by Zoe Valdes
To top it off, “Gala the Druggie,” as the Russian muse was known when she was married to Éluard, left her first husband for the mustachioed Salvador Dalí, never to return. The poet could never get over her desertion, which has its own place in the annals of Surrealism. Call it a desertion for the history books. Éluard did not immediately recover, turning his abandonment into an interminable, depressing whine, which his friends listened to pityingly, especially Dora. Éluard felt belittled, excluded from the life of the only woman who acted as his muse and who revealed herself to be her own work of art. Gala Dalí took off, even though she could have stayed with Éluard collecting lovers with his knowledge and consent. But perhaps Gala needed to belong to one man alone, and not to any man but to a mad, ardent, fertile, and entertaining genius. Everything she perceived of Éluard’s love, Gala’s exaggeratedly dramatic style of passion, gradually became unbearable to him. So much so, that when she shared him with Max Ernst, Éluard kept repeating—as an excuse, pretending all this meant jack to him—that he preferred his woman’s lover to his woman herself. That was Éluard. And that was what Dora loved about Éluard: his complaisant fragility, his evasive attitude to being scorned by the woman he loved, his broadminded championing of every point of view when they argued about people’s sexuality, and so many other sides of his complex personality, his ability to stage all these blind spots, with their sex organs fully exposed, as if genitals talked among themselves, had brains of their own, minds that could hold forth on diverse subjects, like a film by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the writer and filmmaker known for his theory of the Nouveau Roman.
Musidora led Dora to Breton, Breton to Éluard; by another route, as we shouldn’t neglect the influence of Georges Bataille in her life or in their life together, Éluard led her to Nusch, her great friend, her double. And they led her to a certain Pablo Picasso.
Nusch was Dora’s best friend and confidante. Her real name was María Benz. Her father was a circus performer; she also did some acting, playing very minor roles at the Grand Guignol. There Éluard discovered her. She looked like a sickly child, pale, tubercular, prominent bones, so fragile anyone would think she was about to come apart at the seams like an old rag doll. Yet her pearly-white complexion, blond hair, and those same bones jutting out at every angle could all be captured by the camera in a way that made her look like a monumental Nordic beauty playing the role of a lifetime: acting out her own death in every portrait.
The “swinger,” as Breton contemptuously called Éluard because of his continual mixed-up relationships, got married a week before Breton, on August 14, 1934, to Nusch, that young woman whose delicately balanced swan’s neck couldn’t have been a greater temptation to depravity. Dora remembers in minute detail Nusch’s bridal dress, the naughty wink Nusch gave Dora, the complicity that instantly sprang up between the two of them. In those days there were still pleasure-loving girls in the world who couldn’t wait to get married, join nuptially as man and wife, with the idea that desire and love could abide forever.
After that first festive meeting and with their deepening friendship, Dora began to photograph Nusch incessantly, following a mysterious need to capture and immortalize Nusch for herself alone, with some degree of jealousy, almost of morbid egotism.
The “swinger,” however, couldn’t help, years later, going back to his old ways, with Dora and Nusch, with other women, with any woman who crossed his path.
Greek games
Dora was standing still, balanced on a rickety chair, photographing Picasso’s studio from above, capturing a bird’s-eye view, a technique that had become a sort of obsessive tic with her. Éluard and Nusch dropped by, or “slipped in on the sly,” as they put it. Nusch, ravishingly beautiful, posed seductively for the lens. Dora pressed the shutter, hoping to capture Nusch just so, enveloped in a pale white halo.
Éluard made a conspiratorial gesture that Nusch understood implicitly. She began to disrobe, and once nude, she set herself before the painter. When Picasso, who hadn’t stopped painting, saw the young woman offering herself to him, he didn’t wait, he stripped off what little clothing he was wearing, charged Nusch like a bull, and tossed her on the cot.
Dora never understood why Éluard forced Nusch to go to bed with Picasso in front of her. But these were things, she supposed at the time, that Surrealist women had to accept for the sake of their friendship, of her friend’s poetry, of the Surrealist movement itself, as free as she herself had been in her Bataille period. In any case, Dora never forgot Nusch’s melancholy look, her compulsive motions, her moans, more like those of a wounded animal in terror than in heat. Dora felt terribly ashamed of Picasso, snorting like bull, covered in sweat, on top of her best friend’s body. But this feeling vanished instantly when Nusch’s face transformed, looking as if she had fainted dead away, until at last Dora realized she was smiling with pleasure, rolling her eyes.
Éluard smoothed his hair, and his bulging forehead seemed about to burst with fury, with sensual pleasure, with everything he needed to be able to write a poem worthy of Paul Éluard.
Dora always wanted to be like Nusch, so much so that she ended up falling in love with her. In love with her theatrical lovemaking and her histrionic sexual surrender.
Being stout, Dora silently envied the actress’s childlike looks, her sickly body that was for the first time being nourished by the poet and his poetry, her fine hands, the nails she photographed sunk into her feverish cheeks. Her enigmatic face, veiled by a finely drawn spider’s web.
Dora’s best models were Nusch and Picasso; when she photographed them she felt she was surrendering to them forever, in the same state of sublimation she attained in orgasm.
Dora, looking out over the magnificent landscape for the soul that is Venice, admits to herself that she had been deeply in love with Nusch, that she wished she had been the one who made love to Nusch, not Picasso, though Éluard never would have been understood; or maybe he would have but it never occurred to him to suggest she make love to his wife. Besides, they were all—all or most of the Surrealist men—trying to interest Picasso in their wives. Picasso, after all, was Picasso, and recreational sex and voyeurism were growing in importance. An indescribable frenzy was overwhelming them. The sexual object was becoming even more desirable and delectable.
Dora kissed her on the lips, after shooting the photo in which Nusch’s eyes glistened moistly like two drops of liquid indigo. Nusch didn’t push her away, didn’t say anything. She just shifted positions smoothly and very gradually. Afterwards Dora began to dream she was making love with Nusch’s shadow, with her double, enveloped in a florescent halo. Or with a spider with Nusch’s head.
Another time, while shooting the Vicomtesse de Noailles, the moneyed patron of the Surrealists, Dora realized she could fall in love with women more readily than with men. But then she corrected herself: she wasn’t interested in men, she was only interested in one man; she had loved Picasso, while she might have loved many women. First, Nusch. Second, certainly, Leonor Fini, her painter friend. Third might have been Marie-Laure de Noailles.
Marie-Laure had an additional allure: she seemed to have no bones, her flesh wrapped around the wind, the breeze, and her body unfathomably gentle, impossible to describe and even harder to capture in a photograph. She was pure air. Marie-Laure’s body was a Surrealist assemblage of skin, held aloft by a desire to clothe nothingness, veil the void, and costume the abyss.
She was married to the Vicomte de Noailles, an ideal lover, for he understood and accepted everything, couldn’t have been more tolerant. Not that he had much choice; she was already a blue-blood, a direct descendant of the Marquis de Sade. Her great-grandmother on her mother’s side, the Countess of Chevigné, inspired Marcel Proust to create the character of the Duchesse de Guermantes. Marie-Laure had been lucky enough to have a father of renowned ancestry, a Jewish banker, Bischoffsheim, not an easy last name but one that opened all sorts of doors, cousin to the Baron Hirsch who founded the Jewish colonies in Ar
gentina.
Her whole history fascinated Dora, and, like so many other artists, she aspired to be added to the list of the Vicomtesse’s inner circle. And, while Picasso, Balthus, Dalí, Giacometti, and Óscar Domínguez (a painter and the patroness’s vulgar lover) painted the aristocratic lady with bones of smoke, Dora photographed her.
The rich woman who produced many of Luis Buñuel’s films remained close to Dora, faithful to the end.
And she had already foreseen this, long ago, while she watched the shimmering gondolas. She knew that Marie-Laure would never leave her side, ever, because Marie-Laure’s greatest treasure was her great generosity and dependable loyalty, though her loyalty would later be debatable, since if James Lord had allowed her she would have taken him to bed during the week that Lord spent at her fabulous summertime mansion.
Dora was walking in silence now along the Grand Canal. She began to recall how many times she had abandoned Marie-Laure. Just as Picasso had abandoned her, she had left Yves Tanguy, the painter and sculptor, another of her lovers. “Maybe it’s all a punishment,” she droned under her breath in a litany, “maybe it’s the worst of all punishments.” No act will go unpunished.
Before Picasso, she was the one who left the men. Much like Bataille, Tanguy had begun to smother her, and she could no longer bear his stifling presence or even manage to look him in the eye, avoiding his gaze, ashamed he might discover she no longer loved him. Tanguy suffered, but men get over breakups quicker than women. A woman dies every time she is deserted. Every time a man is abandoned, he is reborn. And her relationship with Tanguy hadn’t lasted, not like the ten years she lived with Picasso. “Petit Yves qui vous aime” was the sweet inscription he wrote her in a book: “Little Yves, who loves you.”
And then came Picasso. All love, all betrayal.
She had given the ten best years of her life to Pablo Picasso, and it was as if she had thrown them into the sea, as if they had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. After him, she no longer knew how to live. The rest could only be compared to a form of survival that, paradoxically, came from the vital impulse bequeathed by those ten years.
She went back to the hotel. James was waiting for her at the front entrance, wearing a white linen shirt and lightweight beige pants. He was utterly good-looking, very handsome, and she now tried to believe she might begin to love again.
Étourdissement. Dora, Éluard, Picasso. And me. Paris, 2010
Étourdissement is not an easy word to translate from French. From the verb étourdir, “to stun,” it retains a connotation of pending tragedy without being over-the-top. Yet I can think of no more apt word to get across the feeling that overwhelmed me as never before. I hadn’t slept for days. So many years of reading Paul Éluard’s poem “Liberté” in public, because I thought he’d been expelled from the French Communist Party and had never rejoined; so many years of being flat wrong, of living a lie, a lie repeated so often it had almost become the truth, as happens under totalitarianism.
I learned of this error, to my own horror, from the writer and essayist Jeannine Verdès-Leroux. And though I will always love Éluard’s poem and continue to quote it, because it is a great poem quite in spite of who wrote it, and it will remain a literary symbol of freedom, it won’t be the same, I won’t read it as I used to. When I mentioned this to Jeannine, her response was dreadfully definitive. “In any case, he didn’t give a damn about his poem!” she said in an anguished but authoritative voice.
I have the same feelings toward Pablo Picasso. We know from a number of sources that he did not cover himself with glory, at least not as much as we had been told, during the eight months before the Germans invaded France, nor did he comport himself well with his women. But his art, much of it, still captivates me. Quite in spite of who made it. Nowadays, to be sure, I don’t look at Picasso as I used to, just as I can never read Éluard’s poem in the same way.
Paul Éluard arrived at Surrealism even before Surrealism itself did, before Dadaism did, because he was a Surrealist before World War I, and he was close to André Breton, first as a friend, then as a poet. Both were briefly active in the Communist Party in 1925; later they distanced themselves from the party, fed up with and fearful of what they were already beginning to learn about it: the horror. Éluard was actually expelled, though he later rejoined. André Breton never again set foot in the party, being influenced by the thought of Leon Trotsky.
In 1935, Breton and Éluard traveled to Prague, where they had the good fortune of meeting a number of famous writers, poets, and critics. They became friends with the historian and literary theorist Záviš Kalandra, born in 1902, beloved by all. This experience was incredible for them both. They returned to France in raptures about the way they’d been able to take the pulse of genuine poetic and political movements that were on the rise even inside a nascent dissidence.
In 1942 Éluard went back to the French Communist Party and stuck with it till his death, a move that forced him to write incredibly hideous and even totally Stalinist poems such as his “Ode to Stalin” (1950). He had not, however, entirely forgotten that experience in Prague, and it ate away at him not to accept it for what it really was: an awakening to the truth.
I also wrote poems with communist overtones, though none quite so horrendous; I was sixteen years old and very confused. I’m not sorry, I’m ashamed of my stupid naivety, of how gullible I was to believe everything they told me.
In 1950, Záviš Kalandra—the friend Éluard and Breton had met in Prague—was arrested, accused of spying and conspiracy, and savagely tortured. He was forced to read a mea culpa in front of a tribunal and had to agree to everything the regime ordered him to do, for as we know, at every trial in the USSR and in the “popular democracies,” the accused was obliged to testify to whatever the Communist Party demanded. Thus destroyed, Kalandra was never again the same.
André Breton issued a major appeal with the aim of demanding Kalandra’s release; all the important writers, from Paul Claudel to Marcel Camus, from François Mauriac to Jean-Paul Sartre, signed his petition. Not so Éluard.
In the June 14, 1950, issue of Combat, Breton published an open letter to Éluard: “How, in your heart of hearts, can you bear so grave a debasement of Man in the person of one who has proven to be your friend?” Éluard responded: “I have too much work to do with the innocent people who proclaim their innocence to deal with the guilty who proclaim their guilt.” You can find this quote in the June 19–25, 1950, issue of Action. Záviš Kalandra was executed. He was forty-eight.
Max Jacob, Picasso’s friend, was arrested by the Germans and imprisoned in the Drancy internment camp for deportees. There he died there on March 5, 1944, some say from pneumonia, others say typhus, or both. First he had to live through the torture of seeing his younger sister, Myrté-Léa, dragged to the same camp and later deported.
Jacob wrote to his friends, trying to get them to do something for his dearest sister. Sacha Guitry responded that, if worse came to worst, he could help Jacob but not his relatives. A short time later, on the February 24, 1944, Jacob was arrested. He could have escaped through his back door, but he sat on his bed and waited. From the train, from his dark cell, he wrote to Jean Cocteau and Picasso with a plea for help. Cocteau scrambled to respond, but in spite of his letter and the petition (which, by the way, was never confirmed to have been signed by the poet’s other friends), the letter with the release order that he had obtained from the German ambassador, Otto Abetz, arrived too late.
I’ve said it before: when Picasso was asked to help free Jacob, which he should have been able to do given his relationships and his friends’ relationships, he answered with a pitiful excuse. The scene took place in Le Catalan. “It isn’t worth doing anything. Max Jacob is an angel; he’ll be able to fly the coop.” A very Picasso statement. You can even imagine the poet, winged like the dove of peace, flying across a sky painted by the Spaniard. According to others, rather than an angel, Picasso actually called Max Jacob a lutin, a du
ende, a sprite.
Max Jacob died at Drancy, the antechamber of extermination, the limbo on the way to Auschwitz, very ill and perhaps still hopeful. My mind replays this incident in slow motion and cannot erase the letter he wrote to Cocteau:
Dear Jean:
I write to you from a train, thanks to the kindness of the gendarmes who surround us.
We’ll soon be in Drancy. That is all I can say.
Sacha [Guitry] said, when told about my sister, “If it had been him, I could have done something!”
Well, it is me.
A hug,
MAX
He also wrote to André Salmon from the train, urging him to ask Picasso, one of his oldest friends, to do everything possible. And one last message before he was locked in the icy cell for those waiting to be deported: “May Salmon, Picasso, Moricand do something for me.”
As he was dying, the great poet Max Jacob saw trees passing by overhead; he shouted, he yelled, and shortly he began to fall quiet. The pain in his lungs made him cry out convulsively that someone was plunging a dagger into his chest; in the end, he grew calm. “I am with God—and you have the face of an angel.” Those were his last words.
I once loved and admired Picasso; today I can only view his work coldly, with artistic admiration, of course, but nothing else. I’m done with tenderness. I cannot conceive of art apart from love. But this deep love has left me. Perhaps, with time, I will be able to warm up to his work again.
The great Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, who served as a diplomat after the war, requested political asylum in 1950. He also became a professor in the United States and returned to Cracow in the last years of his life, dying there in 2004. The last sentence of his Letter to Picasso, published in the June 1956 issue of Preuves, pages 5 and 7, in case anyone wants to check, reminds the painter: “If the support you lent to the terror mattered, your indignation would also have mattered. It is therefore just to point a finger at your thoughtlessness, lest it be forgotten by your future biographers.”
