Portraits and Observations (36 page)

Chaplin has had access to genius, and another advantage rarer than that: the benefit of being sole proprietor of his own shop—financier, producer, director, writer, star. One father to a baby is nature’s requirement; the necessity of collaborative seeding is the oddity-making curse of film-art, that blasted heath upon which few giants, and as few middling grown men, stride: those who do, all honor to them.

From the journal of a Mr. Patrick Conway, aged seventeen, during the course of a visit to Bruges in the year 1800: “Sat on the stone wall and observed a gathering of swans, an aloof armada, coast around the curves of the canal and merge with the twilight, their feathers floating away over the water like the trailing hems of snowy ball-gowns. I was reminded of beautiful women; I thought of Mlle. de V., and experienced a cold exquisite spasm, a chill, as though I had heard a poem spoken, fine music rendered. A beautiful woman, beautifully elegant, impresses us as art does, changes the weather of our spirit; and that, is that a frivolous matter? I think not.”

The intercontinental covey of swans drifting across our pages boasts a pair of cygnets, fledglings of the prettiest promise who may one day lead the flock. However, as is generally conceded, a beautiful
girl of twelve or twenty, while she may merit attention, does not deserve admiration. Reserve that laurel for decades hence when, if she has kept buoyant the weight of her gifts, been faithful to the vows a swan must, she will have earned an audience all-kneeling; for her achievement represents discipline, has required the patience of a hippopotamus, the objectivity of a physician combined with the involvement of an artist, one whose sole creation is her perishable self. Moreover, the area of accomplishment must extend much beyond the external. Of first importance is voice, its timbre, how and what it pronounces; if stupid, a swan must seek to conceal it, not necessarily from men (a dash of dumbness seldom diminishes masculine respect, though it rarely, regardless of myth, enhances it); rather from clever women, those witch-eyed brilliants who are simultaneously the swan’s mortal enemy and most convinced adorer. Of course the perfect Giselle, she of calmest purity, is herself a clever woman. The cleverest are easily told; and not by any discourse on politics or Proust, any smartly placed banderillas of wit; not, indeed, by the presence of
any
positive factor, but the absence of one: self-appreciation. The very nature of her attainment presupposes a certain personal absorption; nonetheless, if one can remark on her face or in her attitude an awareness of the impression she makes, it is as though, attending a banquet, one had the misfortune to glimpse the kitchen.

To pedal a realistic chord—and it must be sounded, if only out of justice to their cousins of coarser plumage—authentic swans are almost never women that nature and the world has deprived. God gave them good bones; some lesser personage, a father, a husband, blessed them with that best of beauty emollients, a splendid bank account. Being a great beauty, and
remaining
one, is, at the altitude flown here, expensive: a fairly accurate estimate on the annual upkeep could be made—but really, why spark a revolution? And if
expenditure were all, a sizable population of sparrows would swiftly be swans.

It may be that the enduring swan glides upon waters of liquefied lucre; but that cannot account for the creature herself—her talent, like all talent, is composed of unpurchasable substances. For a swan is invariably the result of adherence to some aesthetic system of thought, a code transposed into a self-portrait; what we see is the imaginary portrait precisely projected. This is why certain women, while not truly beautiful but triumphs over plainness, can occasionally provide the swan-illusion: their inner vision of themselves is so fixed, decorated with such clever outer artifice, that we surrender to their claim, even stand convinced of its genuineness: and it
is
genuine; in a way the
manqué
swan (our portfolio contains two excellent examples) is more beguiling than the natural (of which, among present company, the classic specimens are Mme. Agnelli, the European swan
numero uno
, and America’s superb unsurpassable Mrs. William S. Paley): after all, a creation wrought by human nature is of subtler human interest, of finer fascination, than one nature alone has evolved.

A final word: the advent of a swan into a room starts stirring in some persons a decided sense of discomfort. If one is to believe these swan “allergics,” their hostility does not derive from envy, but, so they suggest, from a shadow of “coldness” and “unreality” the swan casts. Yet isn’t it true that an impression of coldness, usually false, accompanies perfection? And might it not be that what the critics actually feel is fear? In the presence of the very beautiful, as in the presence of the immensely intelligent, terror contributes to our over-all reaction, and it is as much fright as appreciation which causes the stabbed-by-an-icicle chill that for a moment murders us when a swan swims into view.

In 1981 our world, granted it is still orbiting, will celebrate Picasso’s centenary. Of course, because he has that kind of luck, the great man will be on hand; and available, as usual, to all mediums of publicity: very likely on this occasion television will display him in the buff, as befits a god-creature quite beyond the laws of human decorum. Born in Malaga, a country of figs and stone and guitars, Picasso was a child-prodigy who stayed one: that is, remained a prodigy and something of a child, a man inhabited by a boy’s fooling-around impatience, hatred of system, fresh-eyed curiosity: “Pablo,” to quote his oldest friend, Jaime Sabartes, “is preeminently a sum of curiosities. He has more curiosity than a thousand million women.” When Picasso was thirteen his father, an acrimonious Andalusian art-teacher who ground out greeting-card still lifes for the Barcelona bourgeoisie, gave over to his son his palette and brushes and never painted again; which was, in its way, Picasso’s first conquest—he went on to strew the century with painters overshadowed by him or altogether put to pasture. Queer, come to think of it, why some of these fellows have not united to assassinate this octopus of art; for, though not the master of Matisse and unpossessed by Braque’s compositional strength, Picasso has, via vivacious gall and a bottomless plethora of inventional surprises, outrun them all: he is
the
winner.

Chanel, a spare spruce sparrow voluble and vital as a woodpecker, once, midnight in one of her nonstoppable monologues, said, referring to the very costly
pauvre
orphan appearance she has lo these
decades modeled: “Cut off my head, and I’m thirteen.” But her head has always remained attached, definitely she had it perfectly placed way back yonder when she
was
thirteen, or scarcely more, and a moneyed “kind gentleman,” the first of several grateful and well-wishing patrons, asked petite “Coco,” daughter of a Basque blacksmith who had taught her to help him shoe horses, which she preferred, black pearls or white? Neither, she answered—what she preferred,
Chéri
, were the stakings to start a little shop. Thus emerged Chanel, the fashion-visionary. Whether or not the productions of a dressmaker can be called important “cultural” contributions (and perhaps they can: a Mainbocher, a Balenciaga, are men of more authentic creative significance than several platoons of poets and composers who rise to mind) is uninteresting; but a career woman impure and simple like Chanel arouses a documentary interest, the sum of which is partially totaled in these photographs of her changeling’s face, at one angle a darling dangling in a heart-shaped locket, at another an arid and avid go-getter—observe the striving in the taut stem of her neck: one thinks of a plant, an old hardy perennial still pushing toward, though now a touch parched by, the sun of success that, for those talented inconsolables primed with desire and fueled with ego and whose relentless energy propels the engine that hauls along the lethargic rest of us, invariably flourishes in the frigid sky of ambition. Chanel lives alone in an apartment across the street from the Ritz.

Duchamp, born in Rouen, the third son of a multi-membered middle-class family, many of whom were artistically inclined, has lived in New York since 1915. During these forty-four years of
American residence he has dabbled away at only one painting (
Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors
,
Even
—an oil, on transparent glass, the size of a church window), and finished none; for all practical purposes, he abandoned painting in 1913, the year his
Nude Descending a Staircase
(of which a contemporary critic remarked, “Whirl around three times, bump your head twice against the wall, and if you bump hard enough the meaning will be perfectly obvious”) was the drunkmaking sensation of some sixteen hundred forerunner experiments on view at the historic Armory show. “But,” protests Duchamp, “not to paint doesn’t mean I’ve given up art. All good painters have only about five masterpieces to their name. The others are not vital. The five have the force of shock. Shock is good. If I’ve done five good things, it’s enough. Or you might say that instead of dying like Seurat at thirty-one, I am a man whose inspiration for painting stopped, eh?” His inspiration, at all events his talent, for playing games with art, wherein resides the kindergar-tenish and nowadays altogether shockless charm of his paintings, has not lain entirely fallow: in his infinite spare time he has concocted surrealist perfume bottles, made a pioneer abstract film, involved himself in interior decoration (ceilings swathed in coal sacks), devised a portable Duchamp museum fitted with miniatures of his best-known works (also a phial containing “Parisian Air”), and invented for himself other fraudulent forms of art-toy; but what seems to concern him sincerely is chess, a more serious style of fun, a subject around which he has improvised the most
recherché
volume possible: a thousand copies were printed in three languages, and (hold on to your berets) the title goes
Opposition et Cases Conjuguées, Opposition und Schwesterfelder, Opposition and Sister Squares
. Duchamp explains that “It all has to do with blocked pawns, when your only means of winning is by moves of kings. This happens only once in a thousand times. And why,” he adds, “why isn’t my
chess playing an art activity? A chess game is very plastic. You construct it. It’s mechanical sculpture and with chess one creates beautiful problems and that beauty is made with the heads and hands. Besides, it’s purer, socially, than painting, for you can’t make money out of chess, eh?”

And supposing you could, undoubtedly Duchamp wouldn’t: he has often expressed anti-lucre sentiments amounting to a financial allergy (“No! Painting shouldn’t become a fashionable thing. And money, money, money comes in, and it becomes a Wall Street office”); certainly very little about his living quarters, a fourth-floor walkup in a soiled and sullen brownstone on an unprepossessing Manhattan sidestreet, implies limousine standards; the flat, done up in a sort of flapper-period of modern artiness, boasts nothing rain might harm, except a small Matisse and a large Miró: as a sanctuary, it speaks of a man who would be himself, reasonably free and unbeholden. Downstairs, there is on the mailbox a nameplate dingy but dazzling; it reads: “Matisse-Duchamp-Ernst.” Because, you see, the present Madame Duchamp is the former Madame Matisse, wife of the great man’s son Pierre; as for Ernst, that is boyishly pink and silvery Surrealist Max, the apartment’s onetime tenant. The order of the names, the billing, as it were, seems an appropriate artistic judgment.

André Gide, that moralizing immoralist, a writer favored with sincerity but denied imagination, quite disapproved of Jean Cocteau, whose gifts the mischievous muses had reversed, making of him, both as man and artist, a creature vastly imaginative but vivaciously insincere. It is interesting, then, that Gide should have authored the
most accurate, and for that reason most sympathetic, description of our eldest terrible child.

Gide is writing in his journal; the time is August, 1914. “Jean Cocteau had arranged to meet me in an ‘English tearoom’ on the corner of the rue de Ponthieu and the avenue d’Antin. I had no pleasure in seeing him again, despite his extreme kindness; but he is incapable of seriousness, and all his thoughts, his witticisms, his sensations, all the extraordinary brilliance of his customary conversation shocked me like a luxury article displayed in a period of famine and mourning. He is dressed almost like a soldier, and the fillip of the present events has made him look healthier. He is relinquishing nothing, but simply giving a martial twist to his usual liveliness. When speaking of the slaughter of Mulhouse he uses amusing adjectives and mimicry; he imitates the bugle call and the whistling of the shrapnel. Then, changing subjects since he sees he is not amusing me, he claims to be sad; he wants to be sad with the same kind of sadness as you, and suddenly he adopts your mood and explains it to you. Then he talks of Blanche, mimics Mme. R. and talks of the lady at the Red Cross who shouted on the stairway, ‘I was promised fifty wounded men for this morning; I want my fifty wounded men.’ Meanwhile he is crushing a piece of plum cake in his plate and nibbling it; his voice rises suddenly and has odd twists; he laughs, leans forward, bends toward you and touches you. The odd thing is that I think he would make a good soldier. He asserts that he would and that he would be brave too. He has the carefree attitude of the street urchin; it is in his company that I feel the most awkward, the most heavy, the most gloomy.”

In the spring of 1950, in the piazza of a Sicilian town where Gide was vacationing (it was the last year of his life), he had another meeting with Cocteau, a farewell encounter which the writer of these notes happened to observe. It was Gide’s custom to dream
away the morning hours propped in the piazza sun; there he sat sipping from a bottle of salt-water brought fresh from the sea, a motionless mandarin shrouded in a woolly wintry black cape and with a wide-brimmed dark fedora casting a shadow the length of his stern, brimstone countenance: an idle idol-saint (of sorts) un-speaking and unspoken to except for occasional consultations with those of the village Ganymedes who snagged his fancy. Then one morning Cocteau, whirling a cane, sauntered upon the piazza-scene and proceeded to interrupt the steely-eyed reveries of Il Vecchio (as the local
ragazzi
called the distinguished octogenarian). Thirty-five years had gone by since the wartime tea party, yet nothing in the attitude of the two men toward each other had altered. Cocteau was still anxious to please, still the rainbow-winged and dancing dragonfly inviting the toad not merely to admire but perhaps devour him. He jigged about, his jingling merriment competed with the bell-music of passing donkey carts, he scattered rays of bitter wit that stung like the Sicilian sun, he effused, enthused, he fondled the old man’s knee, caressed his hands, squeezed his shoulders, kissed his parched Mongolian cheeks—nay, nothing would awaken Il Vecchio: as though his stomach turned at the thought of digesting such fancy-colored fodder, he remained a hungerless frog upon a thorny frond; until at last he croaked, “Do be still. You are disturbing the view.”