by Lisa Chaney
His great friend Georges Braque believed that while almost no French poets had understood the first thing about modern art, Reverdy was “almost the only exception.” Indeed, Reverdy’s publication on Picasso was one of the few that the artist himself admired. Reverdy was both attracted and repelled by the smart snobberies of the haut monde, famously saying that he preferred the company of artists, and that “life in society is one huge adventure in piracy and cannot be successful without a great deal of conniving.”
By contrast, Gabrielle was less ambivalent about having the haut monde as her friend, although none among them in the end would become as long-standing a companion as the supreme Misia Sert. Gabrielle was more emotionally resilient, more grounded than Reverdy, using her acerbic wit as a jousting tool with which to defend herself and keep mentally in trim. Describing society as “irresistibly dishonest,” she said, “They amuse me more than the others. They make me laugh.” 1 Gabrielle’s famed poise, mistakenly and patronizingly described as having been instilled in her by the Serts, was something she possessed naturally, and in abundance, long before she met them. Thus the confident and graceful Gabrielle felt quite equal to associating with the haut monde. Reverdy failed on most all of these counts. So why had they become lovers?
However much Gabrielle might have found herself at the center of fashionable society, she also remained an unconventional outsider. And despite Pierre Reverdy’s mulish stubbornness, and sense of pride that outdid even Gabrielle’s, perhaps she fell in love with him precisely because he wasn’t society. He represented something that, for her, was immeasurably greater. Almost half a century later, after he had died, she would say wistfully, “He isn’t dead. Poets… you know, they’re not like us: they don’t die at all.” This was the immortality Gabrielle herself longed for, and could not then know she would achieve.2
Gabrielle and Reverdy had known each other for some time before they began their affair, having been introduced by Picasso or Misia in the period after Arthur’s death and when Reverdy had given up Nord-Sud. At the time, Gabrielle’s heart and mind were entirely occupied with Arthur, but her suffering now made her more sympathetic to Reverdy’s “tormented and disquieting lyricism.”
Gabrielle was a deeply practical and pragmatic woman, yet an equally significant part of her lived wholeheartedly and unpragmatically in her imagination. This was a place quite different from the deeply absorbing craftsman’s space she inhabited in her work. At the same time, she continued to believe, as had Arthur Capel and the Theosophists, in “the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions” and in tolerating and trying to understand religions “other than one’s own.” She found much solace in the idea that “death is nothing; that one simply changes dimension.” Reassured by the thought that “one never loses everything and that something happens on the other side,” she said, “I believe in the unreal, I believe in everything that’s full of mystery,” adding, “But I don’t believe in Spiritualism.”3 These convictions helped Gabrielle empathize with Reverdy’s blackness of temperament. Her beliefs also added to her sense of Reverdy’s drawing down something greater, and beyond, with which she identified. This humbled her, and was central to what would become a kind of reverence in which she was to hold Reverdy in the future.
Such thoughts and beliefs would lead Gabrielle to champion this strange and increasingly reclusive man’s work. She would agree with the surrealist André Breton’s overstatement that Reverdy was “the greatest poet of our time.” Since Gabrielle’s first meeting with him, she had become more fully herself. Her defiance, never very far below the surface, was reflected in her love for Reverdy, itself an inevitable confrontation with the establishment. Gabrielle didn’t really give a damn about the establishment. Demonstrating her accustomed capacity for paradox, while she may have acquired for herself one of the smartest addresses in Paris, and mixed with the haut monde, she cared little that she had also acquired a lover who was a poet, who eked out an existence as proofreader on an evening paper and was often virtually penniless.
A man proud of his forebears — freethinking craftsmen from the Bas-Languedoc, at the southernmost part of the Cévennes — with southern roots like Gabrielle, Reverdy enjoyed, with her, the sensual, earthy pleasures of food and wine. His somber, intense looks were just as dark as his lover’s, and while he was passionately voluble, Reverdy was just as capable as she was of silence. Gabrielle identified with his childhood suffering, and one senses that she must have told this fellow southerner about her own youthful miseries and her punishing incarceration in the convent at Aubazine.
Reverdy had a devoted wife, Henriette, a seamstress back in Montmartre, who was admired by painter friends such as Modigliani, Gris and Braque. They wanted to paint her for her simplicity and her beauty. When Reverdy’s failure to make a living from his writing meant that he and Henriette were on the verge of destitution, she took in sewing to help support them. Meanwhile, her husband was almost more adept at making enemies than he was at making friends. Cocteau rather spitefully described him as “a false, uncultured, irascible, unjust mind,” but had to admit that in his writing4 he was absolutely the reverse.
The poet Louis Aragon, Dadaist and founding member of surrealism, observed in Reverdy’s eyes “that fire of anger unlike any I ever saw.” Unlike Gabrielle, Reverdy was unable to use his towering pride as a spur. But like Gabrielle, he was a character of great paradox, and while exhibiting that overweening pride, he was also deeply modest. Finding balance almost impossible, he oscillated between indulgence and extreme ascetic abstinence. He was a brilliant talker, but his silences could be deadly, and everything was done by extremes: eating, drinking, smoking and women. Having overindulged in all these, he was led by turns from revulsion to an inexorable sense of self-loathing. Yet these tendencies and their corresponding darkness did nothing to reduce Reverdy’s ability to love women, no matter that afterward he was overcome by remorse. It wasn’t remorse alone, however, that periodically made him flee Gabrielle and the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and return to his wife in Montmartre. Gabrielle brought out in him a dread at the thought of being tied.
While Reverdy’s vacillation between an obsession with Gabrielle and resisting her must have been emotionally taxing for both of them, she was prepared to suffer his erratic behavior and ferocious rages. One day, Gabrielle was entertaining at the Hôtel de Lauzan. Among her guests was Aimé Maeght, art dealer and friend to most of the significant artists of the period, including Braque and Giacometti. Reverdy appeared with a basket on his arm. Completely ignoring Gabrielle and her guests, he walked down the steps onto the lawn and calmly proceeded to collect snails and place them in his basket.
His disquiet about good living and wealth put Gabrielle right at the center of Reverdy’s doubts. But his love for her emerged from somewhere far more significant than her exemplification of refinement. There are a good many who make an art out of living, and while this is an undeniably important contribution to life, it should not be confused with art. But what drew Reverdy back to Gabrielle more than the lifestyle she represented was her strength, her joie de vivre, her imagination and her creativity. Reverdy also understood that an essential part of her was just as austere as he was.
Gabrielle accused him of masochistically refusing even fleeting possibilities of happiness, telling him he made his unhappiness into a “principle.” But Reverdy’s sense of isolation was almost impregnable; he believed that our most durable links with one another are the very barriers between us. He asked, “What would become of dreams if people were happy in their real lives?” It wasn’t that Gabrielle herself had ever been a particular devotee of the notion of happiness. Indeed, as time went on, she grew exasperated at the growing belief that one had a right to it. Nonetheless, she had a great urge toward life, and the positive, creative forces that this implied. More firmly grounded than Reverdy, she was not tempted by the mysticism gaining a hold over her poet. Battling to nurture him and nullify his remorse, Gabrielle tried to keep Reverdy by her
, to tether him more firmly to this earth.
Offering her strength and capabilities as support, she helped him with great tact and generosity, made visits to his publishers, paid them grants to pass on to him, and also bought his manuscripts. It was Gabrielle who financed his first major book of poems, Cravates de chanvre (the hempen rope used for hangings). And all this she did in secret so as to save his terrible pride. Reverdy alienated a growing number of his friends, including the surrealists who had idolized him and sometimes Gabrielle tried to mediate. Eventually, there were few left who would support his dreadful rages: Picasso, Gris, Braque, Max Jacob — friends Reverdy and Gabrielle had in common. One senses, too, that Gabrielle and Reverdy must have each caused the other emotional torment.
Gradually, his periods of absence from her home grew longer until, sometime in 1924, he left, no more to return. Finally, to his friends’ amazement, Reverdy would withdraw from the world completely. Accompanied by his ever-faithful Henriette, he placed himself in a small house beside the Benedictine abbey at Solesmes, out in the Pays-de-la-Loire.
For Gabrielle to trust a man was most unusual. But over the years, whatever the tumult of her relationship with Reverdy, she never ceased admiring him and remained devoted to his poetry. It was immaterial that Reverdy was married, or that their love affair was turbulent. In turn, until his death, Reverdy would send copies of all he wrote to Gabrielle, with touching dedications:
Dear Coco
The time that passes
The weather outside
The time that flies
Of my obscure life I had lost the trace
Here it is found again darker than the night
But what remains clear is that with all my heart I give you my love
And all that follows doesn’t matter.5
Despite all Gabrielle’s best efforts, she had lost yet another man, and with Reverdy’s final departure, she was left wretched. While outsiders had little comprehension of this relationship, they could yet see that between this strange pair there was a deep rapport. Sometime later, Abbé Mugnier, that inveterate old commentator on the Parisian comedy of manners, wrote, correctly, that Gabrielle’s affection encouraged Reverdy to write and that she herself was not the same as she had been before their affair.
Cocteau’s mother’s comment on the relationship as “the return of a peasant woman to a peasant,” albeit said in snobbery, went some way toward understanding Gabrielle and Reverdy. It wasn’t exactly that they were peasants — they had both traveled way beyond those roots, and neither of them could have either lived with or been accepted by their kin — it was the residual element of their inherited connections to the earth and tradition. Despite the strains of their relationship, in Reverdy Gabrielle had discovered someone whose significance, while not replacing Arthur’s, reconnected her with the pastoral nature of her roots, giving her emotional and spiritual nourishment. Reverdy had written to her, “You know well that whatever happens, and God knows how much has already happened, you cannot render yourself anything other than infinitely precious to me, for ever.”
With Reverdy’s departure, Gabrielle’s heart had been dealt a ferocious blow. But her habit of concealing the depth of her feelings was not so difficult to achieve because the worlds in which she moved were noted for their particular egotism and self-regard. All the same, one suspects that in her entire life, there may only have been a handful of people who understood this highly intelligent, paradoxical and defensive woman with anything like the emotional imagination necessary to do so.
In that same year, 1924, Gabrielle was once again asked by Cocteau to design the costumes for a new Ballets Russes production, Le Train Bleu, whose inception arose out of a Diaghilev fit of pique. Following the death of Radiguet, Cocteau had gone to Monte Carlo to find distraction with his musical friends Stravinsky, Poulenc and Auric. Whatever the histrionics, Cocteau was genuinely prostrate at the death of his youthful amour and would take years to recover from it.
In Monte Carlo was the music critic Louis Laloy, a man of great cultivation who was also addicted to opium. In 1913, his notorious Le livre de la fumée, a history and manual of opium smoking, was credited with the great popularity of its practice in postwar Europe. Cocteau would write, “My nervous suffering became so great, so overwhelming, that Laloy at Monte Carlo suggested I relieve it in this way,”6 and so, with Poulenc, Auric and Laloy, he began smoking in earnest. By the time he left Monte Carlo a few weeks later, he was hooked, and in the future he would at times be reduced to an appalling state by his addiction. While Gabrielle would complain about Cocteau, she also remained his supporter, paying on several occasions for his rehabilitation. It is worth bearing in mind here the opinion of a present-day expert in drug addiction: “Addiction beginning in one’s midthirties [Cocteau’s age], or thereafter, is not a search for excitement or pleasure, as in the very young.” Cocteau was not out for kicks; he was desperate to escape the depths of his depression.
The ballet Le Train Bleu came about initially as compensation for Cocteau’s involvement in a contretemps between Diaghilev and the ambitious and flirtatious Ukrainian dancer Serge Lifar, who had stepped out of line. The ballet was set at a resort and became a vehicle for the extraordinary gymnastic antics of Diaghilev’s present lover, a young Englishman named Anton Dolin (real name Patrick Kay). Cocteau’s thin story line had Dolin impressing a troupe of golf and tennis players and featured beach belles of both sexes who were all in search of adventure.
With a score from Darius Milhaud, choreography was to be by Nijinsky’s dour but gifted sister, Bronislava Nijinska; set designs were by the cubist sculptor Henri Laurens, and costumes were by Gabrielle. Laurens’s Riviera beach set of sloping cubist planes and lopsided beach huts was in natural hues, dramatically setting off Gabrielle’s costumes in bright dynamic colors.
Diaghilev didn’t like Laurens’s front curtain. And remembering that in Picasso’s chaotic studio he had seen a canvas of the now-famous giant women, hand in hand, bare breasted and running across a beach, he set out to acquire it. Diaghilev loved the earthy abandon of these women, and his majestic powers of persuasion overcame even the wily and stubborn Picasso. Diaghilev was so pleased with this painting that a brilliantly enlarged version — painted by the Russian émigré prince Shervashidze — was used as the Ballets Russes front cloth from then on.
The train to which the ballet refers was then the ultimate in chic. Launched only two years earlier, it carried the wealthy between Calais and the French Riviera in exclusively first-class carriages. Leaving Paris in the evening, and renowned for its cuisine, the Train Bleu made three stops before arriving at Marseille the following morning. Then it called in at the most important resort towns along the Riviera, finally halting close to the Italian border. Named by its wealthy passengers for its beautiful dark blue carriages, speeding south in search of pleasure and escape, the train had an image of up-to-the-minute sophistication and romance. Each of its sleeping cars had only ten compartments, with an attendant for every car. Early passengers included the Prince of Wales, Charlie Chaplin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, J. M. Barrie, Somerset Maugham and Gabrielle Chanel. In the years between the two world wars, the Train Bleu carried almost everyone who was anyone traveling to the south of France.
In Gabrielle’s utterly fashionable beachwear, Cocteau’s undesirable passengers — gigolos, good-time girls and chancers of one sort or another — were “hardhearted modern youth that pushes us around with impertinent contempt… Those superb girls who stride past swearing, with tennis racquets under their arm, and get between us and the sun.”7 Cocteau was commenting on the radical change in the way the young felt empowered to behave in the postwar years. They revealed the tendency to disdain authority, already flourishing in those small groups of artists in the early years of the century, and now sufficiently widespread that Cocteau could characterize it in a ballet.
A good fraction of Gabrielle’s clients were young women in this category: tomboys with sh
ort hair who wished for emancipation. Their wealth and privilege made them appear liberated, but a few recognized that there was more to independence than pretending to it by simply taking their father’s, their spouse’s or their lover’s money.
Gabrielle was present at many of the rehearsals for Le Train Bleu, and was by now well versed in the infighting and tensions ever present during the making of a Diaghilev production. With the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev had created around him, as he always did, a kind of loose extended-family atmosphere where, whatever their differences, ultimately they pulled together. Again generated by Diaghilev, an edginess and energy arising out of experiment was what his company of “sacred monsters” thrived upon, often spilling over into near-chaos. While finding them all infuriating, Gabrielle, like her friend Cocteau, was also stimulated by the Russians’ very un-French way of going about things. Logistics, money, the sets, the music, the fanatical dedication, the love affairs, treachery, high artistry and rampant emotion — all typical elements, of course, with their own creative and destructive possibilities in any kind of production. But Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes took them to the limit. The Russians were so entirely different from the cultivated, artistically minded French bourgeoisie and aristocrats. At a certain level, they were simply more interesting; more exotic, more authentic and richer in possibility than the immensely self-conscious refinement found in the Parisian salons.
Diaghilev, a formidable despot, was whimsical, sarcastic and vindictive. Practicing outrageous favoritism, he was also endowed with extraordinary artistic flair. The company might sometimes have grown tetchy at his despotism, but they understood it, and wouldn’t have continued working for him if they hadn’t recognized his great talent. Typically working close to catastrophe meant that it was never quite certain until the last moments whether a Diaghilev production would actually take its bow in front of a first-night audience. And Le Train Bleu was no exception.
