Everybody I Can Think Of Ever: Meetings That Made The Avant Garde

By Francis Booth

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 baton was passed from the past to the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wu Wei Press
• Release date: Jun 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227874252

Francis Booth

As well as Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938 Francis Booth is the author of several books on twentieth century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive) No Direction Home: The Uncanny In Literature Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant Garde A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell A Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman's Novel Francis is also the author of two novel series: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers Young adult fantasy series The Watchers

Book preview

Annus Mirabilis

––––––––

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 baton was passed from the past to the future.

Many of the people we are going to 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 Homer) and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room looked to the future of the novel while TS Eliot's The Waste Land looked to the future of poetry. But while these works were pushing the boundaries of artistic form and expression, three other works published in English that year tried to define those boundaries – one in philosophy, one in art and one in music. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus showed that much previous philosophy was not so much false as meaningless.

'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof 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 Wittgenstein's Tractatus, published the Foundations of Aesthetics with IA Richards, which attempted to find a scientific basis for artistic criticism and define its boundaries. But in contrast both to the formal experimentation of the avant-garde and to Wittgenstein, Ogden and Richards with their scientific 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 basic rules, starting from the basics and taking nothing for granted. 'And again and again to begin at the beginning; again and again to examine anew for ourselves and attempt to organise anew for ourselves. Regarding nothing as given but the phenomena.'

In 1922 America was only just waking up to the new music from Europe. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which had caused the riot of spring in Paris in 1913, was premiered in Philadelphia on March 3, 1922. There were no recordings of it at that time; Americans knew of the scandal surrounding it but had previously only heard it, if at all, in the two-piano version. Stravinsky's latest works, Mavra and Le Renard [The Fox] were premiered in Paris the same year. In 1922 the French-American composer/mystic Dane Rudhyar published 'The Relativity of Our Musical Conceptions' in America, hardly in the same league as Schoenberg's work in terms of its international influence, but very important to the home-grown 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, co-founded 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 privilege of the weary. The present day composers refuse to die.'

But not everyone was taking life so seriously in 1922. French composer Darius Milhaud was in New York that year, having a great time visiting Harlem and listening to jazz. Unlike Varèse and Rudhyar he didn't stay in New York but took its music back to Paris with him in the form of the ballet La Création du 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 tender these tales of the Jazz Age into the hands of those who read as they run and run as they read.' In the introduction to one story he tells us how he revelled in 'a story wherein none of the characters need be taken seriously.' And in 1922, lovable rogue Frank Harris's scurrilous and not at all serious My Life and Loves was privately printed by lovable rogue Jack Kahane.

In the more serious international art world, Mexican communist painters including Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco issued in 1922 'A Declaration of Social, Political and Aesthetic Principles' which concluded:

We proclaim that at this time of social change from a decrepit order to a new one, the creators of beauty must use their best efforts to produce ideological works of art for the people; art must no longer be the expression of individual 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.

Also in Russia in 1922, Leon Theremin demonstrated the first electronic musical instrument to the Soviet leader, Lenin – it was and is the only instrument you play without touching it. Theremin first demonstrated it to the public in Moscow that December. Later, Theremin would become a Soviet spy and would collaborate with Varèse in America. The theremin would go on to be used in all kinds of electronic and avant-garde music up to the present day. The company that marketed it said it 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 wireless manufacturers including Marconi.

The Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay's poetry collection Harlem Shadows was published in the same year. In the introduction, Max Eastman says: 'These poems have a special interest for all the races of man because they are sung by a pure blooded Negro. They are the first significant expression of that race in poetry.' This may be debatable but nevertheless the publication was one of the key events of the early Harlem Renaissance. Also in 1922, Jean Toomer, another leading light of the early Harlem Renaissance, finished his major work: the avant-garde novel Cane. He wrote to his friend and editor Waldo Frank, whose own novel Rahab 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 Czech-German 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 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.

No Monsieur

––––––––

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 the premieres of the ballet Le Renard and the opera Mavra, performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to new music by Igor Stravinsky. The Schiffs had invited forty or so guests to the after-concert 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 home in Eastbourne on the south coast of England, where everyone played games involving what Sydney described to Proust as the 'exchange of personalities'. Eliot said: 'London life would be more tolerable if there were more people like the Schiffs'; he wrote to Violet on 21 July, 1919 saying 'I must write to tell you how thoroughly we enjoyed our holiday with you'. But he was probably just being polite: his wife Vivien, who was always ill and always 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 central character in the first volume of Proust's gigantic novel sequence, had affected them. The letter invites Proust to stay with them in London, but even then Proust hardly went out and he certainly didn't stay with people. Nevertheless, Proust does seem to have been touched by their admiration for him. The Schiffs and Proust first met in person sometime in 1919. It was in a private room at the Ritz hotel in Paris; on the rare occasions Proust did leave his apartment it was to dine at the Ritz. The waiter took them over after dinner to meet him. Violet introduced herself, saying she thought Proust looked too young to be the author of such works. She thought he was 'remarkably handsome and quite unlike anyone else.' He invited the Schiffs back to his apartment – a rare honour – where they talked most of the night. This was the first of several late-night meetings. The adoring Violet wrote later:

The strange enchantments of the nights we passed with Marcel Proust made us believe that no daytime 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 to the Diaghilev party, knowing how ill he was and assuming he would not accept.

Thursday evening we are going to the Premier of a new Stravinsky ballet, and some old Russian ballets. Afterwards, we are having Diaghilev and some members of the ballet to supper at the Hotel Majestic where I 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:

Most of the guests had come directly from my premiere at the Grand Opéra, but Marcel Proust arrived from his bed at the Ritz, getting up as usual late in the evening. Elegantly dressed, wearing gloves and a cane, he was as pale as a mid-afternoon moon. I remember that he spoke ecstatically about the late Beethoven quartets, an enthusiasm I would have shared if it had not been a commonplace among the literati of the time, not a musical judgement but a pose. James Joyce was there that night too, but in my ignorance I did not recognise him.

Clive Bell, brother-in-law of Virginia Woolf, whose Jacob's Room was published in 1922 and a great admirer of Proust himself, was also there. He reports that Proust was 'infinitely gracious' and was only trying to pay Stravinsky a compliment.

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

Proust and Joyce both had novels published that year and it is easy to think of Proust as the last great novelist of the nineteenth century and Joyce as the first great novelist of the twentieth, though their dates of birth don't bear this out: Proust was born in 1871, Diaghilev in 1872, Picasso in 1881, and 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.

Two stiff chairs were obtained and placed, facing the one the other, in the aperture of a folding doorway between two rooms. The faithful of Mr Joyce disposed themselves in a half-circle in one room: those of M.Proust completed the circle in the other. Mr Joyce and M.Proust sat upright, facing each other, and vertically parallel. They were invited to converse. They did.

But not much. According to Ford, Proust began by referring to his Swann's Way. Joyce said he had not read it. Joyce then referred to Ulysses. Proust said he had not read it. There was an awkward silence. Proust then apologised for being late, he said it was because of his liver problem. Joyce, another hypochondriac (though he did have genuine problems with his eyes), told Proust he had exactly the same symptoms. The two then talked for the rest of the night about their respective illnesses, real or 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 version of the Joyce/Proust story in his autobiography Being Geniuses Together but adds a caveat: 'Mr Ford's account, however, as he tells it and writes of it, is highly fictionalised, as are many of his memories'. McAlmon's friend, the poet William Carlos Williams, who we will also hear a lot more of later, was also not there; he heard a slightly different 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 determined not to be drawn into literary or philosophical conversations. He had in fact read some Proust, and wasn't particularly keen on it; hardly surprising that he didn't want to talk to about the works to their author. Margaret Anderson, editor of Little Review, which had published sections of Ulysses before it came out as a book – we will be seeing more of her later too – recalls the evening as Joyce himself described it to her in her autobiography My Thirty Years' War.

James Joyce talks little. He curtails his wit, his epithet, his observation by stopping short in the middle of a pungent phrase and saying:

But I am being unkind.

Sometimes he tells stories like this one:

some friends were eager that he and Marcel Proust should meet. They arranged a dinner, assured that the two men would have much to say to each other. The host tried to start 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.

Neither of the Schiffs gave an account of the evening but Violet noted what happened after the party broke up. In the early hours of the morning the Schiffs left with Proust; Joyce followed them, uninvited.

As soon as our guests had gone we followed Proust to his taxi and Joyce got in after us. Joyce's first gesture was to open the window and his second to light a cigarette. Sydney shut the window and asked Joyce to throw away the cigarette, knowing that Proust dreaded air and smoke on account of his asthma. Joyce watched Proust silently, while he [Proust] talked incessantly without addressing Joyce.

And that was the last time the Schiffs saw Proust before he died.

Your Cruel and Beautiful Face

––––––––

Misia Sert wasn't at the Schiffs' party on May 18, 1922, but at least three of her artistic intimates were: Proust, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. She had arranged the party in 1913 where Proust had first 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 in a recurrence of happiness.'

Misia was a serial muse, one of a long line: in the ancient world Thaïs had affairs with the greatest thinker of her 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 von Bülow, before marrying the greatest composer of her age – in his eyes anyway – Richard Wagner, while being adored by its greatest philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had a stormy relationship with Lou Andreas-Salomé, who was also muse to Rainer Maria Rilke and a confidante of Sigmund Freud. (Nietzsche's first meeting with Salomé is worth noting: it was in the 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 Montparnasse. Gala was Paul Éluard's wife and Max Ernst's lover before she married Dali.

Misia Sert topped all of them. She is best remembered today for her first meeting with Coco Chanel, which we will come back to, but in her younger days she was muse to a long list of artists, musicians and writers. She was often painted, and sometimes courted, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard and Éduard Vuillard, whose lifelong love for her was unrequited. Auguste Renoir painted her many times too, always wanting her to expose her breasts. She never did, though much later in life she regretted it.

'My God! Why won't you show your breasts? It's criminal!' Several times I saw him on the verge of tears when I refused. No one could appreciate better than he the texture of skin, or, in painting, give it such rare pearl-like transparency. After his death I reproached myself for not letting him 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 every possible opportunity and played it regularly on the piano. Earlier, in 1894, Debussy was in her box for the dress rehearsal of the ballet set to his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn, inspired by a poem of Stéphane Mallarmé, another admirer of Sert's. Diaghilev's lover Nijinsky choreographed and danced the role of the fawn, interpreting the words of the poem in an explicitly erotic manner, especially the line une écharpe oublieé satsifait son rêve [a forgotten scarf satisfies his dream]. Debussy was shocked, Misia tried to calm him down. 'The fawn has married the veil he tore from the nymph' she explained. 'Go away, you are horrible' he said and stormed out. We will meet both Debussy and his opera again later, in relation to another strong-willed muse.

As well as painters and musicians, Misia inspired several writers. She was friendly with the poet Paul Verlaine early on and often met him in a cafe opposite the offices of the Revue Blanche [White Review], the literary magazine her first husband ran. 'Usually between benders, and always sad, he would come in the early evening, sit down with me, drink, 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

Cocteau and Proust both fictionalised Sert in their novels, both portraying her as a woman of high birth and high social standing, though she was in fact neither noble nor royal. She was born Marie Godebska to a wealthy family of Polish descent in Saint Petersburg in 1872. In Cocteau's fictional version of her, in his First World War novel Thomas the Impostor she is a princess.

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 pleasure is not to be found in things themselves but in the way you take them. . . She touched what was not to be touched; she opened what was not to be opened. She walked and talked on a tightrope in the midst of a glacial silence, with everyone hoping she would break her neck. Having first amused people, she then disturbed them. Her colourful high-relief personality offended some but seduced others. These others were the elite. Thus from imprudence to imprudence she unknowingly wove a magic spell. Mediocre people avoided her and only people of quality remained with her. Seven or eight men, two or three warm-hearted women became her intimates.

In Proust's novels Misia's character is divided into two halves, one represented by the beautiful young Princesse Yourbeletieff and the other by the very unsympathetic arriviste Madame Verdurin. Proust later said to Misia that her face was beautiful and cruel, representing these two aspects of womanhood to the homosexual Proust. In his fictional version of it the Rite of Spring supper is held by both women. As a young man, the aspirational Proust was desperate to meet Misia and be part of her literary circle at least as much as her social one, though she said Proust 'only liked me because I was rich'. Much later, Misia accused him of being a snob, which he undoubtedly was, despite his fondness for young, working-class men. He replied to her:

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 touchy. . . In the end the phrase 'are you a snob?' pleased me, like one of your last year's frocks because I found that it suited you. But I assure you that the only person whom my frequenting could make people say I am a snob would be you. And even that would not be true. And you would be the only one to think that I visit you out of vanity rather than admiration. Do not be so modest.

It may seem rich of Misia to accuse Proust of snobbishness, since she was at the centre of such an affluent circle. But she was more interested in artists than rich people. Cocteau said of her fictional alter ego in his novel that she 'could not care less about having the seat of honor at a fête; she preferred the best seat. It is generally not the same. At the theatre she wanted to see rather than to be seen. Therefore artists loved her.' It was through Misia that Cocteau first met Diaghilev; he describes that time in The Difficulty of Being.

The Russian ballet of Serge de Diaghilev. . . was splashing Paris with colour. The first time I attended one of his performances . . . I was in a 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!

Cocteau knew Proust too; although he does not recall their first meeting, he does have a very evocative description of him in My Contemporaries:

It is impossible for me to remember any first meeting with Proust. Our group has always treated him as a famous man. I see him, with a beard, 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 shadows. He stood erect against the chimney-piece in the drawing room of this Nautilus like a character out of Jules Verne, or else, near a picture hung with crêpe, wearing a dress coat, like Carnot dead.

Once, announced by Céleste's voice over the telephone, he came to collect me at three in the afternoon so that I could go with him to the Louvre to see Mantegna's Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. . . Proust was like a lamp lit in broad daylight, the ringing of the telephone in an empty house.

Mantegna's painting is now considered a gay icon, but it may not have been then; Cocteau's story could be a simple 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.

Sert met Proust again in August 1907, after her second husband Alfred Edwards started having an affair. She took a break in Normandy, where many of her friends were. She stayed at the Grand Hotel in Cabourg; Marcel Proust 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 4thof the species, as he had already married 2 Americans, 1 Frenchwoman and a Greek). Last night the rumour spread that Mme. Edwards had killed Edwards (the Englishman, who is really a Turk), but there was nothing in it, nothing at all.

Much later, in 1920 when Misia finally married the Catalan artist José-Maria Sert y Badia after living with him for twelve years, Proust wrote to congratulate her, though in what may very well be an ironic tone.

Chère Madame,

I was very touched that you took the trouble to write and tell me of this marriage which has the majestic beauty of something wonderfully unnecessary. What wife could [José-Maria] Sert have found, and you what husband, so predestined, so uniquely deserving of one another?

By 1921, when Proust was trying to hold onto life long enough to finish his huge novel sequence and saw very few people, Misia was one of the few he missed: 'how stupidly my life is arranged that I never see Misia, whom I love'. His 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 admire him prodigiously, but he is rather disagreeable with me and has said that no one is more antipathetic than I. What exaggeration.

Misia said that even though Proust was dying 'he still had the courage to be flirtatious about [José-Maria] Sert', who seems to have attracted gay men. Although he admired Misia, Proust, like André Gide and Cocteau, was probably more physically attracted to José-Maria. 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 the stage should have allowed Marcel Proust to die at a ball.

But he didn't. Perhaps God preferred Molière to Proust, who died in bed at home, dictating corrections his novels right up until his last night. Man Ray, who didn't even know Proust, took the famous photo of him on his deathbed two days later.

Be Russian! Remain Russian!

––––––––

Apart from Proust, Misia Sert had two other close friends present at the Schiffs' party in 1922: Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev. Stravinsky had first been commissioned in 1909, as a young, little-known composer, by Diaghilev, who was then revolutionising the Russian ballet. Diaghilev was born in the same city, Saint Petersburg, in the same month of the same year as Misia. They first met in 1908 in Paris at the first