by Cecil Beaton
It has been said that in France a higher percentage were willing to collaborate with the enemy than in any other occupied country. Marie-Louise was saddened to discover that certain friends had fallen for the blandishments of the Germans — that they could not resist the opportunity of reappearing in the limelight and exhibiting themselves again as stars no matter under whose management.
Marie-Louise de Noailles compared the Occupation under the Nazis as being like a warm bath: soothing to begin with, but the bath became hotter and hotter so that eventually one was scalded. She described how, early one morning, a German and two French accomplices arrived in her room to search her apartment. She remained in bed, combed her hair, and called for her breakfast. After studying her family papers for two hours, in an effort to discover if she were one quarter Jewish, the strangers quit.
Each guest gave us his snippet about the appalling prices on the black market and about the collabos: Johnnie Lucinge, so highly cultivated and kind, told, in his rich, plummy accent, how one never knew if the ringing of a doorbell portended the last moment of liberty: most people placed a ladder against their window in case it was needed for flight: every day brought with it the possibility that one might be carried off, without a word of explanation, to camp and torture. They told us a saga of torture chambers, hot walls and electric baths, and all the other diabolical means whereby the Gestapo tried to extract secrets. A pianist had his hands chopped off: a cellist had his fingers pared as though they were pencils being sharpened. Many friends had faced their appalling deaths with incredible bravery. I noticed that not one of these people was curious enough to ask about conditions in England.
RETURN TO PARIS WITH DIANA
The M. of I. Exhibition of war photographs again takes me to Paris. The difficulties of finding a suitably large gallery, and then competing with the intrigues, prevarications and rank dishonesty of the owners, have now been overcome: a contract duly signed for a showroom off the Champs-Elysées to be hung with dark red velvet (hired). With a large crate of photographs I cross the Channel with Diana who has been to London to collect provender for the Embassy. Merely to accompany an ambassadress is enough to give anyone folie de grandeur: first off the ship at Dieppe — a fleet of cars waiting on the quai — but Diana is the last person who could ever become spoiled. She hates floss: arriving to spend the night in a strange town she never seeks the best hotel; rather she says: ‘Charm is what we’re after — not revolving doors.’ She is a true Bohemian; this is apparent from the clothes she wears today and in her driving: with Diana at the wheel of the van, motoring takes an insignificant place beside her conversation. With Diana talk is never allowed to flag: ‘Who knows about toads? They’re fascinating: they fall from the sky.’ ‘What is the most squalid thing you know?’ ‘What is an incubus or a succubus?’
We bowl towards Paris with the tyres making a greasy hot noise as they whirl over stones: flying at our approach are geese, women and children. Even a gendarme is not permitted to interrupt an account of Morris Guest[3] and The Miracle tour of America. We fly so fast that there is hardly time to notice the passing scene, but from the corner of a terrified eye I note that the trees have turned orange prematurely because of the drought which is causing a disastrous dearth of potatoes. In fact food prices are astronomic. Black marketeers, of all sorts, have become so plutocratic that they have not yet returned from their summer holidays. Many shops and theatres are still shuttered: even the Louvre is only partly opened, and the pictures that are exhibited, with the kipper veneer of years upon their surface, are scarcely visible without any electric light.
CARTIER BRESSON
Henri Cartier Bresson, who has taken a few of the best photographs in existence, has escaped after three years as a prisoner in Germany. In appearance he has become more rugged, with russet, shining cheeks, but his cherubic, almost simpleton, appearance is most disconcerting — for it gives no indication of the far from simple character of this somewhat twisted artist of the secret, prying lens. Henri told me how the farmer, on whose property he was working, always took the largest slice of meat; he, the prisoner, was allowed the second biggest — in order that he could work hard; the children next; and the mother, who nevertheless did most of the work on the place, received the pauper’s share.
Henri now finds it difficult to pick up the threads in Paris where there is no unity of spirit — where everyone is suspicious of one another and denunciations are still going on all the time. And according to him there are too many political factions — all of them wrong.
BÉRARD AND KOCHNO
It has been a great experience to meet old friends long separated, but perhaps the supreme moment of all was when, having climbed the endless flights of stairs in Number 22, Rue Casimir la Vigne, I was greeted at the summit by Bébé[4] and Boris.[5] Amazingly, neither of them seemed to have changed in any detail: Bébé’s henna beard as long, dirty and untidy, Boris’s bullet head as close-shaven. Dressed in shirtsleeves like any happy workmen they laughed, thumped my back, and vied with each other with exclamations of disbelief and joy at seeing someone straight from England. Bébé became theatrical and allowed his imagination to run away with him when describing their recent experiences. Laughingly he said the last days of the Occupation were like a de Mille production of the 1840 revolution, we were imprisoned for one whole week in this apartment, and the entire neighbourhood was posted with “Attention! Ne vas être tué”: while wild citizens rushed out with bottles filled with alcohol trying to set tanks on fire — very “Victor Hugo of the Barricades”.’ When the ‘great festivity’ had taken place around the Arc de Triomphe they had overlooked the fact that there were still German machine-gun men on the top.
Bébé described the terror of living under the Gestapo. Boris’s bag had been packed for prison lest at any moment, and for no known reason, he should be taken away. Yet, in spite of rules to the contrary, they had listened to the radio and done everything they were told not to do. The French went out to watch the RAF raids while the Germans remained under shelter. Bébé also told me about the swinish Hun practices that made the cruelty of the Borgias pale into insignificance: it became quite usual to hear screams issuing from buildings in the centre of the city. Max Jacob, Marcel Khill, Jean Desbordes, and so many other friends had been tortured or had died in camps. Of course the Germans had also wished to appear ‘correct’, and had made a great play of offering seats to women in the Métro and chucking babies under the chin, but they tried too hard to make anti-British propaganda about Oran.
The war created favourable circumstances for Bébé to abandon his more frivolous work for theatre and magazines the better to devote his great talent solely to the purpose of painting pictures. But the volume of output of painting seems disappointing though, of course, Bébé has the excuse that most of the canvases are sold and therefore he is not able to exhibit them to us. However, he showed me enchanting and tender illustrations for Colette and half a dozen other books, all beautifully produced: these were a revelation of printing after the restrictions and poor-quality paper at home. He showed also some sensitive lithographs of young girls and village children done with gutsy grace and an almost Chinese offhand understanding of draughtmanship.
Later, when I took Bébé and Boris out to dinner, the people at neighbouring tables all joined in talk about the Occupation and gave lurid details of German cruelty. The waitress said that the French working-class man would never forgive the Boches for they had got him by the bec and made him hungry. The Germans had taken wine and used it for petrol in their cars. Bébé named with shame the friends who had fraternized with the Germans, but they were very few — one per cent. Chanel was cited as arch-offender, also a Russian Ballet dancer and three American women.
Dinner in this cold and poor little bistro cost £2 10s a head — but it was worth everything to see these friends again.
JEAN COCTEAU
October 31st
Jean Cocteau telephoned. Knowing I am at the Embass
y he is particularly anxious to see me, because he has been accused of many crimes and wishes to be freed of guilt by being accepted by the Ambassador. When someone suggested he had not taken a strong enough line about non-cooperation with the Germans, another answered: ‘Ce n’est qu’une danseuse!’
I hurried to see Jean. We sat in his small, wine-red velvet room with blackboards for chalked memoranda notes, dates and telephone numbers and Christian names. (‘Verlaine’ was for some unknown reason crossed out.)
Jean called himself a phantom, trapped in Paris (‘Paris is now “occupied” by the French’), despising the gossip, the bitchy wit, cynical epigrams and enforced leisure. Inactivity — the ‘occupational’ disease of the defeated Parisians, he said — had encouraged them to backbite and bicker but he had been fortunate to be busy writing plays and films. Now, with his friend Jean Marais at the front, he was too worried to write.
Jean boasted to me that the Germans had attacked him daily in the newspapers and for some time he remained hiding in his apartment. The young sculptor, German Brecker, he said, had saved his life — though quite how I did not understand. It is no business of mine to judge Jean’s behaviour during the war, but I can imagine how difficult it must have been for him, of all ageing vedettes, to feel forgotten, and that he, more than most, found it hard to resist appearing on lecture platforms even when the auspices were highly suspect.
With his wiry, biscuit-coloured hands stabbing the air he droned on in his deep nasal voice, his lips in a pursed smile. ‘Paris life today is clandestine — the reality is only whispered. The papers never give any impression of the way things are. There is still so much, politique in Paris. Even the artists are exerting themselves too much with things outside their milieu: Picasso’s being a Communist is typical. Paris provides too many disruptive distractions.’ Jean considered that ‘everything artistic’ was dead here — one exception being Genet’s pornographic novel Notre Dame des Fleurs. He envied my having been in India and China and living ‘through different epochs’. England was united with one object — to carry on the war. He longed for England: to make films with Korda, to work in London, and to have his new play put on there before anywhere else.
We now sat at the little bistro near the cloistered Palais Royal where night after night writers, poets and painters — Colette, Balthus and others — had forgathered for their clandestine evening meal. In my honour as an Englishman, tonight the proprietor opened a bottle of champagne and a toast was drunk to the Allies.
Jean, with his metallic violence, still possesses a fantastic youthfulness of spirit, and as an artist he manages to overrule technique by mastering it instinctively. If he has not developed his early promise as a serious poet he has become a poet in life. As for his powers of seduction — he is a real virtuoso. What wit, what manners, what brilliance! Jean excelled himself in charm for me, and put on his best performance in order to justify himself.
November 2nd
Yesterday there was an alert, and in the distance a great explosion. The evening paper appeared with a poem by Aragon on the crimes of the Germans against civilization — against the bombing of women and children — above all on All Saints’ Day. It appears his muse was an ammunition train that went up by mistake.
PICASSO
Lost somewhere under the débris accumulated in my bedroom were the odd bits of paper scrawled with addresses and telephone numbers. Who would know where I could find Picasso at his secret, unlisted address? Another search brought me near panic before the missing scrap was found. I rushed off in torrential rain to cope with transport difficulties. But on arrival at the Picasso apartment, 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins, a sad and rather sinister-looking man, perhaps a secretary or an agent, received me enigmatically. I realized that no one was conscious of my being an hour late. No one seemed to know of my appointment: ‘But don’t bother: there are others upstairs already.’ I went up a small, winding, dun-coloured Cinderella staircase. The first room I went into was filled with huge bronze heads and squat, naked men holding animals sculptured by the painter. In the studio next door dozens of vast abstract canvases were stacked back to back. Further upstairs was a group of visitors, among them Balthus, the Polish painter, here for a morsel of shop talk, an American soldier, and two dealers. Conversation was spasmodic and cursory while they awaited the master. Picasso quietly slipped into the room. His whole ambience was calm and peaceful, but his smile was gay. He showed that he was as pleased to see me as if I had been a close friend. The fact that Hitler had been the reason for our enforced separation now made us fall into each other’s arms.
‘You’ve not changed — except for grey-white hair!’ He pointed at me; he, too, had gone white. He said that he hadn’t reconciled himself to his appearance. ‘Have you?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I replied, ‘but there’s nothing to do about it except barge on.’ ‘It’s so unfair! It isn’t as if one changed and became something else’ — he screwed up his face into a childlike grin showing small teeth — ‘as if a chair became a piano, for instance. No, it is merely a dégringo-lade — horrible!’ But since he was not a movie actor it didn’t matter a lot. But nowadays he confessed a hatred of mirrors.
Picasso has recently shown his latest paintings at the Salon d’Automne and his fame has become world-wide. At every kiosk his face stares from the covers of magazines from every country. Perhaps I am foolish to regret the passing of the blue and rose periods, the cubist, and the neo-Greek, but I find the newest works of boss-eyed women with three noses and electric light bulbs or fishes for hats of an almost appalling violence: they are doubtless diabolically clever, bad-mannered and brutal, with the effect of making every other picture pale in comparison. However, these newest Picassos have caught the imagination of the people, and Picasso said he’d heard the crowds arriving to see them were like those which file past Lenin’s tomb — ‘and what a strong smell those people have!’
A further posse of visitors appeared and the host talked to them in grand seigneurial manner. In fact, he is quietly delighted and amused with his success which is of film star proportions.
When the visitors departed I asked how on earth he could find time to paint with such an influx of people. ‘Oh, it’s the victory! It’s terrible! I can’t do any work since the victory — it’s been too big, and all of a sudden the floods have started.’ He doubted if he’d ever be able to work again. Perhaps only another war would make him work.
Later I took photographs of the master. For changes of scene we moved from one room to another, ending in the attics with sloping red tile floor, sparsely furnished with a few zebra and other animal skins thrown around — the whole of a monochrome tonality. Here he sat in his small bedroom and posed on the edge of his bath.
November 8th
Picasso again. Shock to find at least sixty American soldiers and WAACs making a pilgrimage — homage au maître — the maître being revered like Buddha. Picasso is not overwhelmed by his popularity, and the gloomy Sabarthes and some ambiguous servants — like muses in attendance — take charge of the telephone and welcome the pilgrimages. A blonde Frenchwoman with a dashing hat over one eye, acting as interpreter, cornered Picasso in the bathroom (the warmest room in the house) and the GIs started asking questions. ‘Mr Picasso, how come you see a woman with three eyes — one down on her chin?’ Picasso laughed. ‘Mr Picasso, why do you change your style so often?’ He was amused to answer: ‘It’s like experimenting in chemistry. I’m always carrying out my experiments on certain subjects in this laboratory. Sometimes I succeed — then it’s time to do something different. I’m always trying to make new discoveries.’
He did not excuse himself for speaking no English, and told the story of two lovers, one French, one Spanish, who lived together happily loving one another until she learnt to speak his language: when he discovered how stupid she was — the romance was at an end. Many GIs brought cameras, also books for signing. Picasso said they were like a bunch of college boys — so naïf.
Perhap
s partly in order to get rid of them he escorted the soldiers down the street to the neighbouring studio of Adam, a sculptor and engraver. When he returned alone to his place he discovered that some of the GIs had left anonymous gifts: a package of cigarettes by the bed, a cake of soap on the rim of the bath. ‘They often do that,’ he smiled.
Picasso seemed far removed from the war and spoke of it in fairy-tale simplifications. But when I showed him M. of I. photographs of the destruction in London he was obviously moved. ‘C’est épouvantable! And that is happening all over the world?’ I asked if I might do some sketches of him. He sat in profile and laughed that I should not make him look like Whistler’s mother. Then a Hindu silence fell between us. He said: ‘How refreshing not to talk! It is like a glass of water.’
ANDRÉ GIDE
At one time Gide’s scorn of convention, together with his sexual proclivities, was too much for society. But unconcerned, perhaps even unconscious of the opinions of others, he continued to do just what he wanted. Now that he has become venerable, he is given the highest acclaim as a man of great culture and, although some still find it difficult to understand how this strict Protestant can reconcile his church with his life, general approbation is fully granted.
