Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  The familiar feeling of having been cheated rose up in him and Mays could not dislodge it. He lowered his head to the marble basin and began to douse water over his face with a fury directed not just at Bullock’s lie but at the whole trail of lies, misrepresentations, involvements, false leads, and ambiguities that had obscured his way, destroyed any hope of his coming to a thumbnail biography not dependent on his or others’ interpretations. The deeper he pursued the mop of strawberry hair, the more her identity seemed grounded in willful reworking or clumsy observation. Worse, under the stream of cold water arcing from the dolphin’s mouth, Mays sensed that an even more elusive string of interpretations led well beyond that day at the window, beyond the concerns of Delaney, Brink, Bullock, and Ms. Greene, back through a tangle of years, even involving and outdistancing the Bernhardt herself.

  If nothing else, Bullock’s lie restored to Mays the sense of having to be somewhere, to meet a deadline. His lethargy following the afternoon’s revelation fell with a steady douse of water to the hexagons of the porcelain floor. He left the sanctuary of the opulent commode and returned to the dining room, resisting the temptation to go to the news wire at the end of the bar and get current on the day’s disasters, further tragedies of travel by air, sea, or land. No more hunting of clues; if some conspiracy indeed lay in wait for him, he would fall into it willingly with the satisfaction of having brought on, at least in part, his own inheritance.

  Midway in his down-and-out pattern toward the door, a hand hooked inside his arm and restrained him. Instantly recalling the trauma of being caught shoplifting at the age of nine, Mays began to protest his innocence, saying he’d left the meal money on the table and someone must have walked off with it. Turning, he found himself confronted by the full-fruited face of Miss Stark. She stood exactly Mays’s height, and her eyes were rolled back in a burlesque of long-suffering.

  The laundered Edwardian had disappeared. In her place stood a Mack Sennetient comedienne who, by a puff-pastry joviality to her cheeks, gave off the impression of being caught in a punchline too ludicrous to explain. She had an animated face, photogenic, with refreshingly mundane brown hair and an expression that might, if caught by the shutter, have seemed ironic, but, when allowed free movement, passed well beyond irony into relish and good humor.

  —I need your help. Will you play along for a minute? I’ll explain later.

  Playing along in hopes of a later explanation had become a sort of religion with Mays. That he could actually help someone by doing so had never occurred to him. He nodded acquiescence.

  They stood facing each other for two beats. Then she tightened her grip on his arm and nuzzled up to him, steering the cargo to a distant table. As they approached, a figure rose in a flourish of Old World grace. Even Mays, who had all his history from late-night costume reruns starring Garbo and Charles Boyer saw at once that this fellow was the genuine article. His Continental clothing, unlike Miss Stark’s set copy, hailed from the heyday of The Trading Floor.

  Like a good Aristotelian, Mays never guessed at people’s ages beyond labeling them as Beginnings, Middles, or Ends. This fellow was the clearest-cut End Mays had ever met. The gentleman’s act of standing called out for a good traction kit. Miss Stark glossed over the scene with introductions.

  —Mr. Krakow, I’d like you to meet my fiancé, Mr. . . .

  Before she could add to the heap of falsehoods and misrepresentations, however well intentioned, that had just nauseated him a moment before, Mays interjected:

  —Peter Mays.

  An ineffectual blow for accuracy. After blurting this out, Mays hoped, with some embarrassment, that he had not upset Miss Stark’s plans. Gauging by her expression of gratified relief, matters were passable.

  Mays took the old man’s proffered hand, afraid that even a light touch might break the intricate and antique mechanism beneath the skin. Contact contracted the old fellow’s muscles, the way an electric shock galvanizes a dead frog’s legs. He began to speak quickly in a thick, virtually indecipherable European accent.

  Mr. Krakow combined apology, congratulations, reminiscence, homily, and asthma attack into one tortuous siege of syntax, seemingly without connective tissue or logic. At first, Mays thought he detected a story line about childhood in Vienna, but when his drifting attention returned to the man’s monologue, he found the topic had wandered on to the beauty of Miss Stark, Peter’s luck, and the doddering obtuseness of the man himself.

  —But most you, please, my two young friends, have you the knowledge how my heart goes forth with your way. Will you join me at my table for the evening meal?

  —Dinner? Well, I’m afraid, Mr. Krakow, that Peter and I have . . .

  Once again Peter, afraid of this woman’s least embroidering of the facts, interrupted:

  —We’ve plans to go out this evening. But Miss Stark and I would be pleased to eat with you on another occasion.

  An odd formality had infected Mays’s diction. He and Krakow made long, full-eye contact. Mays imagined he could see the man’s eyes go soft, insubstantial, even as he looked at them, losing ground to the proliferate folds of cheek and eyelid, beaten down mostly by all they had taken in in a century’s time. Mays had the unpleasant sense of being just another sight at the end of a long line of travelogues. He felt a tremendous urge to recant, to go back on what he had just said about he and Miss Stark having plans, to spend the evening with this fellow, to put in front of those liquid eyes the obscurities he had come across in tracking down the Vets’ Day mirage, to see what history could make of the mystery before experience softened the man’s eyes altogether.

  He opened his mouth, but this time Miss Stark cut him off. She made the perfunctory good-byes for all three parties, and the two men again shook hands. Mays tried to form a permanent memory of what that hand felt like. Then Miss Stark steered him back to the door, saying:

  —Thanks so much . . . Peter. I’m really embarrassed to have done this to you. But that man is off his nut. He comes in for dinner three times a week, dressed in a thousand dollars of antique clothes and carrying on about the Old World, like he did just now. He’s convinced that I am the perfect image of his dead wife. Gives me the heebie-jeebies. A bit on the ghoulish side, wouldn’t you say? Anyway, I thought I could use you to shock Arkady back to the present.

  Her words had precisely that effect on Mays. He was once again without conspiracy, Bernhardt forgotten, in a snooty restaurant with a waitress who, despite the getup, was graced with a decidedly contemporary attraction. She still had his arm, still gave off the look with which she had initially accosted him. Her words, when she spoke, were saved from the inflection of sarcasm or cynicism by a component of seemingly congenital affection:

  —So what are these much rumored “plans” we have for this evening?

  —A show. The Your Move Theatre.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Great Personalities of the First War Era

  Cultural fatigue is sometimes preceded by a kind of euphoria, a last flare-up, which forecasts the impending collapse.

  —Gerhard Mauser

  In following a path back to the world of the First War, whether opened up by the portal of a photograph or by a casual remark from first hand, the amateur historian finds the wayposts populated, as if the past were no more than a sum of portraits done in gum arabic and brushed into representative perfection for the lens. Each book on the period circles back to the same names again and again, names that are held up as symbolic of the spirit of the times. Choose one at random—the day’s most adored redhead—and find it done up a century later as if she meant from the start to cross and weave together, with the help of outside editing, all the chief personages of her era.

  For someone as famous as Bernhardt, the editing by observers obscures her real self almost completely. Just as the minerals in water replace the cells of a fallen tree, legend crystallized her life until she became her observers’ rumors. At the end, we all become edited copy. With the famous, the
process simply starts sooner, while the subject is still alive. Bernhardt aggravated the situation, cultivating and believing her own legends. Her capricious memoirs read like gossip sheets. Her biographers—related to Sarah by blood, love, and scandal—all have personal reasons for perpetuating the Bernhardt legend. Only three facts concerning Sarah are agreed on: she was a household word from palaces to hovels, she lied obsessively, and she was excessively thin.

  She was born in a half dozen houses at once to a score of parents. She was most probably of Dutch descent, although her accent bore a hundred cultivated traces. Her childhood is anecdotal at best, with no record of her six-year formal education. Sarah made sure never to recount her colorful rise to fame the same way twice.

  Every account of the Great Sarah embellishes on a notorious coffin that the actress supposedly traveled with and slept in. Some sources transmute it to gold plate, others make it rosewood lined with satin. She communicated with spirits while lying in it. She slept in it to gain the power of dead thespians. She did it to shock France, to shock the world. She entertained in it. She took lovers in it. One reporter called it a “sepulchre built for two.” Robert de Montesquiou, the model for Proust’s Baron Charlus, reportedly administered a black funeral mass over Sarah as she lay in it.

  For her part, Sarah claimed that she had begged her mother to buy her the box when she was fifteen. Perennially ill, with a habit of coughing up blood, she had been condemned to death by various doctors. Afraid of an ugly bier and eager to get used to a state she’d be in for a long time, Sarah procured the coffin for aesthetic reassurance and practice. The December 1903 issue of Theatre Magazine imports the legend into the New World:

  When Mme. Bernhardt is world-weary, she gets into this coffin . . . and covering herself with faded wreaths and flowers, folds her hands across her breast and her eyes closed, bids a temporary farewell to life. A lighted candle on the votary table at her left and a skull grinning on the floor add to the illusion.

  So perfect a journalistic knowledge of the details surrounding Madame Sarah’s coffin came not at first hand, but from a photograph of the actress in her rosewood bed. The details survive in countless mechanical reproductions. Sarah had herself so photographed at least twice in her long life. The first amateurish attempt shows a teen-aged Bernhardt in repose, ill-focused and poorly composed. The second, improved by experience, is a luxurious scene, the model for the journalist’s florid imaginings.

  The obvious contrivance of the document, rather than dispelling the legend, only adds to the pyre. The age of mechanical reproduction creates a new celebrity worship. We read about Garrick and Booth, study their careers and roles, digest descriptions of their gestures and eccentricities, but they remain strange to us. About Sarah we may be in total ignorance but simply seeing her lying in state creates the illusion of intimacy. We need only pretend that we, not the photographer, composed the scene.

  The Bernhardt legend rests on many such intimate scenes. She made and squandered several fortunes. She frequently went from obscene wealth to deep debt in a matter of days. When bills grew pressing, she simply dipped her hand into a bowl full of precious rings given to her by lovers, pawning a scoop. The sum always covered the debt in style. Her least expense was immoderate. One winter, she spent two thousand francs feeding the sparrows of Paris.

  Readers visited, via the tabloids, her notorious menageries. Apes inhabited the attic, lions ate live quail, snakes reigned in her front rooms, disrupting her soirées. If her scripts called for animals, she used live ones, no matter how dangerous. She was a pantheist, once refusing to walk on a carpet of lilies laid at her feet by Oscar Wilde. Wilde, no slouch at flamboyance himself, went to his own coffin in the first year of this century, insisting that the three women he would have most liked to marry were Lillie Langtry, Queen Victoria, and Bernhardt.

  She traveled to engagements in a private train, the Sarah Bernhardt Special, an entire car reserved for her alone. She wore heaps of fur, even in summer. Yet this woman, who decorated her rooms in endless damask, also gave extravagant sums to anarchists’ soup kitchens. She befriended Vaillant, amused and moved by this man’s childish idealism. The memory of childhood poverty and an innate love for the phantasmagoric drew her to this fellow. When Vaillant’s bomb exploded in the House of Deputies, the naïf bragged that:

  . . . a hundred deputies lay wounded on the floor. . . . Everywhere I have been, I have seen the same wounds and tears and blood. Tired of this life of suffering, I aimed my bomb at those who were primarily responsible for social misery.

  Their friendship ended with the anarchist’s hanging.

  Audiences poured in, first to see the performer, then to see what everyone else flocked to see, and finally to see the Personality whose scandals filled the popular press. In an age of propriety, her affairs with leading men, paupers, and Ducs of all persuasions were thought necessary for one of her stature. If she kept clear of politics after the anarchist debacle, she did not shy away from heads of state. She was brooched by Louis Napoleon. Rumors proliferated about her relations with princes and ministers of all nationalities. In 1910, when nine kings gathered for the funeral of Edward VII, they mourned, besides their own coming disintegration, a long-time Bernhardt paramour. If Bernhardt had slept with all the men the papers implicated, she would never have had time to appear onstage. She fueled her own notoriety, saying of her son, “I could never make up my mind whether his father was Gambetta, Victor Hugo, or General Boulanger.”

  Among those linked to her is the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. His musical drama of 1913, La Pisanelle, concerned a beautiful medieval prostitute who, captured by pirates, dances herself to death, smothered in roses. Former Prime Minister Clemenceau, leaving the opening of La Pisanelle, remarked to a reporter, “D’Annunzio is the last of the troubadours.” Parisians could not be bothered with such fluff. They were busy rioting at Nijinsky’s barbarically innovative ballets, hissing his minimal movements and still poses in Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun, for which he dressed in a satyr’s suit but carried no panpipes. Responding to the broadsides attacking his performance in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the dancer, shortly to go incurably mad, ushered in an epoch with the phrase “Grace and charm make me sick. . . . I eat my meat without sauce Béarnaise.”

  Squeezed from the artistic spotlight, D’Annunzio made his mark on another front altogether. At the outbreak of war, Bernhardt’s consort returned to Italy, where his skills in writing and oratory were instrumental in bringing Italy into the war on the side of the Allies. He became the most daring ace in the first Italian air force, as if the transformation from anachronistic rhymester to pioneering biplaner were the most natural step in the world.

  After the war, D’Annunzio involved himself in the dispute over the port of Rijeka, also called Fiume. The secret Treaty of Paris promised the city to Yugoslavia, but Italy would not renounce its claim. D’Annunzio took matters into his own hands, marching his personal army of Italian free corps on the city, establishing an independent nation opposed to both belligerents as well as to the rest of Europe. There D’Annunzio introduced a costume of black shirts, one he later re-created for his future employer, Mussolini. When poets become activists become Fascists, we arrive at the heart of the century. But D’Annunzio too, as a youth before the war, was a lover of Madame Sarah.

  Now, everyone in the world was not a Saradorer. Max Beerbohm lampooned her from across the Channel. George Bernard Shaw accused her of having a whole arsenal of “capitally vulgar” sensational effects. Henry Ford used his newspapers to discourage his employees from attending this immoral woman’s American tours. When she could, Sarah dealt with such detractors head on. She went after the libelous Marie Colombier with a horsewhip in one hand and a stage dagger in the other. Three continents exploded with news of the attack, spilling many times the words that Colombier had written in the first place. The only way to handle reporters was to give them good copy.

  Men and women alike stood
in the wings, called from the balcony, wept over performances, massed to train stations and ports, chased after this red-haired wraith as if she possessed some fabulously important secret, worshiped her well into old age, followed her into the new century. All, that is, with some important exceptions. For one group of men and women entered the century by a back door which in time became a grand foyer. In 1900, when Sarah was the toast of every respectable table, a different banquet was under way across the Seine.

  There was another play in town besides Sarah’s production of Racine’s Phèdre. In a single night’s performance four years before the century began, this play established itself with its first word: Merdre. Shee-it. The opening-night house rioted for a half hour before the play could reach its second word. For six weeks afterward, all Paris was dueling.

  Ubu Roi was written by Alfred Jarry, a man who single-handedly raised derangement to the level of religion. Jarry opened the floodgates of that movement with the military name: the advance guard. By his death in 1907, every practitioner of radical art—Picasso, Matisse, Pound, Joyce, Stein, Satie, Stravinsky—owed something to the diminutive Jarry and his obese King Ubu. Yeats sat in the house on opening night, cheering the play on against its detractors. Yet afterward, he wrote of feeling an extreme sadness. After the refinements of his own verse, of Bernhardt and Brahms, there had to be a reaction against so much beauty. Sadly, he wrote the century’s obstetric: “After us, the Savage God.”

  But Jarry and the avant-garde of the first decades were not so savage as they first appear. They are not so much antibourgeois as bourgeois ad absurdum. The artistic vanguard wedded the logic of the middle class to that class’s unadmitted dreams. Jarry merely emphasized the underside of the intimacy brought on by mechanical reproduction: the camera, in encouraging us to identify with the photographed scene, always lied. It cropped, it recolored, it double-exposed. Lenses blurred the distinction between private dream and public, mass-reproduced logic.