7
In Saint-Tropez, the architect took a long vigorous swim, sometimes two, every day in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. Shortly after the first escapade at E. 1027, Le Corbusier started a swim by diving into the water off the Môle Vert—the green breakwater. He headed toward the Môle Rouge—another jetty about 120 meters off. This was well within the range of his ability, even with the strong waves that day.
A powerful motor yacht was racing through the water. No one on board saw the swimmer stroking along, his broad shoulders and strong arms lifting rhythmically, his legs kicking in perfect sequence as he continued his daily exercise in a straight line created by the pronounced depression between two large waves. The fifty-year-old architect was about a quarter of the way toward his objective when he felt something hard hit his head. He discovered that he was under a boat. He noticed that it was as if the sunlight was trapped with him in a white and luminous cavity.
We know these graphic details because, more than a month later, Le Corbusier responded to a request from his mother for the most specific description possible of the accident he miraculously survived. In relating what happened, he diminished his own significance. He said that he rolled along “like paste out of a tube” under the keel of the boat. He went its entire distance, determining that it was between fifteen and eighteen meters. While being pushed along, Le Corbusier told himself to stay calm until he reached the stern, at which point the whole unfortunate affair would be over. However, instead of emerging easily from beneath the far end of the boat, he came smack up against rapidly moving propeller blades. As he told his mother, with deliberate understatement, “The motor at 200 horsepower—a good clip.”27
In Saint-Tropez bay, summer 1938
What occurred next was pure Le Corbusier. He completely suspended his emotional and physical reactions. Disconnected from his physical pain, he focused entirely on the behavior of other people—and attended logically to his immediate needs.
He reported to his mother, “After the first turn of the blades, I was thrown out of the circuit and seemed not to have been hurt. I reached the surface, and breathed air. I hadn’t swallowed a drop of water. I saw the boat gliding slowly away. I shouted: ‘Hey, wait a second, you went right over me, there may be some damage!’ Quite automatically my hand went to my right thigh, my arm fitting nicely inside. I looked down: a big area of blood-red water, and half my thigh floating like a ray (the fish!), attached by a narrow strip of flesh: ‘throw me a buoy, I’m badly hurt.’ The yacht headed toward me, throwing me a sort of rope knot too big to be held in one hand. The side of the yacht was too high for anyone to help me. ‘Throw a lifesaver.’ It comes, and I sit inside it. And here are some fishermen coming into port; their boat is low, they hold out their hands, and I give them my left hand, because I’m holding my thigh together with my right; we reach the place I started from, on the breakwater; I get up on the jetty; a kind driver appears out of nowhere and helps me sit down beside him. The fisherman gets in the backseat. Hospital. They put me on the table and begin sewing me together. This lasts from six to midnight, in two sessions. I’ve already told you the rest.”28
For all his mental detachment, he had recognized the imperatives of staying alive.
REPORTING THESE EVENTS through an architect’s lens, Le Corbusier emphasized the factor of scale. When the people on the yacht threw out the rope with a large knot, what mattered was that the knot was too large to be held by a human hand. Then the side of the boat was too high for anyone to be able to help. Le Corbusier had had the presence of mind to recognize that he therefore needed a lifesaver and to call out for one to be thrown to him. A command of tools and a knowledge of mechanics had enabled him to survive.
Once Le Corbusier was seated inside the circular buoy, the event became more like a biblical parable. The yacht and its wealthy owners were too far above the roiling sea to help, but because the modest fishermen had a boat that was closer to the surface of the water—a vessel of work rather than pleasure, more connected to the ocean than separate from it—they provided salvation. Rather than risk trying to get the nearly dismembered Le Corbusier into their small boat, they pulled him along and brought him back to the breakwater. The heroes of the story were anonymous: the sympathetic person with a car who rushed to the scene and helped place Le Corbusier in the passenger seat next to him, and the fisherman who rescued him.
Le Corbusier later wrote Marguerite Tjader Harris that he had been “cut to pieces” during the two surgical procedures.29 He was in the local hospital for four weeks in all. He calculated that he had two meters of stitches—a statistic he often announced—plus a hole in his head.
There was another detail he recounted to his mother as well: “On the green jetty I said to the bystanders: ‘Hand me my glasses and my clothes.’”30 He had not for a moment lost his rationalism.
8
Shortly after the accident, Le Corbusier went into the sort of rage that overtook him when he felt others had inflicted unnecessary suffering on his mother. He was more upset by the way Marie Jeanneret heard about his encounter with the propeller blades than by the event itself. For this he blamed journalists. Paris-Soir and other papers had picked up the story about the famous architect and reported it immediately. He was furious that the newspapers’ greed for gossip had resulted in his mother’s being far more frightened than if he had been the first to inform her—once he had returned to consciousness. The idea of Yvonne becoming involved in the communication seems not to have occurred to him.
And of course the papers were inaccurate. To alleviate the anxiety of his aged parent, Le Corbusier wrote her a letter from the hospital ten days after the surgery to specify the details the papers had gotten wrong, even if he had not succeeded in his goal of telling his mother first—and would have to write a second letter nearly a month later in response to her request for more precision in his report. The person for whom architectural rejection was tantamount to tragedy presented a life-endangering accident as a miracle of good fortune. He also made clear that his concern was for his wife and his mother as much as for himself.
Hospital, Tuesday August 23 ’38
Dear Maman,
Yvonne and I sent you a note the other day at Evolème. Did you get it? I was afraid that the papers would have printed the story and that my accident would be revealed to you by some third party. Wretched Paris-Soir actually reported the whole thing….
I’ll try to put the whole thing on a strictly factual basis:
1. Ten days ago I was sliced up by a yacht propeller.
2. There were several ways of being killed or hideously crippled; and one way of escaping; slick as a lizard. The miracle occurred: I’m calling it the miracle of Saint-Tropez.
3. The head was the object of a special operation, in the presence of Prof. Démarets, one of the glories of Parisian medicine. It could have been serious. Nothing of the kind. Better still, it’s all over today, healed, liquidated.
Thigh. Yes, the famous lardaceous tissue. But the propeller cut lengthwise and not across: no vein or artery touched. The wound is the size of the Radiant City (the book). Today is the tenth day. I don’t have even one degree of fever. Baths the last four days, and the Carrel-Dakin solution has had its effect. The wound is clean, ready to be sewn up. Here, 1 doctor + 1 surgeon to deal with it. Tough customers who inspire every confidence. The hospital personnel extremely attentive and kind. Bravo, hospital, the only place to go when you’re sick. This business has given me the reputation of being extremely brave. From six in the evening to midnight on Saturday the 13, I was cut, sewn, mutilated by the medicos without being put under. The doctor complimented me.
And now everything is put right. I hope to leave the hospital at the end of this week. This monastic retreat has not been without interest for me. High moments of resuming contact with the truth of things.
Yvonne of course was terribly shaken. She’s with good friends who love her and are taking care of her.
So now you are well-informed. Take it in with all the serenity of your alpine vacation.
All my affections31
The Carrel-Dakin solution to which Le Corbusier referred was a system of irrigation for infected wounds using an antiseptic solution containing sodium hypochlorite. Le Corbusier had no idea that in little time the French surgeon Alexis Carrel, who had developed it with the English chemist Henry Drysdale Dakin, would become a close colleague.
BEDRIDDEN IN the Saint-Tropez recovery unit and unable to move virtually any part of his body while he recuperated, the architect became preoccupied with Juliana, one of his nurses. Her little acts of kindness impressed him deeply, especially as he learned Juliana’s life story and became keenly aware that she was an unlucky and grief-stricken woman. Her hardships made her generosity of spirit all the more remarkable.
The Provençale nurse was the first person every morning to smile at people suffering from illness, gracing the lives of all the patients, massaging the muscles of paralytics. She always brought Le Corbusier garden flowers in a glass and placed them on his bedside table. The architect became convinced that an underpaid hospital employee who acted in this way exemplified pure charity. “Each morning’s smile is an eloquent object,” he wrote.32 The commentary on Juliana’s ability to give joy was both an expression of his priorities and advice to his mother.
9
Marie Jeanneret was deeply upset by all these events but full of admiration for her son’s fortitude. The encounter with the yacht motor and his handling of it garnered him some of the praise he craved. On September 11, his mother wrote him,
Thanks be to God you’ve left the hospital and can benefit from the good salt air following the dreadful adventures from which you have emerged wounded and further weakened by weeks in bed and so much suffering. The suffering you never mentioned: now you can claim direct lineage with the famous Spartans in their heroic combats with pain….
My dear boy you are a hero; you never fought in a war but had you been in the ranks of the brave soldiers of ’14 to ’18, you would have been cited for honors, for you have even more character than they, and strong characters are rare….
All of which is not to boast too much about you, but just to acknowledge those who accept without a murmur and suffer without complaint.33
She continued, “Make fun of your old lyrical Maman! There has been no lack of bad moments lately, and so we must praise those who warm our hearts.”34 She understood his admiration for Juliana; she also shared her son’s insistence on facts and clarity: “Now before ending, I’d like to ask one more favor of you. Couldn’t you tell me in detail how the yacht accident actually occurred? How you were found (fainting etc.), how the rescue was effected, things about which we are far from being informed.”35
Meanwhile, in her suffering, Albert, she assured Edouard, was her “compagnon fidèle.” If she meant this to comfort him, it surely had the opposite effect.
BY THE END of the third week of September, Le Corbusier could put on his pants and shoes by himself and had given up his cane. His skin still pulled when he walked, but after more than a month of being immobilized, he was on the mend and in high spirits.
Shortly thereafter, Marie and Albert wrote jointly to Edouard. Now that he had provided the full report as requested, they replied, “Lately your description of the accident gave us all the shudders, and we have thanked God for sparing you. He will preserve you for a still higher task.” Le Corbusier’s brother added, “The moving account of your accident almost made me faint, but Maman’s solid temperament saw her through. Certainly it reads like a page describing the heroes of long ago, whose character is not likely to be found in our period, in the tranquil ambience of present-day life…perhaps an ambience quite out of date.”36
It had taken happenstance, not architecture, to get that admiration at last.
10
After writing Edouard about his accident, Le Corbusier’s mother continued, “We need all our strength for future storms, for the Inevitable approaching with giant strides. Can it be possible, O Lord, that by the frenzy of one man an entire continent is being swept into the abyss? I listened to Hitler’s speech in Berlin, and since then I cannot believe that so many appeals to humanity and wisdom from so many quarters will be heard! It is abominable and terrifying! Everyone here agrees about assisting those in despair because politics has forced them to accept exile in other countries. But to seek out atrocity and to wield it in this fashion denotes a man who has turned into a barbarian, an hysterical madman, a dangerous mystic. I am overwhelmed by all this, and especially for your sake, in the fiery furnace as you are. What will you and Y and Albert and Lotti do in Paris if war is declared? You know that my little house is always open to you and that you would be safe here…. I say this because in your present condition, my son, you cannot assist in the defense of your new country.”37
Le Corbusier was not as worried as his mother. At the end of 1938, he wrote Marguerite Tjader Harris with the news that the plan for Algiers was moving ahead; finally, he would achieve his objectives there! Using military language—as if, like the armies of Europe, he, too, was waging war—he said that he believed that, after six years of perseverance on various fronts, he had at last conquered public opinion.
His only problem, he confessed to Tjader Harris, was Yvonne’s refusal to have sex. He complained that he was living like a monk; the situation with his wife was “harsh and terrible. My nights are filled with intense imaginings.” Tjader Harris, of all people, should understand how taxing abstinence was for him: “You know me well enough to know that this ascetic life I am leading is a heroic effort for me.” But he was determined to resist other temptations; “If I were to yield even slightly now, I should be a ruined man.”38
The year 1938 loomed in Le Corbusier’s thoughts as the “époque magnifique.”39 Tjader Harris thought so, too. From her large house in Darien, leading the life of a dutiful daughter and attentive mother, she wrote him delicately flirtatious letters. She regularly gave news of Toutou and her mother and asked warmly after Le Corbusier’s mother, but most of all she missed its being just the two of them. A friend of hers adored her Le Corbusier chair; nice as that was, she longed for the architect “by himself.”40
11
In March 1939, one of Le Corbusier’s best Spanish friends was killed by a bomb. The architect wrote his mother, “One must not let oneself be overwhelmed by death. It is the most natural event in life. If life has been even normally fulfilled, I do not see how death can come as a disruption.”41 He was devastated when Franco’s forces then took Madrid and Hitler invaded Poland—there would be fewer chances to make architecture when people could think only of defending what they already had rather than building anything new—but he was determined to hold the darkness at bay: “Better to occupy one’s life with possible hopes than collapse into neurasthenia. Certainly this is the time for patience. France has been in crisis since 1932. No one is doing any building. And the flag must be kept flying, ready for the moment of rebirth.”42
Meanwhile, once Le Corbusier had an idea in mind, he did not let it drop. The architect was working on “a museum for unlimited growth.” The project was an elaboration of his earlier scheme for a contemporary-art showcase in Paris and of the concept he had pitched to Nelson Rockefeller. Again it was built from inside out as a square spiral and was capable of indefinite expansion, with the idea that what was an exterior wall on one day would become an interior one the next. But now it was a structure raised on pilotis, entered at its center, from underneath.
Le Corbusier wrote his mother on June 3, 1939, from Fleming’s Hotel on Piccadilly in London telling her he was developing the scheme for an American client—“Guggenheim, the copper king of New York,” to whom he was about to present it.43 This was Solomon Guggenheim, the man who ultimately was the chief patron of the great art museum that bore his name when it was completed in New York in 1960. Hilla Rebay, Guggenheim’s art advisor and emissary, was with him at
that presentation in London. She very much liked the square spiral of ramps and the idea of entering into the core of a building that worked from inside out.
Four years later, Rebay began conversations with Frank Lloyd Wright about a museum structure to be funded by Solomon Guggenheim. The spiral that Wright designed for that patron was circular rather than square, finite, vertical, and with a large central atrium. Nonetheless, Le Corbusier’s revolutionary idea for a linear presentation of modern art, with the visitor moving continuously around a central axis in a progression that broke the mold of exhibition architecture, was possibly at the root of Wright’s idea, having been communicated by Rebay and by Gugggenheim, even though Le Corbusier never made the claim or tried to take credit, any more than he ever proposed that the ramps at the villas La Roche or Savoye had influenced Wright’s museum design.
12
On September 3, France and England declared war against Germany. Le Corbusier was officially relieved of all military obligations because of his age, and his swimming accident and his vision problem disqualified him from volunteering as a soldier anyway, but he wrote to three different friends with high government positions seeking employment that would be of maximum usefulness to the country.
At 5:00 p.m. on the day war was declared, Le Corbusier wrote his mother, “We are—each of us—quite incapable of facing events with any sort of mastery. The unspeakable is occurring quite mechanically, with no regard for human sensibility.”44 The next day, he and Yvonne left Paris.
They first went to Vézelay, a lovely hill town in Burgundy where their friend Jean Badovici lived and that has one of the most splendid of all Romanesque cathedrals. Le Corbusier wanted Yvonne to be in a place where she felt comfortable; he figured he would wait there, too, until he was somehow called to action. Pierre Jeanneret, meanwhile, went to Savoie, and Albert and his family accepted Marie Jeanneret’s invitation to install themselves in Vevey.
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