whom he was talking. He approached a cafe with a small-boy, tough-guy swagger, and before

I couldn't keep up with him? Now he just has to be the champ.' McAlmon also recorded his first

strangers of whom he was uncertain a potential snarl of scorn played on

meeting with Gertrude Stein. Before they met he hadn't thought much of her,

his large-lipped, rather loose mouth.

he saw her as 'a protected child, never actually allowed to face real hardship.'

Still, the two men became friends and went with Hemingway's family to Spain

Her brother Leo chose the paintings they bought, he says, not her. She was

to see the bullfights. Later, McAlmon began to go off Hemingway, partly because of the amount of drinking he

'protected from "reality" and vulgar contact by hangers-on, who sat, looked and listened to her as the oracle.' A fair

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BEING GENIUSES TOGETHER

description, but nevertheless he did

monologue and pontificate and reiterate

meet her, introduced by the extraordinary British

and stammer.' In turn, Stein very briefly recalls first meeting McAlmon in The

artist/poet/pamphleteer Mina Loy, of whom we will hear much more later. 'Surprisingly, she [Stein] struck me as

Autobiography of Alice Toklas: 'Mina also brought Robert McAlmon. McAlmon was very nice in those days, very mature

almost shy. She did seat herself in a large, higher chair, and she did

and very good-looking.' Stein and McAlmon turned out to have some unlikely mutual tastes: Anthony Trollope and the crime writer Edgar Wallace, who sold over 50 million books – far too popular one would think for Gertrude. However, she says in her other autobiographical work Everybody's Autobiography: 'I never was interested in crossword puzzles or any kind of puzzles but I do like detective stories. I never try to guess who has done the crime and if I did I would be sure to get it wrong but I like somebody being dead and how it moves along'. McAlmon left 'thinking one could become fond of Gertrude Stein if she would quit being the oracle'. They never really did become friends though, and their relationship became very difficult 133

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

when McAlmon as a publisher tried to

Gertrude Stein being a Sumerian

publish Stein's The Making of Americans, a colossal work far longer than Ulysses.

monument at five o'clock tea on Fleurus Street among Picassos,

Stein refused to sign a contract and left McAlmon in a very difficult position. They fell out. As Stein put it: 'everybody

Braques and some Cézannes; slowly the slow blush monumentally mounting as in dismay pontificating

quarrelled. But that is Paris, except that as a matter of fact Gertrude Stein and

Miss Stein, loses herself in the labyrinthine undergrowths of her

he never became friends again.' In 1925

jungle-muddy forestial mind naïvely

McAlmon wrote a very unflattering

intellectualising.

'portrait' of Stein, probably never meant for publication, that Ezra Pound published in 1928, probably with great glee.

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WILD PLACES WITHOUT A MAN

for other artists. McAlmon was a starving writer as well as a starving editor and a starving publisher. He

When William Carlos Williams first saw him, Robert McAlmon was in the nude: one way for starving artists and writers to make money is to act as a life model

founded the literary magazine Contact, which ran between December 1920 and June 1923 – Williams was also involved with it [details of it are available online at modernistmagazines.org]. In the introduction to a book about McAlmon by Robert E Knoll, Williams recalls seeing him for the first time. When I first met McAlmon he was posing for a living for art classes at Cooper Union for $1.00 an hour. Sometimes it meant nearly a full eight hour day. He had the straight, slim body, lean-bellied and not overmuscled, of a typical American college freshman. He didn't give a damn whether he was looked at clothed or naked by either sex so long as he got his fee. He got so used to the routine that when he entered the room he began to disrobe automatically, whoever might happen 135

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

to be present but this phase in his

got to know each other better from

development didn't last long. He got tired of it. Its regularity left no room

1905 when Hilda went to the women's liberal arts college Bryn Mawr, where

for composition; he wanted to write. Unlike Williams, who was a full-time

her friend, the poet Marianne Moore also went, though Williams didn't meet Moore until around 1914. Williams said

doctor in New Jersey but still left an immense body of literary work,

that in those college days Hilda was 'a bizarre beauty'. He may have been in

McAlmon couldn't hold down a full-time

love with her himself, but she was

job and write as well. Fortunately for

attracted to Ezra and they became

him his money worries were soon to be over. Williams introduced McAlmon to

engaged.

his very wealthy future wife, the writer and editor who named herself Bryher, after one of the British Scilly Isles. She was the lifelong, if on and off partner of HD, Hilda Doolittle, whom Williams had met along with Ezra Pound when they were all in college. Hilda had first met Ezra even earlier, in 1901, when she was fifteen and a schoolgirl in a Philadelphia suburb; they met at a Halloween party. Pound was already a student at the University of Pennsylvania, as was Williams. Pound was dressed as a Tunisian prince. They 136

WILD PLACES WITHOUT A MAN

Ezra was the official lover, but Hilda

either for the girl or for the poetry.

was very coy and invited us both to come and see her. Ezra said to me,

We were pals, both writing independently and respecting each

'are you trying to cut me out?' I said, 'no, I'm not thinking of any woman right now, but I like Hilda very much.'

other. I was impressed because he was studying literature and I wasn't. I was learning from the page when I

Ezra Pound and I were not rivals,

had a chance. Williams had met Pound even before he met HD. It was a very significant meeting for him; he was already starting to write poetry but intending to become a doctor. In a series of 1950s interviews with him, published as I Wanted to Write a Poem, he said: 'Before meeting Ezra Pound is like B.C. and A.D.' I don't recall my first meeting with him. Someone had told me there was a poet in the class. But I remember exactly how he looked. No beard, of course, then. He had a beautiful heavy head of blonde hair of which he was tremendously proud. Leonine. It was really very beautiful hair, wavy. And he had his head held high. I 137

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

wasn't impressed but I imagine the

ties were the absolute standard of dress

ladies were.

for men, he wore none, but had his shirt open at the neck in true Byronic fashion.

HD wrote to Williams in 1905 that she was going to dedicate herself to 'one who has been, beyond all others, torn

. . After the meal he read his poems to his adoring parents and Hilda, while the rest of us listened in confused

and lonely – and ready to crucify himself yet more for the sake of helping all – I

wonderment.' The engagement was soon over – Hilda wrote to Bill that Ezra

mean that I have promised to marry Ezra.' Williams got the consolation prize: 'you are to me, Billy, nearer and dearer than many – than most.' Hilda invited Ezra and his parents to Sunday lunch at her very conservative parents' house. Her father was director of the Astronomical Observatory at the University and he didn't approve of Ezra from the start, though Pound's parents were socially acceptable – his father was assayer at the Philadelphia Mint – and they seemed to approve of Hilda. Hilda's cousin recalled Ezra's first meeting with Hilda's parents; he came with no hat over his wild mass of hair and was the first person her cousin had ever seen wearing tortoiseshell glasses. And 'while 138

WILD PLACES WITHOUT A MAN

had met someone else, but that she was

several of them have 'Sea' and the name

'happy now as I was before – and I know that God is good.'

of a flower in their title. The first one is 'Sea Rose':

Bryher's own first meeting with HD on July 17, 1918 was seismic for both of them. Bryher had read about HD in

Amber husk fluted with gold,

Amy Lowell's books; she had become a great admirer and knew HD's collection

fruit on the sand marked with a rich grain,

Sea Garden of 1916 by heart. The poems in the collection are mostly sea-related,

treasure spilled near the shrub-pines to bleach on the boulders: your stalk has caught root among wet pebbles and drift flung by the sea and grated shells and split conch-shells. Beautiful, wide-spread, fire upon leaf, what meadow yields so fragrant a leaf as your bright leaf?

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Bryher sought out her idol. When she

Bryher if she had seen the puffins in the

found her, Bryher said that Hilda had 'the sea in her eyes' when she opened

Scilly Isles. Bryher asked Hilda if she would go there with her. Bryher had

the door of her Cornwall cottage and said 'in a voice all wind and gull notes, I have been waiting for you'. Hilda asked

arrived at the right time: HD was poverty-stricken, abandoned by both her husband, Richard Aldington, and her lover, Frances Gregg, and pregnant, possibly with DH Lawrence's child. Nobody knows if she had a physical affair with Lawrence – they both burned all their letters to each other – but they were certainly close intellectually and geographically: Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived above her. We know they critiqued each other's manuscripts and often had dinner together; all the rest is speculation. HD fictionalised her relationship with Aldington, DH and Frieda Lawrence in her novel Bid Me to Live, but does not resolve the issue. (HD's daughter Perdita said she believed her father was Cecil Gray: 'I took it for what it was, a brief fling, a spunky retaliation for Richard Aldington's infidelities'.) HD also fictionalised her meeting with Bryher in

140

WILD PLACES WITHOUT A MAN

the novella Paint It Today; HD is Midget

When Hilda met Bryher, Aldington was

and Bryher is Althea, who arrives just after the fictionalised version of HD's

not unhappy, they had an open relationship – the stillborn child she had

former lover Frances Gregg has left her to marry a man (Perdita's first name was Frances) .

with him had put her off sex, at least with men. He wrote to her 'damn it, Dooley I believe in women having all the

'You are not altogether beautiful,'

lovers they want if they're in love with them'. She told him about her new

said Althea, 'but you look alive.'

friend and admirer and on July 28, 1918

'I am alive,' said Midget.

Richard wrote to his 'wild Dryad': Ah, my dear, how sweet and beautiful you are. Of course I will come to you after the war and we will be 'wild & free', and happy 'in the unploughed lands no foot oppresses, The lands that are free being free of man', I love you, best-beloved and dearest among all the daughters of the halfgods. . . You must tell me more about this new admirer of HD. She must be very wise since she can love your poems so much. Has she a name or is she just some belle anonyme? Is she truly of the sacred race or merely

141

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

one to whom it is given to recognise

to the Scilly Isles and live with her she

the gods yet not be of them?

would commit suicide. Hilda agreed, and Bryher nursed her through the

Bryher was certainly not among the gods as a writer, though McAlmon did publish her. Whether or not HD was a

pregnancy, this time resulting on December 13, 1919 in a daughter, Perdita – the lost one – whom the two

goddess of writing is another matter; Pound thought she was, but then she

women brought up together. Ezra

was helping him, along with Amy Lowell, in his promotion of Imagism in poetry. TS Eliot on the other hand certainly didn't think so. On November 17, 1921 he wrote to Aldington: 'I did not conceal from you that I think you overrate HD's poetry. I do find it fatiguingly monotonous and lacking in the element of surprise.' Bryher's real name was Winifred Ellerman and she was the daughter of secretive shipping tycoon John Ellerman, at that time probably the richest Englishman who had ever lived. He had a huge mansion in Central London near to Selfridges where Winifred grew up – she hated it and called it a 'stuffy mansion'. She told Hilda that if she did not come 142

WILD PLACES WITHOUT A MAN

Pound turned up at the hospital in

old Mrs Grumpy. His only problem, he

London the day before Perdita was born, carrying an ebony stick with which

said, was that the child wasn't his. Soon after Perdita was born, Bryher

he pounded the floor. He said he was very happy for her, though he told her that in her black lace cap she looked like

got married. To Robert McAlmon of all people. It's hard to imagine a more unlikely couple, but all was not what it seemed. They had first met when Hilda contacted her old college friend William Carlos Williams to say that she and a friend were coming to New York en route to Los Angeles, where they were thinking of setting up; would he like to drop round to their hotel for tea? Williams was working with McAlmon on Contact magazine at the time; he asked Bob if he would like to come along. 'Wanna see the old gal?' I asked Bob. 'Sure. Why not?' So one afternoon we decided to take in the show. Same old Hilda, all over the place looking as tall and as skinny as usual. But she had with her a small, dark English girl with piercing, intense eyes, whom I noticed and that was about all. 143

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

'Well, how did you like her?' I asked Bob when we came away. 'Oh, she's all right, I guess,' said

good fortune, I couldn't decide.

Bob. 'But that other one, Bryher, as she was introduced to us – she's something.' The women were leaving

Bryher turned out to be a very good thing financially, not only for McAlmon, but for many of his friends. Sylvia Beach

next day for the coast. Bob was at that moment about to

regularly exchanged letters with her and HD; she spoke to Hilda as a friend, but

ship on a freighter for China and had made the preliminary arrangements. But a card from Bryher changed his plans. After a week they had been fed up in California and were bound back to England and Bob must not do anything, especially not leave New York until Bryher had seen him once more. She arrived in the city shortly after, saw Bob and proposed marriage to him. She turned out to be the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the heaviest taxpayer in England. Bob fell for it. When he told me, I literally felt the tears come to my eyes, whether from the anticipated loss of the man's companionship and the 144

assistance of his talents, or joy for his

WILD PLACES WITHOUT A MAN

when she wrote to Bryher she wrote in

It was in one of the earliest days of

gratitude, as to a patron. There are several letters extant where Sylvia

'Shakespeare and Company' that you came into my bookshop and my life,

thanks Bryher for saving her from financial ruin; in one she even mentions that Bryher's mother, Lady Ellerman,

dear Bryher, and that we became a Protectorate of yours. We might have had the words: 'By Special

had sent a cheque to George Antheil. Many years later, on Bryher's fiftieth

Appointment to Bryher' painted above the door.

birthday Beach wrote to her: When he first met her, McAlmon didn't know – said he didn't know – that Bryher's family was fabulously wealthy; he seemed genuinely to be attracted to her physically. He knew she wasn't just another poor poet though: 'Her family name meant little to me. However, I knew she was connected with great wealth.' At least that was the story that McAlmon, Williams and others told. Morley Callaghan believed it, or at least he didn't believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth: it had been a very nice thing for him to marry a rich girl and get a handsome divorce settlement, but I 145

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

had always believed his story that he

a man. She thought I understood her

hadn't been aware it was to be a marriage in name only; he had

mind, as I do somewhat and faced me with the proposition. Some other

insisted he was willing to be interested in women. And with the money, what did he do? Spend it all

things I shan't mention I knew without realising. Well, you see I took on the proposition.

on himself? No, he became a publisher, he spent the money on

It was a good proposition, for both of

other people he believed in.

them: McAlmon got access to lots of money and a trip to Europe where he

But McAlmon wasn't telling the truth, certainly not the whole truth. Kay Boyle, in her edited version of McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together, prints a letter that he sent to Williams at his home in Rutherford, New Jersey. Then you'd better know this, Bill. I didn't tell you in New York because I thought it wasn't mine to tell. But Bryher doesn't mind. . . The marriage is legal only, unromantic, and strictly an agreement. Bryher could not travel, and be away from home, unmarried. It was difficult being in Greece and other wild places without 146

could meet James Joyce; Bryher got

WILD PLACES WITHOUT A MAN

both a publisher and a husband as a

whom he called 'Hilda Doolittle's infant.

cloak for her relationship with HD. He was presumably not the kind of husband

It had black hair and eyes, and utterly blithe disregard in disposition and at the

her parents would have wanted: a penniless writer taking his clothes off for a living, but he was probably preferable

time looked like a Japanese Empress in miniature.' Note his charming use of the word 'it' rather than 'her'.

to a lesbian lover in the eyes of them and the public. This wasn't

In return, many years later, Perdita (Schaffner as she became) wrote about

cosmopolitan, liberated Paris, this was

McAlmon in her afterword to a 1984

conservative London and New York.

republication of Bid Me to Live:

They were married in New York on February 14, 1921, Valentine's Day –

Bryher's husband Robert McAlmon

Williams and his wife Flossie, Marianne Moore, and the painter Marsden Hartley were at the supper afterwards. They set

turned up from time to time. from Paris. He never stayed long. It was a marriage of convenience; no reason

off for Europe immediately, sharing the bridal suite, for which Sir John Ellerman

why it shouldn't work as well as any other, but it didn't. He and Bryher

had paid. HD went with them. It wasn't entirely a happy family

fought constantly. Realizing that something was awry, I never looked

though: McAlmon was a serial

on him as a father, even though

womaniser and needed conquests. As we saw earlier, he even tried to kiss Adrienne Monnier and got his lip bitten for trying. And though he didn't so much mind Hilda he barely tolerated Perdita,

Bryher was my second mother.

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EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

'I found myself dancing with a lady done up in purple draperies, and she murmured to me that she had read my

Morley Callaghan was a friend and defender of Robert McAlmon but not even Callaghan, himself a very minor writer indeed, thought McAlmon was much of a writer; everyone loved him as a drinking companion, publisher, editor and supporter of writers, but not as a writer. In That Summer in Paris Callaghan quotes a very unkind poem he heard about McAlmon. (Whoever wrote it wasn't much of a writer either.) I'd rather live in Oregon And pack salmon Than live in Nice And write like Robert McAlmon Still, McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together is a wonderful memoir and his novel Village of 1924 did get critical acclaim and the approval of some of his friends. 148

novel, Village, and thought it wonderful. She felt I had really reported life amongst the young and lively. Would I write her autobiography for her? Sure I would, and without even asking who she

I'D RATHER LIVE IN OREGON

was.' She was Isadora Duncan, but she

her scarf was caught in the wheel.

wasn't paying him much of a compliment: she asked a lot of people to

Hemingway wrote to McAlmon from the Austrian Alps that Village was

write her biography. In the end the English novelist Sewell Stokes did it, though her autobiography My Life was

'absolutely first-rate and damned good reading. We've already got it down here and everyone thinks it's a knockout. It is

published in 1927, the year of her death; she famously died in a car on the

swell.' Even Gertrude Stein liked it. 'I find your young people to be as I knew

Promenade des Anglais in Nice when

them and as I know them and America as I know it . . . Like Trollope you ought to write a lot.' But James Joyce didn't think much of McAlmon or his writing. In Being Geniuses Together, McAlmon had painted Joyce as a very heavy drinker; Joyce called it 'the office boy's revenge'. Still, it was McAlmon who introduced Morley Callaghan to Joyce. Callaghan had always been something of a groupie, in awe of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound and especially of Joyce. In That Summer in Paris, Callaghan tells how he and his wife bumped into McAlmon one evening. McAlmon said he was 'having dinner with Jimmy Joyce and his wife at the Trianon. Why don't you join us?' McAlmon was immediately nervous; he 149

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

had heard from Hemingway about

none of his jokes made his wife laugh

Joyce's reputation for not wanting to talk to strangers and especially not

out loud, and I was reminded of McAlmon's story that she had once

wanting to talk about anybody else's work. But, unexpectedly, Joyce was quite garrulous and very welcoming.

asked the author of the comic masterpiece Ulysses, 'Jimmy, have we a book of Irish humour in the house?'

Callaghan describes meeting the great man.

When McAlmon, who had been drinking heavily (as he often did; he really didn't

His courtly manner made it easy for us to sit down, and his wife, large bosomed with a good-natured face, offered us a massive motherly ease. They were both so unpretentious it became impossible for me to resort to Homeric formalities. I couldn't even say, 'Sir, you are the greatest writer of our time,' for Joyce immediately became too chatty, too full of little bits of conversation, altogether unlike the impression we had been given of him. His voice was soft and pleasant. His humour, to my surprise, depended on puns. Even in the little snips of conversation, he played with words lightly. However, 150

I'D RATHER LIVE IN OREGON

have any right to call Joyce a heavy

has a talent, a real talent; but it is a

drinker), went to the bathroom, Joyce leaned across the table and asked

disorganised talent'. McAlmon returned, and Joyce stopped in the middle of what

Callaghan what he thought of McAlmon's work. Callaghan was amazed that Joyce would ask him about anyone

he was saying. Callaghan wanted to laugh; he thought: 'how had the story got around that the man wouldn't talk

else's work. He said that McAlmon wrote too fast and didn't take enough

about another writer?' Callaghan noticed that McAlmon had washed his face and

time with his work. Joyce replied, 'he

combed his hair. 'When with people he respected he would not let himself get incoherently drunk; he would go to the washroom; there he would put his finger down his throat, vomit, then wash his face, comb his hair and return sober as an undertaker.' It was now about 10 o'clock. Turning to his wife, Joyce used the words I remember so well. 'Have we still got that bottle of whiskey in the house, Nora?' 'Yes, we have,' she said. 'Perhaps Mr and Mrs Callaghan would like to drink it with us.' Would we? My wife said we would indeed and I hid my excitement and 151

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

elation. An evening at home with the

one could interrupt McAlmon. Mrs

Joyces, and Joyce willing to talk and gossip about other writers while we

Joyce seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for sitting motionless and

killed a bottle! Stories about Yeats, opinions about Proust! What would he say about Lawrence? Of

looking interested. The day would come, I thought bitterly, when I would be able to tell my children I had sat one night

Hemingway? Did he know about Fitzgerald's work? It all danced wildly

with Joyce listening to McAlmon talking about his grandmother.' To shut him up,

in my head as we left the restaurant.

Nora put on a record of Aimee Semple McPherson preaching a sermon.

When they got to Joyce's apartment, Joyce explained that the lift was too small for them all and they would have to use it in shifts. The three men got in together. 'No one spoke. Out of the long silence, with the three of us jammed together, came a little snicker from Joyce. "Think what a loss to English literature if the lift fails and the three of us are killed," he said dryly.' Callaghan couldn't wait to quiz Joyce about literature but Joyce just wanted to talk about the movies. Then something reminded McAlmon about his grandmother, and for the next half hour they listened to him talk about her. 'No 152

I'D RATHER LIVE IN OREGON

McAlmon was silenced. Joyce looked at

McAlmon didn't get the joke. He

McAlmon and his wife, who knew what the game was. 'He brightened and

thought that he and Joyce were close friends, and that Joyce respected him.

chuckled. Then Mrs Joyce, who had also kept her eyes on us, burst out laughing herself. Nothing had to be explained.

They had first met in 1920. McAlmon had a note of introduction from Harriet Weaver of the Egoist Press, which had

Grinning mischievously, in enormous satisfaction with his small success, Joyce

published Explorations, a book of McAlmon's poetry. He knew Dubliners

poured us another drink.'

and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and had read the extracts from Ulysses that were being published in Little Review. It was Weaver's money that was allowing Joyce to finish writing Ulysses, so her introduction was very valuable. At his place on the Boulevard Raspail I was greeted by Mrs Joyce, and although there was a legend that Joyce's eyes were weak, it was evident that he had used eyesight in choosing his wife. She was very pretty, with a great deal of simple dignity and a reassuring manner. Joyce finally appeared, having just got up from bed. Within a few minutes it was obvious that he and I would get 153

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

on. Neither of us knew anybody

sake, and Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy

much in Paris, and both of us like companionship. As I was leaving he

had come with me. The girls were very adoring towards Joyce, the master.'

suggested that we have dinner that night, and we did meet at eight for an aperitif and later went to dine.

Joyce was in one of his sombre moods, he 'enjoyed a thoroughly Irish period of sorrow and melancholy. The women

Subsequently Joyce read excerpts of

tried to comfort him, but he preferred drink.' Everyone eventually left, leaving

Ulysses to McAlmon – 'probably about a

him and Joyce alone in the bar until they

third of the book'. It was impressive to observe how everything was grist to his mill. He was constantly leaping upon phrases and bits of slang which came naturally from my American lips, and one night, when he was slightly excited, he wept a bit while explaining his love or infatuation for words. McAlmon implies that it was Joyce who started him drinking, though this does seem unlikely. He tells the story about one night when 'Joyce, his friends and I were at the Gypsy Bar, for old times' 154

I'D RATHER LIVE IN OREGON

were kicked out around five in the

story. He also tells a story of having

morning. McAlmon got Joyce into a taxi and carried him up to his room. Nora

dinner with Joyce and William Carlos Williams and his wife Flossie the year

told her husband off, saying 'you've been bringing your drunken companions to me too long, and now you've started

they visited Paris together:

McAlmon in the same way.' At least, that was McAlmon's version of the

Before Williams and Florence headed towards the south of France there was a party at the Trianon, then the restaurant at which Joyce always dined. Mina Loy, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Kathleen Cannell, Laurence and Clotilde Vail [Laurence subsequently had an affair with Djuna Barnes, married Peggy Guggenheim and then Kay Boyle, we will be meeting him again], in all some twenty people were there. Williams had expected Joyce to be perhaps more staidly the great man of letters, but Joyce had been having apéritifs and dearly loves a party. He wanted there to be singing, preferably of Irish songs in an Irish tenor voice. He wanted general hilarity. Williams wanted these too,

155

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

but he also wanted there to be

mother's side and the Norsemen had

profound discussion, one gathered.

played a great part in Irish history. We were all drinking white wine

Williams himself tells his own version of the dinner with Joyce in his autobiography: And so for the event of the evening,

beyond onto the table until she moved her glass into a position to

supper with James and Nora Joyce, at

catch it and so save the day.

the only place at which Joyce would

As we started to drink another

eat, the Trianon. Joyce was not a tall man. He had

round, Bob McAlmon, who may have been a little tight, proposed, 'Here's

a small, compressed head, straight nose and no lips, and spoke with a distinct, if internationalised, Irish

to sin!' Joyce looked up suddenly. 'I won't drink to that,' he said.

accent. He would take no hard liquor, only white wine, a mild white wine,

So Bob took it back with a laugh and we all sipped our wine again

because of his eyes. He was almost blind from glaucoma. It was a

silently. . . Joyce invited Floss to come up to his flat someday to help him

wonderful evening. Nora, a sturdy

struggle, as he did with great pains,

one, hardly said a word. Joyce, who was working at that time on the early Dublin parts of Finnegans Wake, was particularly anxious to talk with Floss because

over words of the ancient language. She never followed it up.

she was Norse-speaking on her 156

out of courtesy to Joyce, who, as he talked, went to fill Flossie's glass; but his aim was poor, the wine going

WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

Freytag-Loringhoven, whom Margaret Anderson called 'the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet

Having married the daughter of the richest-ever Englishman, Robert McAlmon could now give up his career as a nude model. Even after the divorce

extraordinary', never did. That was how George Biddle first encountered her, as he recounts in An American Artist's Story: I met her in my Philadelphia studio one gusty, rainswept morning in the

he still got so much money from the Ellerman coffers that his friends called him 'McAlimony'. But another struggling

spring of 1917, a few weeks before I

artist in America, the Baroness Elsa von

harsh, high-pitched German stridency, whether I required a model, I told her that I should like to see her in the

enlisted in the Officers' Training Camp. Having asked me, in her

nude. With a royal gesture she swept apart the folds of a scarlet raincoat. She stood before me quite naked – or nearly so. Over the nipples of her breasts were two tin tomato cans, fastened with a green string about her back. Between the tomato cans hung a very small bird-cage and within it a crestfallen canary. One arm was covered from wrist to shoulder with celluloid curtain rings, 157

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

which later she admitted to have

19, 1913 in New York. The Baron was

pilfered from a furniture display in Wanamaker's. She removed her hat,

summoned back to Germany to serve in the armed forces in 1914 but shot

which had been tastefully but inconspicuously trimmed with gilded carrots, beets and other vegetables.

himself instead. 1913 was the year of the Armory Show in New York, the first time Americans had been exposed to

Her hair was close-cropped and died vermillion.

avant-garde European art. The Baroness's friend Marcel Duchamp's

The Baroness appeared to be about forty. She had the body of a Greek ephebe, with small firm breasts, narrow hips and long smooth shanks. Her face was lined. Her eyes were blue-white and frightening in their expression. Her smile was a frozen, devouring rictus. I bade her be seated and offered her a cigarette, while I continued working. The Baroness was the very embodiment of dada, arguably the only true dada presence in New York. She was born Else Hildegard Plötz in Germany in 1874 and became the Baroness through marriage, her second, to Baron Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven on November 158

Nude Descending a Staircase was famously derided as 'an explosion in a

WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

single factory' but the exhibition

York life for various newspapers. Barnes

signalled the beginning of the avantgarde in New York, later moving to the

describes first seeing the Baroness getting out of a taxi in an early piece of

rest of America. Djuna Barnes – whom Sylvia Beach described as 'so charming, so Irish, and

journalism, 'How the Villagers Amuse Themselves', published November 26, 1916:

so gifted' – is now most famous as the author of Nightwood, but before she

with seventy black and purple anklets

wrote that she was a reporter on New

clanking about her secular feet, a foreign postage stamp – canceled – perched upon her cheek; a wig of purple and gold caught roguishly up with strands from a cable once used to moor importations from far Cathay; red trousers – and catch the subtle, dusty perfume blown back from her – an ancient human notebook on which has been written all the follies of a past generation. Margaret Anderson said that the Baroness didn't appreciate Barnes' work at first. 'I cannot read your stories, Djuna Barnes, she said. I don't know where your characters come from. You make them fly on magic carpets – what 159

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

is worse, you try to make pigs fly.' But

the Dice] and the quaintly erotic imagery

the Baroness came round in her later years; when everyone else had grown

of Breton, Eluard and Aragon. Above all, they reflect the expressionist poems of

tired of her and the chaos she spread all around herself, Barnes looked after and protected the Baroness for two years in

her German near-contemporary, and near-namesake: Else Lasker-Schüler. But no one else was writing, or was to write

Paris, becoming her patron and protector and later her biographer and

such things in English, except perhaps Joyce; his Pomes Penyeach, which we will

literary executor. In fact, we only have

see more of later, are early examples.

the Baroness's works today because

Here is one of the Baroness's poems

Barnes preserved them for us; she never lived long enough in one place or cared

[images of all the Baroness' surviving works can be found on the web in her

enough about material things to keep her work safe; dada is by nature transitory, and she was living dada. Her

online archive, held by the University of Maryland]:

poems were all handwritten on any scraps of paper she could find, and often illustrated with her drawings; they are more than poems, they are art works in themselves. They prefigure the wordcombining and neologising of Paul Celan, who wrote in her native language, German, and echo the futurist cries of Tzara and Marinetti, the experimental layouts of Apollinaire's Calligrammes or Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés [A Throw of 160

WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

DESIRE WILL THINE LOINS BETWEEN WORLD WHIRRLS POPULATED SUNSTAR LONE! ONE LIMPID DROP CRYSTAL POTENCY – ALL: FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER MATE BEGINNING END – WAS NEVER

BE IS: OMNIPOTENTLY VAST IMMEASURABLE! THINESELF LONE ALONE DESIROUS FOR MINE RADIANT COUNTENANCE’S DAZZLE!

I– SUN UNPERISHABLE GODSELF LIFE –

- DEATH – - ONE - - IN HUMANITY TIRED 161

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

162

LONE –

MATE

AM!

FAMILY - - -

SHAPE

KISS –

THEE –

MINE –

ME –

- THINESELF –

LET!

WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

Unlike Barnes and most of her circle,

It was painted on a bit of celluloid and was

the Baroness was not a lesbian but a rampant and very aggressive

at once a portrait of, and an apostrophe to, Marcel Duchamp. His face was indicated

heterosexual. She pursued all the men she found artistically attractive, including Wallace Stevens, who said he didn't dare

by an electric bulb shedding icicles, with large pendulous ears and other symbols. 'You see, he is so tremendously in

go below 14th Street in case he met her, and Marcel Duchamp, who may have left America to escape her. On

love with me,' she said. I asked: 'and the ears?' She shuddered: 'Genitals – the

their first meeting she showed George

emblems of his frightful and creative

Biddle one of her 'color poems'.

potency.' 'And the incandescent electric bulb?' She curled her lip at me in scorn. 'Because he is so frightfully cold. You see all his heat flows into his art. For that reason, although he loves me, he would never even touch the hem of my red oilskin slicker. Something of his dynamic warmth – electrically – would be dissipated through the contact.' Duchamp appreciated the Baroness's art – he said she 'is not a futurist. She is the future' – but he was scared of rather 163

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

than in love with her, as were most of

I knew she was suffering agony. I

the men she pursued so vigorously. When they spurned her, she spurned

shrugged my shoulders and said: 'Why not, Elsa?'

them in her poetry; in one poem she says 'When I was / Young – foolish – / I loved Marcel Dushit'. She was by no

She smiled faintly, emerging from her nightmare. Enveloping me slowly, as a snake would its prey, she glued

means young by this time – she was born in 1874 – and not physically

her wet lips on mine. I was shaking all over when I left the dark stairway

attractive to men, though her lesbian

and came out on 14th Street.

female circle were perhaps more attracted to her. And because much of the time she slept on park benches, she didn't bathe very often and didn't smell very good close up. Biddle remembered getting rather too close to her. As I stood there, partly in admiration yet cold with horror, she stepped close to me so that I smelt her filthy body. An expression of cruelty, yet of fear, spread over her tortured face. She looked at me through her bluewhite crazy eyes. She said: 'You are afraid to let me kiss you.'

164

WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

Williams he was shocked by 'the jagged edge of La Baronne's broken incisor' on his lip and the way 'a reek stood out purple from her body.' And of course, the way she dressed, as a walking dada sculpture, was hardly likely to be seductive to men: even the most avantgarde male artists seem to have had conventional sexual tastes. Among the men who did not find her even slightly seductive was Hart Crane, future author of The Bridge, though he was gay; Crane will reappear at length in this story. In a letter of January 14, 1921, while he was living in Cleveland, he mentions her: I hear 'New York' has gone mad about 'Dada' and that a most exotic and worthless review is being concocted by Man Ray and Duchamp, billets in a bag printed backwards, on rubber deluxe, et cetera. What next! This is worse than The Baroness. By the way I like the way the discovery has suddenly been made that she has all along been, When she tried to kiss William Carlos 165

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

unconsciously a Dadaist. I cannot

She saluted Jane with a detached

figure out just what Dadaism is beyond an insane jumble of the four

How do you do, but spoke no further and began strolling about the room,

winds, the six senses, and plum pudding. But if the Baroness is to be a keystone for it, – but I think I can

examining the bookshelves. She wore a red Scotch plaid suit with a kilt hanging just below the knees, a

possibly know when it is coming and avoid it.

bolero jacket with sleeves to the elbows and arms covered with a quantity of 10-cent-store bracelets –

However, if men didn't like her, the

silver, gilt, bronze, green and yellow.

masculine, cross-dressing Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson's partner before she

She wore high white spats with a

met Georgette Leblanc, seems to have been attracted to her, if not vice versa. She was certainly attracted to the Baroness's work and regularly placed it in Little Review. Elsa dedicated a poem to the 'Fieldadmarshmiralshall jh' and Jane undoubtedly marshalled support for her. Heap was in the Little Review offices when the Baroness first appeared in early 1918 to check on a poem she had submitted to them. Margaret Anderson remembers her entrance:

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WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

band of decorative furniture braid

high peasant buttons filled with shot.

around the top. Hanging from her bust were two tea-balls from which

Her hair was the colour of a bay horse.

the nickel had worn away. On her head was a black velvet tam o'shanter with a feather and several

Despite her appearance, her odour and her consistent lack of success, she

spoons – long ice-cream-soda spoons. She had enormous earrings of

persistently tried to seduce men, in particular William Carlos Williams

tarnished silver and on her hands

(WCW), who had made the mistake of

were many rings, on the little finger

being nice to her. He immediately backed off but she wouldn't give up. Williams remembers first meeting the Baroness's work at Anderson and Heap's apartment: a piece of sculpture that appeared to be chicken guts, possibly imitated in wax. It caught my eye. I was told it was the work of a titled German woman, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a fabulous creature, well past fifty, who the Little Review was protecting. Would I care to meet her, for she was crazy, it was said, about my work.

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EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

He would. He wrote, as he says, 'fatally,

artwork; happily-married family man and

to Margaret and Jane, saying I wanted to meet the woman.' At that time she was

sexually-rapacious free woman.

in prison for stealing an umbrella. He met her on her release, on Sixth Avenue near Eighth Street and promised to see

William Carlos Williams, one of our contributors, had found her poetry interesting and had called to tell her

her again soon; he thought that she 'had perhaps been beautiful'. When they met

so. Incidentally he took her a basket of peaches. They talked. The

again she didn't waste any time in telling

Baroness found him charming and

him her intentions: she had an intimate talk with me and advised me that what I needed to make me great was to contract syphilis from her and so free my mind for serious art. She was a protégée of Marcel Duchamp. She sent me a photo of herself, 8 x 10, nude, a fine portrait, said to have been taken by him – a picture I kept in my trunk for years. Margaret Anderson also remembers the first meeting of the two very different poets; suburban doctor and living dada

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WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

fell violently in love with him.

letter to Little Review, for Anderson and

Williams didn't want her in love with him and became thoroughly

Heap to publish; 'I will get this man' she said. In her covering note she said she

frightened at the avalanche. . . She didn't give up her struggle for Williams until she had frightened

wrote the letter to Williams because 'it tells – the strange thing between this man and myself'. It wasn't published but

him to the point of planning an escape to Europe.

it was filed away and still exists in the Little Review papers. It went, in part:

The Baroness started to send Williams

Why are you so small – Carlos

love letters. She sent a fifteen-page open

Williams? Why do not trust me – to help you? . . You love me and hate me. You desire me. In truth: you envy me! . . Passion is humbleness – desire for self-destruction – to die for beauty – to sacrifice all – for God's sake! That is in truth – what sex intercourse is! Williams was not interested in selfdestruction, especially when 'that damned woman' threatened to show the love letters around at his hospital if he didn't sleep with her. The appalled Williams said she pursued him for years while 'all the old gals of Greenwich 169

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

Village were backing her: coal scuttle on

Sanders, to Margaret Anderson that

head on Fifth Avenue, black mother Hubbard with moons cut out front and

referred to the pair of them. She published them on May 31, 1921, to sit

back for ready reference. Her attacks were persistent to a point where it concerned me seriously.'

alongside the second instalment of 'Hamlet of Wedding Ring'.

In March 1921, Little Review published 'Thee I call "Hamlet of Wedding Ring"', an experimental prose poem by the Baroness which was also a review of Williams' recent book Kora in Hell, itself a series of experimental prose poems. She called him 'Carlos Williams – you wobbly-legged business satchel-carrying little louse' who was 'shackled to cowardice of immobility – American mistake of dense vulgar brains rendering W. C's legs immovable – agonised arms out – thrust – vile curse of helpless rage on sneering lip distorted – doomed to torture'. Ezra Pound liked the Baroness's poetry, as you might expect, and relished her quarrel with his old college mate Williams. He sent two dada poems of his own, under his pseudonym Abel 170

WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

To Bill Williams and Else von Johann

Whether out of fear over her blackmail

Wolfgang Loringhoven y Fulano Codsway Bugwash

threats, pity or love – he did say 'I was really crazy about the woman' –

Bill's Way backwash FreytagElse ¾ arf an'arf Billy Sunday one harf Kaiser Bill one

Williams eventually went to see Elsa and gave her some money. He was shocked by the state of the 'slum room where

harf Elseharf Suntag, Billsharf Freitag

she lived with her two small dogs, I saw them at it on her dirty bed.' But then

Brot wit thranen, con Plaisir ou con

she went too far: she pursued him to his

patae Pomodoro Bill dago resisting U.Sago, Else ditto on the verb

home in Rutherford, New Jersey. Robert McAlmon was at the Williams' house for dinner when Williams received a phone call asking him to attend to a sick baby. Margaret Anderson heard what happened: 'She went to New Jersey to the suburban town where he lived and installed herself in his car which was usually standing at the curb on spring nights to take him on emergency calls – Williams being also a doctor. One night he came out to rush to a maternity case and found the Baroness romantically waiting in the front seat.' But there was no maternity case; the Baroness had got someone to call him just to get him out 171

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

of the house. As Williams went to get

stiff punch to the mouth. I thought

into his car, she grabbed him by the wrist. Williams continues the story:

she was going to stick a knife in me. I had her arrested, she shouting,

'You must come with me,' she said in her strong German accent. I was taken aback, as may easily be imagined, and nonplussed besides, because – well, she was a woman. It ended as she hauled off and hit me alongside the neck with all her strength. She had had some little squirt of a male accomplice call me from supper for this. I just stood there thinking. But at that moment a cop happened to walk by. 'What's the matter, Doc, this woman annoying you?' 'No,' I said, and she lit out down the street. 'Let her go.' I bought a small punching bag after that to take it out on in the cellar, and the next time she attacked me, about six o'clock one evening on Park Avenue a few months later, I flattened her with a 172

'What are you in this town? Napoleon?' Much later, in a 1950s interview reprinted in I Wanted to Write a Poem,

WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

Williams' memory of her was still vivid,

pounced on it: "you know what that

if a bit faded. He had published a volume of poetry in 1921 called Sour Grapes.

mean – you are a disappointed man" – as if she had made a brilliant discovery.'

When discussing it with the interviewer, especially its title, he said: 'I remember one woman, a notorious Baroness who

In May 1924 Ernest Hemingway took up the Baroness's work; he was at that time assistant editor on Ford Madox

lived in a filthy apartment in Greenwich Village. When she saw the title she

Ford's transatlantic review. Ford remembers her with distaste in his memoir It Was the Nightingale of 1933. Mr Hemingway soon became my assistant editor. As such he assisted me by trying to insert as a serial the complete works of Baroness Elsa von Freitag-Loringhofen [sic]. I generally turned round in time to take them out of the contents table. But when I paid my month's visit to New York he took charge and accomplished his purpose. Hemingway placed the Baroness's work prominently in the opening pages, following poems by Bryher, now Robert McAlmon's wife. It has been suggested that Hemingway might have done this to 173

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

embarrass Williams, whom he met on

turned the gas jet on in her room while

May 15, 1924 in Paris. But he may also have been influenced by Ezra Pound,

she was sleeping. That's the story.' That's Williams' story but isn't the

who wanted to see her published and by his rather unlikely friendship with Jane Heap. At that time Hemingway was a

only version; many people thought she had killed herself. Shortly before her death in Berlin, the Baroness wrote

keen amateur boxer and had been trying to teach Ezra to box; fortunately for the

letters to Djuna Barnes intended for publication that were fundamentally

Baroness she didn't pursue Hemingway:

suicide notes. They were published in

he could have hit her harder than Williams. Hemingway and Heap were as unlikely a pair as Hemingway and Stein, they had been going to boxing matches together and he recalled in A Moveable Feast one particular Saturday night when he, his wife Hadley, Ezra Pound, Jane Heap and Robert McAlmon saw five bouts together. After the incident with Williams the Baroness was released from prison upon promising not to do it again. Later he gave her $200 to leave the country but she said the money was stolen and he had to give her more. She left, according to Williams 'only to be playfully killed by some French jokester, it is said, who 174

WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

Little Review and in transition, which

Before she died she had moved back to

described them as 'the saddest and most beautiful letters in English literature'.

Germany. The Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay, whose Harlem Shadows

I will probably – yes, yes, yes, probably have to die. When life is

was published in 1922 met her there and recorded his sad meeting with her. He had known her in New York when he

not, one has to die . . . I cannot anymore conceive of the idea of a

was a co-editor of the Liberator and published her poems; perhaps he felt

decent artist existence for me, and

extra sympathy for her because he too

another is not possible.

had at one time 'been posing naked in Paris Studios to earn my daily bread.' He talks fondly about her in his autobiography A Long Way From Home: The delirious verses of the Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven titillated me even as did her crazy personality. She was a constant visitor to see me, always gaudily accoutred in rainbow raiment, festooned with barbaric beads and spangles and bangles, and toting along her inevitable poodle in gilded harness. She had such a precious way of petting the poodle with a slap and ejaculating, 'Hund-bitch.' 175

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

She was a model, and in a

It was a sad rendezvous. The

marvellous German-English she said 'Mein features not same, schön, but

Baroness in Greenwich Village, arrayed in gaudy accoutrements, was

mein back, gut. The artists love to paint it.' The Baroness's back was indeed a natural work of art.

a character. Now, in German homespun, she was just a poor pitiful frau. She said she had come to

There is a wonderful photograph of

Germany to write because the cost of living was cheap there. But she

them together; they are both in fancy

complained that she had been

dress, McKay looking quietly terrified as the Baroness leans on him and stares at him with what may well be lust. McKay was gay and black but that would not put off the Baroness. When he saw her in Berlin years later, she was reduced to an even greater state of poverty than in New York. I met again the Baroness von FreytagLoringhoven, selling newspapers in the street. Our meeting surprised both of us. We talked a little, but she had to sell her newspapers, for she said her rent was overdue. So we made a rendezvous for the next evening at the Romanischer Café. 176

WE ALL CALLED HER THE BARONESS

ditched. She didn't make it clear by

professed a liking for me, because of

whom or what. So instead of writing she was crying news. She wished that

my poetry, he said he had plenty of money and was always treating me

she was back in New York, she said. I was accompanied by an American student lad whom I had met at the

to more drinks than were good for me. I told him that the Baroness was a real poet and that he might give

American Express office. He came from one of the Western cities. He

her a couple of dollars. He generously produced five and we were all very happy for it. McKay's act of kindness, or one like it, may have accidentally caused her death. Janet Flanner wrote about the death of Baroness in a 1927 piece for the New Yorker that is reprinted in her memoir Paris Was Yesterday. 'The recent demise is announced in Paris of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag von Loringhoven, aged fifty-two.' Flanner notes that the Baroness was 'notable for the perfection of her torso' and the 'friendly painters for whom she represented the consummate model.' Her life, whether in Greenwich Village, Paris, or Berlin, was spent in 177

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

poverty, adventures, liberty, logic, and

comfortable quarters she had

eccentricities. When modern art first came to

recently known, she and her little dog were asphyxiated by gas in the night,

Fifth Avenue she shaved, painted and varnished her handsome head as part of a new movement. Not long ago

both victims of a luxury they had gone too long without.

she appeared on the terrace of the Café des Deux Magots in a hat

Possibly the five dollars that McKay's student friend gave the Baroness paid

trimmed with a large watch and

for the gas that killed her.

chain. Always pro-French, she once called, in honor of her birthday, on the French consul in Berlin with her birthday cake and its lighted candles poised on her superb skull. A woman reared to epicureanism, after the Bolshevik Revolution and the loss of what was left of her fortune, she sold newspapers in Unter den Linden. Installed, through the kindness of Parisian friends, in the first

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IT IS TOO LATE FOR ME TO HELP YOU

and some of the magazines he was representing. At that time Pound was acting as secretary to WB Yeats, who

Ezra Pound and James Joyce started

had recommended Joyce to him. There is a photograph of a meeting where Pound (third from right), Yeats, (third

their relationship when Pound wrote on 15 December, 1913 to introduce himself

from left), Richard Aldington (on Pound’s right) and three other poets

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EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

rented a car from Harrods for £5 and

darkened room, was reading by

drove from London to the house in West Sussex of the poet Wilfrid Scawen

candlelight to a small, a very small gathering of his protégés, maybe five

Blunt (in the centre), who was married to Lord Byron’s granddaughter, to eat a peacock.

or six young men and women, members of the Abbey Theatre group. He paid no attention whatever

William Carlos Williams, who of course had been friends with Pound

to us as we entered and seated ourselves, but went on reading;

since they met at college, said that Pound 'gave Yeats a hell of a bawling out for some of his inversions and other archaisms of style and, incredibly, Yeats turned over all his scripts of the moment to Pound that Pound might correct them. That is not imagination but fact. Yeats learned tremendously from Pound's comments.' Williams had earlier been present at Pound's first meeting with Yeats, along with Pound's future wife Dorothy Shakespear and her mother, Yeats' mistress; he recorded his memories of the meeting in his autobiography: It was a studio atmosphere, very hushed. We tiptoed in. Yeats, in a 180

IT IS TOO LATE FOR ME TO HELP YOU

reading, of all things, Ernest

remained a few additional moments

Dowson's 'Cynara' – in a beautiful voice, I must say, but it was not my

with the great man while we waited. That was in 1910.

dish. After a while, never even having been greeted, we got up to leave.

On the subject of Pound's wife Dorothy Shakespear: Pound had met her mother

Nobody had noticed our presence up to that point, as I remember, but as

Olivia first, at a literary salon in Kensington, London. They seem to have

we were practically at the door Yeats

been attracted to each other, though

called out, 'was that Ezra Pound who

Olivia was twenty years older than Ezra.

was here?' We had already rounded a corner

She invited him to tea, where he met Dorothy. She wrote about him in her

of the corridor. 'Yes,' someone told him, 'that was Ezra Pound.' 'Tell him to wait a moment, I'd

diary for that day, February 16, 1909.

like to speak to him.' The rest of us went out, Ezra returned and

Listen to it — Ezra! Ezra! And a third time — Ezra! He has a wonderful, beautiful face, a high forehead, prominent over the eyes; a long delicate nose, with little, red, nostrils; a strange mouth, never still & quite elusive; a square chin, slightly cleft in the middle — the whole face pale; the eyes grey-blue; the hair golden-brown, and curling in soft wavy crinkles. Large grotesque eyes,

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EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

with long, well-shaped fingers and

boy who belongs to your clan more

beautiful nails.

than to mine and more still to himself. But he has all the

They finally married in 1914. Dorothy stayed with Ezra until his death, despite his fifty-year affair with Olga Rudge and

intellectual equipment, culture and education which all our other clever friends here lack. And I think writes

despite losing most of her money – she followed his advice and invested in

amazingly well in prose though I believe he also writes verse and is

Mussolini's Fascist regime in the early

engaged in writing a comedy which

1930s – and her reputation when Pound

he expects will occupy him five years

was arrested in 1945 for issuing enemy propaganda and incarcerated in a mental hospital. James Joyce's own first meeting with Yeats in 1902 is legendary. A mutual friend, George Russell, had said to Yeats: 'The first spectre of the new generation has appeared. His name is Joyce. I have suffered from him and I would like you to suffer.' Russell wrote to Yeats: I want you very much to meet a young fellow named Joyce who I wrote to Lady Gregory about half jestingly. He is an extremely clever 182

IT IS TOO LATE FOR ME TO HELP YOU

or thereabouts as he writes slowly. . .

unannounced. They went to the

Anyhow I think you would find this youth of 21 with his assurance and

smoking room of a nearby restaurant together. Joyce had a lot more in

self-confidence rather interesting. Joyce's self-assurance was such that he

common with Yeats than with Proust; he had certainly read a lot more of his work and could quote much of it by

resisted Yeats' invitation to come to his hotel, instead knocking on his door

heart. But despite the fact that both created myths about Ireland in their work, the two men were opposite in so many ways: the Protestant Yeats revelling in the timeless beauties of the countryside versus the Catholic Joyce rejoicing in the contemporary ugliness of the city. The distinguished elder poet asked the younger man to read some of his poems. Joyce did but he said 'I attach no more importance to your opinion than to anybody one meets on the street.' Like Pound, Joyce didn't feel any need to show respect to Yeats' age or reputation, just a deep knowledge and intelligent opinions of his work; to Joyce that was the greatest respect one writer could give another. When Yeats told Joyce that his own work was moving in a 183

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

more experimental direction, Joyce said

very problematical bond on

'Ah, that shows how rapidly you are deteriorating'. His famous last words on

introduction.

parting with Yeats at that first meeting were, according to different reports, either: 'We have met too late. You are

Both men appear in each other's works throughout their lives. Joyce played with the word pound, both in the sense of

too old for me to have any effect on you', or: 'It is too late for me to help

money and in the sense of hitting hard. Ezra turns up in Joyce 'as unbluffingly

you'. Ezra Pound was Yeats' secretary when he sent his first letter to Joyce. It begins 'Mr Yeats has been speaking to me of your writing'. He invites Joyce to send material to him, as a 'collector for a number of literary magazines'. 'As I dont in the least know what your present stuff is like, I can only offer to read what you send'. At the end of the typewritten letter Pound adds in longhand: I am bonae voluntatis, – don't in the least know that I can be of any use to you – or you to me. From what W. B. Y [eats] says I imagine we have a hate or two in common – but that's a 184

IT IS TOO LATE FOR ME TO HELP YOU

blurtubruskblunt as an Esra [arse backwards], the cat' and Joyce turns up in Pound's Cantos, published after Joyce's death in 1941:

at the haunt of Catullus Sylvia Beach 'knew the Pounds' from her

'in fact a small rainstorm . . .

early days in Shakespeare and Company's original premises, in a small street round the corner from Rue de

as it were a mouse, out of cloud's mountain recalling the arrival

l'Odéon; they were among her first visitors. 'They had just moved from

of Joyce et fils

London, obliged to flee, as Mr. Pound explained to me, because the water was creeping up, and they might wake up some morning to find they had web feet.' Dorothy drew for Sylvia a map of the shop's hard to find location, which she signed D Shakespear; Sylvia put it on all her correspondence. On their first meeting Ezra made a similar impression on Sylvia to the one he made on most people, as she recalls in Shakespeare and Company: Mr. Pound looked just as he did in his portraits, the frontispieces in Lustra and Pavannes and Divisions. His costume – the velvet jacket and the open-road shirt – was that of the 185

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

English aesthete of the period. There

needed mending, and he mended a

was a touch of Whistler about him; his language, on the other hand, was

cigarette box and a chair.

Huckleberry Finn's. Mr Pound was not the kind of writer who talks about his, or, for

Later she said 'I saw Mr. Pound seldom. He was busy with his work and his young poets; his music, too. He and

that matter, anyone's books; at least with me. I found the acknowledged

George Antheil were cooking up plans to revolutionise music.' They were.

leader of the modern movement not bumptious. In the course of our conversations, he did boast, but of his carpentry. He asked me if there was anything around the shop that

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his wife Gabrielle Buffet that Margaret Anderson and Georgette Leblanc had invited him to. Pound had been writing

George Antheil first met Ezra Pound,

to Anderson, as editor of Little Review, since 1916 when he first suggested she should come to London and Paris. He

along with the composer Erik Satie, at a tea with the painter Francis Picabia and

continued the correspondence until 1954. His letters to her fill a large volume; many of them are Poundian poems in themselves. Dear Margaret Anderson Don't think me a pig for not enclosing poem at once. The fact is I aint got no pome and I've only one 'story' ready for printing. AND if we are going to coöperate, along the lines of my long letter, which you will have rec'd by now, OR along other lines to be outlined by you in reply, I want to start off the new order of things with a bang. Decent (or indecent) tale by me, something from Eliot, something from Joyce, etc. good wodge of 16 pages of new 'blood'.

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EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

(Pages of blood! wot an

behaviorist laboratory. Ezra's

expresshun.) anyhow, a good cubic hunk of BLAST, to catch edgeways on

agitation was not of the type to which we were accustomed in

the public ivory. Although Pound had been notionally the

America – excitement, pressure, life too high-geared. It gave me somehow the sensation of watching a large

foreign editor of Little Review for some time, he and Anderson did not meet in

baby perform its repertoire of physical antics gravely, diffidently,

person until she and Jane Heap moved

without human responsibility for the

to Paris.

performance . . . Ezra had become fairly patriarchal in his attitude to

He was living in one of those lovely garden studios in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. He was dressed in the large velvet beret and flowing tie of the Latin Quarter artist of the 1830's. He was totally unlike any picture I had formed of him. Photographs had given no idea of his height, his robustness, his red blondeness – could have given no indication of his high Rooseveltian voice, his nervousness, his selfconsciousness. After an hour in his studio I felt that I had been sitting through a human experiment in a 188

AN EXPERT ON GENIUS

women. He kissed them upon the

But he never did grow up, any more

forehead or drew them upon his knee with perfect obliviousness to their

than George Antheil did. George describes meeting a

distaste for these mannerisms. In fact Ezra ran true to form, as the academic type, in everything – as I

Mephistophelian red-bearded gent who turned out to be Ezra Pound.

had anticipated. I am very fond of Ezra. Only it will be more interesting

Preceding my entry, Margaret had given Ezra quite a spiel about me;

to know him when he has grown up.

according to her I was a 'genius,' and Ezra was vastly intrigued by all this, for, as everyone knows, Ezra was at that time the world's foremost discoverer of genius; in fact he frankly called himself 'an expert on genius.' He was unusually kind and gracious to me; and as I left he asked for my address and said that he would someday come around to see me. Ezra turned up early the next morning, in a green coat with blue square buttons; and his red pointed goatee and kinky red hair above flew off from his face in all directions.

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Pound took Antheil to the house of a

words not the words to music and

friend who had a piano. He played for hours, with Ezra's apparent approval.

didn't want it sung by modern, classically-trained opera singers. Pound

Pound asked him if he had written anything about his own views on music. He didn't know at this stage that

didn't know how to notate music and got help from his regular collaborator Agnes Bedford, but after he met Antheil

George had views on everything.

he asked him to look at the orchestration. According to Pound,

I had occasionally amused myself

Antheil approved but made many

with typing out pronunciamentos on

changes to the rhythms, adding micro-

art and music which would have blown the wig off any conventional

rhythms even more advanced and daring

musician; among other things I said that melody did not exist, that rhythm was the next most important thing to developing music and that harmony after all was a matter of what preceded and what followed. Pound was of course not a conventional musician, though he was very knowledgeable and opinionated about music. But Pound had written a kind of opera, Le Testament, to words by the 15th century poet François Villon – Pound said he was setting the music to 190

AN EXPERT ON GENIUS

than Stravinsky's. Antheil told him it

begin. I was with Jane Heap, Djuna

would be twenty years before the public understood it. Robert McAlmon

Barnes, Mina Loy, and Kitty Cannell, and all around us were people we

remembered the Paris performance. Ezra's opera was given in a small

knew well. As the opera got underway I saw TS Eliot slip into a seat in the back row. Mina Loy and

hall, and it was not as well attended as the French affairs or the Swedish

Jane Heap said that they would like to meet him, and I thought surely he

and Russian ballets, but still a sizable

would remain to go behind and greet

audience arrived on time and waited

Ezra, but before the performance

patiently for the performance to

was ended he slipped away as he had come. Perhaps he was living up to his belief that to know people is mainly futile, or perhaps he did not approve of Ezra's music or the Paris congeries, which was certainly very unlike those of London. The singers held our attention far more than most of us had anticipated. Perhaps Ezra had caught the right sort of music to suit Villon's poems. Afterwards, several groups from the audience headed for Le Boeuf sur le Toit, and later went on to Montmartre, and the night was a hilarious one. Ezra's delight in having 191

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

an audience as a composer was, for the time being, flawless. He was, however, no jealous composer, and he arranged various musical affairs at which George Antheil's music was played. The first fully staged performance of Le Testament was not until many years later, on November 13, 1971 in Berkeley California, though the programme gives Antheil no credit for the music. Meanwhile, it was broadcast from London on BBC radio on at 8:45 pm on October 27, 1931 as 'The Testament of François Villon: A Melodrama by Ezra Pound; Words by François Villon; Music by Ezra Pound'. Again, George received no credit but Pound received a large cheque: £50, a lot of money then. The BBC had paid the same amount to William Walton for a half-hour piece. Pound was very proud of his first earnings as a

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composer and wrote to Dorothy on

Fascist speeches from Rome – 120

October 10: 'As to Villon/ . . . Am more concerned

between 1941 and 1943. The Americans weren't amused; as we saw, Pound was

with its being. . . also with chq/ and fact of being paid for a musikal komposition'. Actually the BBC paid the cheque to

arrested after the war. HD remembered Pound's opera in her late memoir of him, End to Torment.

Dorothy to avoid tax; some things don't change. It may have been the BBC

He wrote an opera, Villon, broadcast,

experience that encouraged Pound to

I read, in 1932 [sic] by the BBC. At

do his radio broadcasts from Italy. Ten

least, he hummed tunes or whistled

years later he started broadcasting pro-

them and they must have been transcribed by some musical expert. I did hear Olga Rudge, the accomplished violinist, play some Provençal fragments in London in the early days (I did not pretend to follow them), presumably composed or resurrected by Ezra. He seemed unintimidated by the fact that (to my mind) he had no ear for music and, alas, I suffered excruciatingly from his clumsy dancing. HD's memory is almost correct: two of the songs from Testament were performed at an Antheil/Rudge concert 193

EVERYBODY I CAN THINK OF EVER

at the Salle Pleyel and later at the

book on him was called Antheil and the

Aeolian Hall in London on May 10, 1924. A few weeks after their first meeting,

Theory of Harmony. It is a strange, small book that has a chapter on Antheil and

without any further contact with Pound, Antheil found out through Sylvia Beach that Pound was writing a book about

another on Pound's views, though perhaps one should say George's views, on harmony. In it, Pound portrays

him. 'This scared me.' George couldn't shoot his way out of this one. Pound's

Antheil as the future of music, its saviour even. 'Antheil is probably the

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first artist to use machines, I mean

what I was really after in music. I

actual modern machines, without bathos.' (This is a good point, as we will

don't think he wanted to have. I think he merely wanted to use me as

see when we meet Leon Theremin later.) Pound quotes Antheil's contempt for Stravinsky, his professed

a whip with which to lash out at all those who disagreed with him.

disappointment at how Stravinsky, 'the only man who seemed rhythmically and

Antheil was either being disingenuous or over-estimating his own importance to

musically gifted enough to reorganise

posterity; he said that the book 'did me

the machineries of music' had let down the modern movement, and his preference for Satie: 'In accepting Satie as a master, we see that he [Stravinsky] was nothing but a jolly Rossini'. Ouch. In Pound's view the future of music had not yet arrived but 'Antheil has made a beginning'. As always, Pound wanted to promote Antheil for his own ends. He did publish the book, promoting Antheil as well as, naturally, his own musical wisdom. But George didn't like it, and didn't think that Pound understood his music at all. From the first day I met him Ezra was never to have the slightest idea 195

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no good whatsoever; on the contrary, it

beginning: Monnier let Antheil compose

sold the most active distaste for the very mention of the name Antheil'. But

it on the piano in her apartment. They first heard it on a player piano at Pleyel's

in fact the only way most people know the name Antheil these days is because of Pound's book. George did however

– Antheil thought it would be impossible for a human to play on the piano. Pound then organised a private concert at the

acknowledge that Pound had introduced him to some of the most important

Salle Pleyel where his and Antheil's compositions would be played. Beach

artistic figures in Paris, especially Jean Cocteau, and got commissions for him, particularly the violin sonatas for Olga Rudge, later the mother of Pound's daughter Mary. Pound and Cocteau were both involved in the realisation of Antheil's most famous work, Ballet Mécanique, the scene of another riot, this time in Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1927. It was scored for 'eight grand pianos, to say nothing of the xylophones, percussion and whatnot' and first performed privately in Paris; the Carnegie Hall performance had even more pianos and an aeroplane propeller. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier had also been involved from the 196

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and Monnier were there, sitting with

The concert started late because

James Joyce and his son Giorgio. TS Eliot, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap,

Antheil had to get a moth hole in his jacket repaired and it became rowdy

Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway were also there, along with what Beach called 'the entire crowd'. But this time

straightaway. According to Beach, people were 'punching each other in the face, you heard the yelling but you didn't

the riot wasn't staged.

hear a note of the Ballet Mécanique'. The aeroplane propeller apparently blew the wig off one man's head and took it all the way to the back of the theatre; 'men turned up their coat collars, the women drew their wraps around them; it was quite chilly'. As Beach says, 'from a Dada point of view, one couldn't have anything better'. A year after the Carnegie Hall concert William Carlos Williams wrote about the critics' response.

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Every major musical critic of New

in their 'spotty' correspondence Pound

York reacted unintelligently to Antheil's first presentation of his

had 'continued to emphasise that I no longer knew what I was doing'. One of

compositions. . . I do not mean that they reacted stupidly, for they were shrewd in listening to and sensing the

their last meetings was in Vienna. George was having a coffee with Böski in a cafe when Pound walked by. They

immediate expressions of feeling among certain of the audience rather

yelled at him and Pound came over and sat down, though not, according to

than to have paid attention to what

George without a slight hesitation.

was going on from within the limits

George tried to convince Ezra that he

of the musical problem itself confronting them. I mean they found

was 'through with neoclassicism' but Ezra was 'on vacation and wanted fun',

nowhere in their minds an apposite thing to say musically about the object for criticism, nothing of

not serious musical discussions. Pound's idea of fun was 'flaying writers' but

importance, so that their 'columns' in the papers the next morning were totally blank to a person seeking musical information concerning the event. They completely failed to place, musically, what had gone on. Antheil and Pound were more or less estranged after the book was published. Antheil said Pound had walked out on his symphony concert in Paris and that 198

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George didn't think that any writers

uncle, also called Schnitzler, and got

Pound would deem worthy of a flaying would live in Vienna. Böski 'piped up

uncle Arthur's phone number. She called him.

quite unexpectedly: "Would you like to visit Schnitzler? He's some sort of uncle of mine"'. George didn't know that Böski

'I am married,' Böski explained into the phone, 'to a mad American

was related to the famous, even infamous playwright Arthur Schnitzler;

husband who has a poet friend who is even madder. We all want to come

he had never asked and Böski had never

out to see you. Will it be all right?'

mentioned it. Neither man really believed her but she telephoned another

Schnitzler asked his visitors about the Paris surrealists: Éluard, Aragon, Breton. The two men were astonished that the distinguished sixty five year old playwright was interested in French surrealism, but in fact Schnitzler was notorious for writing about sexuality, and was in some ways a precursor of the surrealist movement. His scandalous and amoral play Reigen (Ring) best known in the film version as La Ronde (which might have been a good title for this book) was privately published in 1900, the year of Antheil's birth and sold 40,000 copies before it was seized by the censors. It was not performed until 199

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the 1920s, when the performers were

the author of The Erotic; it may have

prosecuted. It consists of ten scenes between two people; at the end of each

been Schnitzler who introduced her to Freud. Schnitzler knew even better than

scene they go offstage to have sex. Each scene contains one of the characters from the previous scene and one new

his young visitors how to épater les bourgeois. He knew the work of the Surrealists very well but hadn't heard of

character who have sex at the end and so on, until scene ten, when the

Pound; Antheil recalls that Pound took this very well, though this seems unlike

prostitute from scene one reappears,

him. And that is the last mention

completing the circle. Schnitzler's erotic

George Antheil makes of Ezra Pound.

Traumnovelle (Dream Story) was the basis for Stanley Kubrick's erotic film Eyes Wide Shut. Even Sigmund Freud complimented Schnitzler on his insight into sexual matters, saying that Schnitzler had found by intuition what he had had to labour for years to uncover. He wrote to Schnitzler that he had 'been conscious for many years of the far-reaching agreement which exists between your views and mine on many psychological and erotic problems'. Moreover, Schnitzler had been a regular correspondent with Rilke's muse Lou Andreas-Salomé, herself notorious as 200

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every nerve. I remember one shot when the camera caught my face in a The film star Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Kiesler in Austria in 1914, was widely considered the most beautiful woman on earth. She was also one of the first film stars to go nude and simulate sex and orgasm on screen, in the 1933 Czech film Ecstasy. The director, Gustav Machatý got the orgasmic look by sticking a pin in her bottom at the appropriate moment on several takes. ‘Some of those pinpricks shot pain through my body until it was vibrating in

distortion of real agony . . . and the director yelled happily, “Ya, Goot”’. Hedy was seventeen at the time. She became a leading Hollywood star in the 1940s, playing opposite Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Spencer Tracy and others. In one of her first major roles she starred alongside James Stewart, Judy Garland and Lana Turner in Busby Berkeley's 1941 Ziegfeld Girl. But just before this, Lamarr and George Antheil started work together on a remote-controlled radio torpedo. You couldn't make it up. Even Antheil couldn't entirely make it up. His steamy description of their first meeting in Bad Boy of Music is one of the best stories even he ever told, and is probably largely true, even if it does need to be taken with a large pinch of salt. It's in a chapter called HEDY LAMARR AND I INVENT AND PATENT A RADIO TORPEDO. Antheil had been in Hollywood composing for the 201

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movies for some years when Lamarr

Queen want to see me also. I just

first asked to meet him, in the summer of 1940 in Hollywood where they both

haven't the – ' 'But she does, she really does!'

lived, not to do with his music but his work on endocrinology. Lamarr had split recently from her second husband and

they insisted. 'You mean,' I faltered, 'that Hedy Lamarr wants to see . . . little me?'

was living alone. Böski and their son Peter were away, visiting George's

'Yes,' they said, 'and moreover we are going to arrange it for next week.

parents in Trenton. The Antheils' friends

Now don't protest.'

Adrian and Janet Gaynor invited the two native German speakers to dinner. 'Hedy Lamarr wants to see you about her glands.' I said, 'Uh-huh.' They repeated, 'Hedy Lamarr wants to see you.' 'It's funny,' I said, 'but I keep hearing you both say, "Hedy Lamarr wants to see you."' 'That's what we said,' they chorused. 'That's nothing,' I said indifferently. 'Lana Turner, Betty Grable, Carole Landis and the Snow

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MY BREASTS?

George didn't protest. He had been

Most movie queens don't look so

dabbling in endocrinology, specialising in analysing and correcting glandular types,

good when you see them in the flesh, but this one looked infinitely better

but without much practical application. He arrived late to the dinner.

than on the screen. Her breasts were fine, too, real postpituitary. The black silken ringlets fell softly

They were already sitting at the dining table, one of green onyx

down around her throat, and . . . oh well, why go on? You can get the

splashed with golden tableware.

same effect by going to your favourite

I sat down and turned my eyes

movie theatre and pretend you're

upon Hedy Lamarr. My eyeballs sizzled, but I could not take them

looking across the dinner table, just like lucky me.

away. Here, undoubtedly, was the most beautiful woman on earth.

And – remember! – this picture is in technicolour! So I looked at her and looked at her, and finally I permitted my eyes to look down a little from her face. I felt a terrible flush spreading over my face. 'But your breasts, 'I stuttered, 'your breasts – ' I could not go on. She whipped out a notebook and pencil. 'Yes, yes,' she said breathlessly, 'my breasts?'

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'Your breasts . . .' I repeated

on to explain to her that she is

aimlessly, but my mind commenced to wander. I could not go on. I knew

thymocentric – according to Webster's it means: oriented toward feeling and

that in a moment I would swoon, Adrian shovelled a glass of water into my hand just in the nick of time. I

emotion rather than toward intellect and morality, though George doesn't explain it to the reader. It hardly seems the

wolfed it and said: 'They are too small.' (I just said

right thing to say to the world's most beautiful woman on the first meeting.

that to lead her on; every movie star wants larger bosoms.) Hedy made a note in her book. 'Go on,' she said, not unkindly. 'Well,' I said, wanting to get up and rush right out of the United States, 'well, they don't really have to be, you know.' If you want to see whether you agree with Antheil there is a clip from Ecstasy on Vimeo. Lamarr herself was happy enough with her 33B bust – in Ecstasy and Me she says: ‘When men bring up the question I point out that the Venus de Milo had a small bosom, as do Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn’ – but it was a problem in Hollywood. George goes 204

MY BREASTS?

But Hedy didn't need an explanation. 'I

of them. George said he 'had on my best

know it, I studied your charts in Esquire. Now what I want to know is, what shall

suit and had washed my hands and face very carefully. A butler served us, just

I do about it?' Hedy left George her unlisted telephone number in lipstick on his car

like in the movies.' Before the main course had even arrived she was talking about breasts again. They spent most of

windscreen. He phoned her the next day and she invited him to dinner at her

the evening talking about glandular extracts and the lazy gland. But later on

house that evening. It was just the two

they started to talk about world events – this was late summer 1940, things were looking very bad, though America had not yet entered the war. George already knew about Hedy's hobby of inventing new weapons. Her first husband was Fritz Mandl, the largest weapons manufacturer in Austria. She told George about her idea for a radiocontrolled torpedo; he suggested that she should patent it and give it to the government. For the next few weeks they worked together on her invention. George was very useful to Hedy, he knew a thing or two about mechanical devices from his attempts to synchronise multiple player pianos for

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Ballet Mécanique. Failed attempts,

sexually transmitted diseases. 'I seem

unfortunately. Then Böski came back from Trenton

clapless . . . Spending all my spare money buying condoms and sticking them about

unexpectedly. George had to tell her that he was going to dinner that night with the most beautiful woman in the

in reserved places. My suits each contain one (I have two suits)'. The next day George brought Hedy

world. 'Oh, so you are going to be busy!'

down to their house 'just to show Böski what a nice girl Hedy really was. Böski

Böski exclaimed. 'What doing, dare I

was not immediately convinced.' Hardly

ask?' She was a trifle sarcastic.

surprising. According to George,

'We are inventing a radio-directed torpedo,' I said.

however, Hedy was not aware of Böski's jealousy, or anything else, she was so

'Indeed,' said Böski frigidly. 'Yes,' said I. (Anyone who knows me will tell you that I would

absorbed in their work. 'She just kept on inventing our torpedo'. So she did,

not tell a lie to Böski.) Of course he wouldn't. However, he was the bad boy of music, and he might not always have been entirely faithful to Böski: in one of his much earlier letters to Ezra Pound he expresses his surprise at not having any

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MY BREASTS?

while at the same time filming Ziegfeld

expired the same year as Antheil: 1959,

Girl. There was a long and rocky road ahead for their patent application but it

but Hedy lived to see some muchbelated recognition when in 1997 she

was finally approved, though it was never taken up by the US government as they advocated. It was awarded US

was awarded the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. George Antheil was posthumously

Patent Office number 2,292,387, June 10, 1941, Serial No. 397,412. The patent

included in the citation.

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Prejudiced as I was in favour of the European School of literature – which accepted me on a broader basis than

We saw that Sylvia Beach had a portrait of George Antheil by Man Ray on her wall. She said: 'To be "done" by Man Ray or Berenice Abbott, his assistant from 1923, meant you were rated as somebody.' Abbott took wonderful portraits of many of the people in this book: Sylvia Beach, George Antheil, James, Nora and Lucia Joyce, Solita Solano, Djuna Barnes, Claude McKay, Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, Jean Cocteau and Janet Flanner. Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in America in 1890) wasn't really part of the 'Crowd'; he saw the portraits purely as a job and didn't do it out of love of the expat community, whom he didn't on the whole much like. In his autobiography Self-Portrait he devotes just ten pages to them.

208

my English writing visitors, whose interest in me occasionally manifested itself only after I had been recognised as a member of the local avant-garde movement – my

I DID NOT WANT THAT LOOK ON MY FACE

contact with American and English

Man Ray does mention his first meetings

writers was a more casual affair. . . it was principally the relation between

with a few of the expats by name and describes them with a photographer's

photographer and sitter. Although I read their work with interest, I could not help comparing it with what

eye. Gertrude Stein he calls 'massive, in a woollen dress and woollen socks with comfortable sandals, which emphasised

seemed to me the more meaty and poetic writing of my French friends.

her bulk.' He at first assumed Alice Toklas was the maid. He liked Stein and saw a lot of her over the next ten years, but was not so keen on Ezra Pound. 'When Ezra Pound came into my studio he immediately flopped into an armchair with his legs stretched out, his arms hanging loosely, his black tie flowing, and his pointed red beard raised aggressively, as if to take possession of the place.' Although he believed Pound to be 'a kindhearted man' he thought him 'dominating and arrogant where literature was concerned. It worked very well with the English-speaking community, but I never heard him mentioned in European circles', probably because 'the basis of his writing was too erudite for other races'. Man Ray says perhaps disingenuously, 'I was too 209

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ignorant to feel any impact from his

window above, which came down

work; as for any revolutionary content, I was too steeped in the violent and often

splintering glass on him. He was bandaged up. I put a small felt hat

gratuitous productions of my French friends, who generally hid their erudition to obtain wider circles of reaction'.

jauntily on his head partly hiding the bandage – the wound wasn't very serious – and took a picture of him.

It was McAlmon who introduced Man Ray to Hemingway, whom he describes

There have been other pictures of him wounded, before and after this

as 'a tall young man of athletic build,

one, but none which gave him the

with his hair low on his forehead, a clear complexion, and a small moustache. . . My first portrait gave the man a poetic look, making him very handsome besides. We became friendly; one night he took me to an important boxing match'. Man Ray also tells the story behind the well-known picture of Hemingway with a bandage on his head. We had a little party one night in my place – a few American and French friends. During the evening he went to the toilet and came out soon, his head covered with blood. He'd pulled what he thought was the chain, but it was the cord of the casement 210

I DID NOT WANT THAT LOOK ON MY FACE

same look of amusement and

commenting on my high prices. Not that

indifference to the ups and downs of his career.

it did me any harm, but I was annoyed that he hadn't found something more

Ray is a little kinder about Joyce, whom he seems to have liked though he wasn't really a fan and certainly not in awe of

significant to talk about.' What Williams actually said was:

him: 'it seemed to me that here, too, there was an immense background of

Man Ray posed me. I kept my eyes wide open. He asked me particularly

erudition, of literary knowledge – one

then to close them a little and I, not

would have had to be as well-read as

knowing, did as he told me to do, not

Joyce to appreciate the liberties he had taken with the language.' William Carlos

realising the sentimental effect that would be created. (I opened them,

Williams also came to be photographed by Man Ray; they had met years earlier in New Jersey. When he found out that

though, later when I got his bill.) I was infuriated when I saw the finished pictures, but it was too late. I

Williams was staying in one of the most expensive hotels on the Left Bank, he

did not want that look on my face.

included a 'modest bill'. Two decades later, when Man Ray was living in California he was invited to a book signing by Williams, who signed a copy of his Autobiography. 'We shook hands, my wife was very much impressed with his presence and thrilled with the inscription. There was a reference to our meeting in Paris in the book, 211

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212