I remembered.
‘The one our friends at La Marine were so nasty about.’
‘So they came back?’ I said. There’d been no sign of them last summer.
‘And vanished again. Rumour had it that she’s a training partner of Suzanne Lenglen’s and that he’s been brought up with Lacoste and Borotra; they go to Biarritz and do nothing but play tennis all day long. Other rumours say they’re in Paris settling their affairs and are coming to live here for ever. Someone’s actually seen their building site.’
‘Where?’ I said.
‘I’ve not the slightest idea.’
* * *
The omens held. It was a good summer, my third in the South of France. There were many to come, each definable still: different, individual in atmosphere, focus, events; men and women in foreground. The great constant was the climate, the inflexible summer climate of the Mediterranean coast. It embraced, contained, our existence; the ever-present sun and sea, the scented air, the strident sounds of tree-frog and cicada were the element we moved in. From May to October there was no rain, only night-dew, thus nothing changed: the earth was monochrome, the sea reverberated the sky. Morning after morning we woke to clear light, coolness modulating through the hours into the still, unwavering heat of noon, the small evening breezes, the warm night luminous from sky and phosphorescent sea. How permanent they felt, these even summers, how reassuring – this will go on: we shall go on.
Oh the Mediterranean addiction, how we fall for it! Natives most of all; anywhere north of Avignon, of Pisa, as the case may be, they pine in deprivation, exile; while the rest of us go seldom free again of that call of the South after our first weeks on the Ligurian or Aegean. So did I respond when as a child I had looked out of a train window crossing the Alps; later the Sorrentine peninsula gave substance to the instinctive longing. From then the South meant Italy, and my first summer at Sanary had confused and disappointed me. The Mezzogiorno, Midi (by any other name) was the authentic South, no doubt about that, but it also was most certainly not Italy. I missed what I was used to, I missed what I loved, and though rash and ignorant, I was affected by the absence of the architecture that I had become expectant to see springing from the ground at wayside and obscurest village. Poor Sanary offered two fountains, at the ends of the port, each mounted by a statue (female) of circa 1900, one representing L’Agriculture, the other Le Commerce. It was a come-down.
In short I did not take to Sanary at once; hard to explain by any future light. There had been the unsettling effect of my mother and Alessandro’s sudden move to France; the vague unease that year, the sense that all was not well with them – between them? – contributed.
How very different were the months that followed so soon after. But they were a winter – sunny in every sense – a winter all the same. And although we were steeping ourselves as it were in Frenchness – those forays into books during the day, those sorties in the evenings – we might have been anywhere, it feels looking back, pursuing an existence of our own – a mother and her daughter, a pair of sisters, a woman and a girl – ensconced happily, very happily, in our wind-blown villa like two explorers in their base camp. Such a time never came again.
The succeeding summer, my second French one (a good part of it spent in London on my last lap with the Robbinses) I see as a forerunner of the third, the present one, the aestival routine of the South of France: active mornings in market and sea, siesta hours enclosed in shuttered houses, nights of eating, dancing in the open air. At home, indications of stability, the trustees and their warnings quiescent, Alessandro finding acceptance as a go-between by a small coterie of artists and their patrons. Locally, new connections had been formed, earlier ones sloughed off. The days were over when my mother had been subject to the courteous, protective gallantry accorded to a woman on her own (a beautiful woman, slightly enigmatic?), she and Alessandro were now facing Sanary life as a couple; we were seen – with me added – as a family, a household.
All this I found consolidated, in undertones and fact, this year: now, 1928. We lived in a handsome house (if without much confort moderne); we had a car; my elders were as near as ever to being gainfully employed, enjoyed their teamwork, which indeed seemed to help keeping us in modest prosperity. It had all become quite bourgeois. I no longer went out with a bowl to fetch our dinner from the traiteur, we had a maid from Italy now, living in, who cooked for us and did everything else as well. She would have baked our bread, had we not persuaded her that French bread was eatable (which it was indeed in those days before steam-baking). Emilia (procured by Alessandro’s mother), lean, wispy, unmarried, came from a Tuscan village, a hard worker, serious though not unsmiling. She saw being in service as a softer life than working on the land. Like Flaubert’s Félicité, she was saving part of her wages for a nephew. (To whom, we believed, she was not individually attached, it was more a matter here of family feeling and honour.) She reminded me of our Lina from the German village who had done so much so selflessly for my father and me. Emilia was less elderly, of less pessimistic outlook, less desiccated and a good deal less devoted to her religion. In some weeks she missed mass altogether. Perhaps she believed herself dispensed while toiling in foreign parts; perhaps she was unable to take the Sanary church – very sparsely attended, we heard (I never set foot in it) – quite seriously; perhaps she prayed at home in the darkish, silent kitchen of Les Cyprès while hand making our pasta. She was contemptuous of the indigenous population – of mixed and largely Italian origin – who considered themselves French, and were so by Emilia who understood but did not approve their patois. Like Lina she had an obstinate adherence to some stiff principles the nature of which was often quite unclear to us. As in Lina, as in Félicité – though not to the heartbreaking degree – there was much goodness there. We became fond of her, and she of us. She was not demonstrative.
To us she brought the blessing of an almost entire liberation from housework. We could ask whom we pleased, when we pleased at the spur of the hour as was much the habit of the circle we now moved in, to come and eat with us without suffering the aftermath of hospitality. When one had been at table long enough, one just got up and moved to another part of the terrace and went on talking.
Among these new companions – too soon to say friends, acquaintance too cold – one did not ‘entertain’, one happened to eat together, in groups of six or maybe ten, in someone’s garden, in the bistros of Toulon or Bandol attracted by some spécialité or view.
I can still still hear it: someone driving up to our house, calling out of a car window, ‘On va faire une bouillabaisse ce soir chez Justin … Vous venez …?’ and be off.
And chances were that we would join them, meeting at sundown outside Chez Schwob or La Marine, deciding who to go in whose car, then on to eat the bouillabaisse or the loup, the handsome big fish they’d caught that morning, at Justin’s restaurant on the port of Toulon. And there or wherever else our evening was spent would be a sense of elation, of being en fête, of sharing the pleasure of that moment. Spirited talk bubbled. The company were neither residents nor tourists, they were members of that new wave of artists and writers who had fallen in love with the South of France and were making it their summer habitat. The dozen or so who chose Sanary were painters and their wives, one or two of them also painters, an art critic, some literary journalists. Give or take a few years either way, they were in their thirties – young enough to be casually in fine health, old enough to have achieved a part of what they had set out to do. Some had come up a hard way. (Including, for most of the men, fighting in the war now ten years past.) They had reached a good stage in their lives, enjoying a measure of recognition, lack of material want. They had earned their dinners at Chez Justin and under the jasmine-scented arbours of their houses. Rented: no one had bought or built yet; many later did. They believed that the good times, now they had come, would last. Meanwhile their lives and work were based in Paris, though few of them were born Parisians.
The centre of their circle was a couple: he a Polish Jew, a tailor’s son, who had got himself to Paris as a boy; she born, like Colette with whom she shared many attributes and tastes, in a rural corner of Burgundy (or so I always fondly believed). They were the Kislings, the painter and his wife Renée. Kisling, Kiki, was on the threshold then of his international reputation. (Later he became fashionable, some thought over-fashionable – too many portraits of rich women – followed by relative eclipse. At the time of writing, 1988, France is preparing to celebrate the centenary of his birth in 1991.) Kiki was a charming looking creature, with something of a slender bear about him, short, with his round head, round amiable flat face and Slavic slanted eyes – very clean and trim in his blue cotton trousers and check shirts with the short sleeves; but I oughtn’t really to attempt describing him: there is at least one full-length self-portrait of the artist as a young man. There he stands brush in hand in his pale-washed blues and red-white shirt before his easel. I never saw him wearing anything else, not in winter in his Paris studio, not in New York, in exile from Vichy France during the war we did not yet think of then.
Renée, his wife, was a phenomenon, a force of nature which was capable of tender – as well as ruthless – emotions and of many civilised human skills. Her looks were startling: a blaze of vitality and colour, not readily defined in conventional feminine terms – belle laide leaves out the notion of scale and sculpture, bel monstre gets nearer to the mark. A head of rock-hewn features supported on a strong neck and powerful bronzed shoulders, large prominent blue eyes, heavy-lidded, thickly lined with kohl and a fat blue, honey-fair hair, straight cut, savagely bleached and streaked by sea water and sun, a fringe covering one side of the wide forehead, a nose like a parrot’s beak. Her clothes dazzled with strong plain colours; she dressed simply, a pair of sailor’s trousers, barebacked singlets, turquoise or scarlet, sea-shells about her neck, shell and ivory bracelets on her arms. It was superb. And when the monster smiled – proffering, it might be, a slice of melon – it was a smile of serene sweetness and sensuality.
This is how I see her (some photographs I have bear me out). Kisling painted her often, mostly when she was very young and not yet fully herself, sitting for him more as a model than a portrait subject; the paintings, good Kislings, if immediately recognisable, are not terribly like Renée: too stylised perhaps, too slick, prettified. Her laugh was huge; her speaking voice gentle, low, fastidious; her language racy or lyrical in turn. When she was talking of a bird, a plant, a dish, the sea, she could use inflections that reminded one of Colette and may indeed have had a similar source, a farmyard and orchard childhood in a literate and cherishing family with whom the passion for nature, cookery and French literature played an everyday and equal part.
Her parents might be labelled bourgeois with a slight military flavour (however antithetical that sounds when applied to Renée); her father, dead, had been a Commandant of the Garde Républicaine. For her too the first move towards affranchissement had been to get to Montparnasse, on her own, very young. There, like others she took up with, she painted, earned a little here and there and as a model, shared the exhilarating hand-to-mouth existence and camaraderie of artists and beginners. I imagine her at that stage – farouche, incorruptible, devoid of inhibitions of any kind, giving and devouring pleasure.
When Kiki and Renée first lived together and during the early years of their marriage, they were often miserably poor, destructively poor (one has only to think of Modigliani – whom Kisling took into his own studio, at 3 rue Joseph-Bara, 5e gauche, when he was ill, moneyless, in fact dying), so poor that there could be whole weeks when credit had run out, when there was nothing to eat. Kisling survived, and it was chiefly Renée’s strength that pulled them through. She had the loyalty, courage, high spirits and tough débrouillardise, and she put her hand to anything. It is said that she once got a job helping out in a circus.
Renée – again like Colette – adored her mother, Maman. Nothing – defection to Paris, the shifts and wildness of her life, the sexual notoriety later on – seems ever to have clouded that exquisite filial relationship; Renée was and remained a devoted daughter, looking after her mother’s every need in the years of her own prosperity. (When Maman died, in reasonably old age, Renée distraught, flung herself on the floor, howling with grief.)
Equally, she was a good mother, bringing up her two little boys with a wild beast’s protectiveness and tender care (and some strictness). When we first knew the Kislings, the boys, Jean and Guy, must have been about a small three to five, brown as nuts, agile as monkeys, clever, naughty, tough and not averse to using charm. They spent their summers in the sea and part of their winters in the snow (not at Sanary: they were sent skiing). They bore no resemblance to the studious, pale-faced French child expected to swot indoors, for the lycée, the bachot, the grandes écoles: their childhood was spent in brilliant physical freedom.
A good wife? Depends on how one looks at it. What had doubtless begun as a huge love affair modulated to a married couple who had faced the world together and were now enjoying it in perhaps slightly different ways. Renée, if hardly domesticated in the ordinary sense, was a home maker. On large and simple lines; no chi chi – much style. Unlike Colette, her talents went into life only (her painting stage did not last), into the arts and skills of living. The Kislings’ hospitality has become a legend: for its generosity, the vigour and authenticity of the food, its ambience of healthy sensuality. Renée was not just a very good cook – with her own hallmark, nourished like a good composer’s by tradition – she was one of the best of the handful of the very best I’ve known (and I did seek them out); coevals and youngers were her disciples, her influence on my cookery and eating has lasted to this day. (The best known, and professional, of the heirs must be Richard Olney, who ate at her feet as it were in his young days in France.)
Renée in the kitchen, Renée à table … there was also Renée in the sea – perhaps that was her greatest passion – she was a tremendous swimmer, diver, sailor, she ran her own fishing boat … The sea – la mer: salt water, waves – was her natural habitat; perhaps she was what she sometimes looked, a sea monster.
Kisling bathed a little, splashing about with the boys (who swam like fishes), I’m not certain even that he could swim. He worked extremely hard; during their halcyon times at Sanary as well as in his Paris studio (the large studio attached to the small flat four flights up). He seemed always pressed to produce enough to fulfil his contracts with the dealers; one felt that he couldn’t afford to let up. As soon as done, a painting vanished; there were weeks when there was not a single canvas of his on their walls. At the same time he played hard – the big nights, the long nights out, with les copains, with beautiful girls, with wayward girls, at the Montparnasse cafés and boîtes, the bals musettes, faire la bombe as one called it in those days (not any longer). Bounce, vitality: drink till dawn, at work by dawn, was one of Kiki’s things; another was to make big play with women. The joyous cries of welcome – Voilà les belles filles – of appreciation, the bear-hugs, these expressed how much he loved them, how desirable they were to him. It added to the mutual glow, it flattered (as Alessandro’s quieter but equally automatic, if abstemious, demonstrations flattered), that was how his circle saw him, how he saw himself, a part of his charm – he was lovable – his charisma. Renée when she was present, she often was, smiled her serene wide smile. It was also all a little pat, a little loud, a little public. Whereas Renée … We are back at the good wife question.
She had been, she could be, a rock to him; and goodness there was a bond. At the same time, her infidelities were frequent, unconcealed, casual on the whole, often concurrent. If they were not flaunted (their very naturalness prevented that), they were certainly not discreet. Renée did not flirt, Renée did not flatter, when she wanted to go to bed with someone – man or woman (far more men than women), friend’s husband, student, sailor – she made it clear. Then she did. This was accepted. By their
milieu, that is, which shared her attitude, and by Kiki (or so it was presumed). If Renée stood out, it was because her actions, as in everything else, were so instinctive and her appetites were larger.
That permissiveness, partly founded on a love of living here and now, and on an entire absence of religious qualms, was, quite consciously I believe, a moral one. A blow struck against possessiveness (bourgeois), jealousy (ungenerous). You don’t own anyone, you don’t begrudge pleasure to anyone and if it is your own love or lover, let it be. We are friends. Les amis, that was the key notion, les camarades, les copains. It had applied in war, now it went for money as well as sex. (Something not so dissimilar had been going on, mutatis mutandis, in Bloomsbury. Of that I knew nothing as yet.) Nineteen-twenties Montparnasse-South of France attitudes were good-natured: antipodal to the chilling, cruel and ultimately anti-human permissiveness of the eighteenth-century French aristocracy as reflected in Les Liaisons dangereuses. There pleasure was a means to subjugation and humiliation, the ends of conquest vainglory, power, revenge. One might give a thought to the fact that Choderlos de Laclos’ libertines preceded the French Revolution, while those I am talking about followed the First World War.
Much of what I am trying to piece together about the Kislings and their lives and ways was not clear to me all at once during that summer when I first came into their presence; some came gradually, some in retrospect, all the same I drank in a good deal.
The living en fête in the evenings, their maxims of good behaviour. A principle was summed up for me in one not particularly elegant sentence I heard at table one night, sitting – figuratively – at the low end as children and young persons do in France, unsegregated to nurseries or juvenile resorts, expected to take part by listening and speaking up intelligently as the occasion arises. They are not elevated to pretence adults, they’re treated as rational children and young persons. I cannot recall who said it – it may well have been Renée herself – but I can hear the sentence word by word, ‘Si on est amis, il n’y a aucune différence si on fait l’ amour avec.’ Which, in a non-literal translation, said to me, ‘If it’s a friend, it’ll be all right to make love together.’ It made a great impression and I salted it away for future use. I liked the easy sound, the niceness of it, and there was the contrast to what I was afraid had shown in Toni Nairn’s outburst about her sister’s life. That the Kisling doctrine took no account of chagrin d’amour nor the pangs of threatened loss (indeed most of the facts of human nature) escaped me. Well, I did not know much about these (except from books).
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