Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Read online

  After a journey to Alsace in the summer of 1858, Whistler produced his first successful work, a group of etchings known as The French Set. The following year he abandoned Paris for London. He was often back there, but from then on avoided the Latin Quarter, no longer regarding himself as a penurious bohemian; Montmartre was his preferred place of residence.

  His attitude to Paris is striking. There could be no greater contrast with the British reserve of the du Maurier set, who when they wanted an evening out would generally go to an English restaurant where they could dine off roast beef and beer. Whistler, far from conforming to his national background, was rejecting the whole American Puritan tradition from which he had emerged, a tradition embodied by his picture of his pious mother sitting in the gloom. He was also the first American in Paris to achieve a reputation as a trouble-maker. On one occasion he struck a workman for accidentally dropping some plaster on him; the American Minister in France had to be called to court to smooth out the affair. He also had a fight with a Paris cab-driver, and knocked his brother-in-law through a plate-glass window.

  *

  Henry James said his first memory was of the Place Vendôme, on the Right Bank near the Place de la Concorde, when he was six months old. His first important trip to Paris was a dozen years later, just as Whistler was in the middle of his year at Gleyre’s (1855–56). This visit was the result of James’s father’s determination to take his sons and daughter abroad from New York for a year, ‘to absorb French and German and get a better sensuous education’. In Paris they stayed first in a house rented from an American who divided his year between Louisiana and France; Henry remembered shiny floors, a perilous staircase, ormolu vases, gilded panels, brocaded walls, endless mirrors.

  The James boys were provided with a French tutor, Monsieur Lerambert, who wore a tight black coat and spectacles, and Henry endured endless mornings of lessons rendering La Fontaine into English. In the afternoons a governess, Mademoiselle Danse, would take them for walks. There was Guignol (Punch and Judy) in booths on the Champs-Élysées, and a warren of little streets and squares to wander through, for Haussmann’s reconstruction of the city was far from complete. Later, Henry and his elder brother William began to attend school in a somewhat curious institution, part classroom, part pension, in the rue Balzac, where what Henry later called ‘ancient American virgins’ drifted in from the dining room to learn French alongside the children.

  Henry James made his first independent trip to Europe after studying at Harvard Law School. He spent some time in Paris in the autumn of 1872, finding it so thronged with American society – the Lowells, the Nortons, and other blue-blooded Bostonians – that it seemed almost ‘Massachusetts-on-Seine’. He wrote to his father that he and James Russell Lowell had ‘tramped over half Paris and into some queer places … There is a good deal of old Paris left still.’ He told Charles Eliot Norton that he would probably stay on for some weeks, ‘unless indeed M. Thiers [the current President] and the Assembly between them treat us to another revolution’. James’s fear of insurrection was understandable; it was only eighteen months since the terrible struggles of the Paris Commune, in which 20,000 people had been killed and the Tuileries palace burnt to the ground. But Thiers and the Third Republic managed to retain control, and James’s 1872 Paris stay was peaceful. Writing to his brother William, he described how he usually spent his day:

  Mornings and very often evenings in my room; afternoons in the streets, walking, strolling, flânant, prying, staring, lingering at bookstalls and shop-windows; six o’clock dinner … De temps en temps the theatre … I walked to the Odéon in the rain (it hasn’t stopped in three weeks) and enjoyed through the flaring dripping darkness from the Pont du Carrousel the great spectacle of the movement, the enormous crue of the Seine … It stretched out from quay to quay, rushing tremendously and flashing back the myriad lights from its vast black bosom like a sort of civilised Mississippi.

  The letter continues by observing that, as a crowd, ‘the Americans in Paris (as observed at Munroe’s, the Grand Hotel etc.) excite nothing but antipathy.’ On the other hand, ‘I enjoy very much in a sort of chronic way which has every now and then a deeper throb, the sense of being in a denser civilization than our own. Life at home has the compensation that there you are a part of the civilization, whereas here you are outside it. It’s a choice of advantages.’

  The French nobleman who in 1776 had regarded Benjamin Franklin as the equal of the ancient Athenians might have been surprised to find Henry James, a century later, judging Paris ‘a denser civilization’ than the USA: at the dawn of its independence, the latter had seemed to promise so much. But the nineteenth century had not deepened and enriched the quality of life in the USA; the civilised outlook of a Franklin or a Jefferson was becoming the exception rather than the rule in public and even intellectual circles, as the national energies bent themselves almost exclusively on the amassing of personal wealth, and the simple fact was that Europe, the Old World, was ‘denser’ in culture simply by virtue of its vastly longer history. James, on his walks about Paris in the rain, did not miss that point.

  Coming back to Paris in 1875, he began to work his observations of the differences between the two societies into his second novel, The American (1877). The story was serialised in the Atlantic while it was being composed, and was largely based on his own daily experiences in Paris, sometimes scarcely assimilated into fictional form. Its hero Christopher Newman, a wealthy young American visiting France, is almost a caricature of the national type, ‘the superlative American’. He ‘had never tasted tobacco … His complexion was brown and the arch of his nose bold and well-marked … He had the flat jaw and the firm, dry neck which are frequent in the American type.’

  Speaking no French, Newman blunders when dealing with the Parisians, but gets away with it through sheer nerve. He admits that, though he has made his pile back home, in Paris ‘it’s as if I were as simple as a little child, and as if a little child might take me by the hand and lead me about’. He makes the acquaintance of Tristram, an American who lives with his wife ‘behind one of those chalk-coloured façades which decorate with their pompous sameness the broad avenues distributed by Baron Haussmann over the neighbourhood of the Arc de Triomphe’. Mrs Tristram, discovering that Newman wants a wife, introduces him to a half-English, half-French widow, Claire de Cintré, and the novel is thereafter chiefly concerned with his tortuous relations with her family, the de Bellegardes. But there are passing portraits of other American expatriates and tourists, such as the Unitarian minister Babcock, whose ‘digestion was weak and he lived chiefly on Graham bread and hominy – a regimen to which he was so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted when, on landing on the Continent, he found these delicacies fail to flourish under the table d’hôte system’. Mr Babcock claims to be fond of pictures and churches, ‘but nevertheless in his secret soul he detested Europe’.

  Newman takes French lessons at the first opportunity, and soon acquires a thoroughly sophisticated and European style of conversation. Claire de Cintré’s brother is duly admiring of this, but is more impressed by Newman’s unchanging Americanness. ‘It’s a sort of air you have,’ he tells Newman, ‘of being imperturbably, being irremovably and indestructibly (that’s the thing!) at home in the world … I seem to see you move everywhere like a big stockholder on his favourite railroad. You make me feel awfully my want of shares. And yet the world used to be supposed to be ours. What is it I miss?’

  *

  James’s view, then, was that each side – Americans and Europeans – had something to learn from the other; a judgement that would doubtless have been shared by the promoters of the Statue of Liberty. The appeal for funds for the statue opened in 1876, just as James was writing The American and moving from Paris to England.

  The statue did not owe its inception only to a desire to express Franco-American friendship. Relations between the two countries had, after all, been diplomatically cool sinc
e the 1790s. La Liberté was intended by her French promoters not just as a gift to the USA, but as a subtle reproach to France herself for not achieving the high ideals of liberty and democracy which her Revolution had promised, and which the American struggle for independence did seem to have achieved.

  The French did not realise that from the USA the picture looked rather different: that Americans were beginning to feel themselves trapped in a shallow and materialistic society, and that they would soon begin to turn towards Europe, the land that seemed to them to offer a true sense of liberation.

  * Later known as Scènes de la vie de Bohème.

  PART ONE

  The Introducers

  1

  Slowly I was knowing that I was a genius

  Some eighteen months after Henry James’s departure for London, an American-Jewish mother and her five children arrived in Paris and settled for a while in Passy, which was now a suburb in the sixteenth arrondissement. The husband, Daniel Stein, had made a success in the clothing and textile business in the USA. In 1874 he had taken his wife and children on business to his native Europe. They spent about three years in Vienna; then Daniel had to return to the USA and his wife Milly came to Paris for a while with the children, Michael (aged thirteen), Simon, Bertha, Leo, and four-year-old Gertrude.

  ‘Gertrude Stein,’ writes Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,

  remembers a little school [in Paris] where she and her elder sister stayed and where there was a little girl in the corner of the school yard and the other little girls told her not to go near her, she scratched. She also remembers the bowl of soup with french bread for breakfast and she also remembers that they had mutton and spinach for lunch and as she was very fond of spinach and not fond of mutton she used to trade mutton for spinach with the little girl opposite. She also remembers all her three older brothers coming to see them at the school and coming on horse-back. She also remembers a black cat jumping from the ceiling of their house at Passy and scaring her mother and some unknown person rescuing her.

  The Stein family stayed at Passy for about a year, then returned to the USA, settling in California. The mother died when Gertrude was fourteen, the father three years later; but in any case Gertrude already depended emotionally on her brother Leo.

  She went to live with an aunt on the East Coast, studying at the ‘Harvard Annex’, the women’s college at Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was soon renamed Radcliffe. There she was taught philosophy and psychology by Henry James’s brother William, with whom she hit it off entirely. ‘It was a very lovely spring day,’ she writes,

  Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night and going also to the opera in the afternoon and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of the final examinations, and there was the examination in William James’ course. She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. Dear Professor James, she wrote at the top of the paper, I am sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today, and left

  The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself. And underneath it he gave her work the highest mark in his course.

  She did not, however, read his brother’s novels. Later she developed a great admiration for Henry James and called him her ‘forerunner, he being the only nineteenth century writer who being an american felt the method of the twentieth century’. But when she was young he seemed to belong too much to the elder generation. ‘The parents are too close,’ she writes, ‘they hamper you, one must be alone.’

  At Radcliffe her written work rarely did her justice. ‘She never wrote good English and grammar meant nothing to her,’ says a contemporary. But she was full of vitality and seemed to be unselfconscious about her rotund and dumpy appearance. She often went for walks in the country with another girl: ‘We said if we have any trouble with a man Gertrude will climb out on the furthest limb of a tree and drop on him.’

  Leaving Radcliffe in 1897, she decided to pursue a career in medicine, with an emphasis on psychology, and began to attend the Johns Hopkins medical school in Baltimore. She spent her summer vacations travelling in Europe with Leo, and largely thanks to what she saw there she began to lose interest in her medical studies, offering no resistance when her professors told her they would ‘flunk’ her. One of her women friends pleaded that she would be letting down the feminist cause, but Gertrude answered: ‘You don’t know what it is to be bored.’ She had been especially bored by abnormal psychology, of which she writes: ‘The abnormal … is so obvious … The normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.’

  She began to realise that her own psychology was ‘abnormal’, at least by contemporary standards. In 1903 she wrote a novella, Q.E.D. (eventually published posthumously as Things as They Are). Based on events in her life, it describes the passionate relationship between Adele – a modified self-portrait – and the tall, slender Helen. Adele is the more passive partner, but observes of the possibility of a sexual affair: ‘It is something one ought to know. It seems almost a duty.’ The drama, played out in America and Europe, is complicated by Helen’s feelings for another girl, Mabel. The book is never explicit about actual sexual relations, but seems to imply that Adele has difficulty in responding physically: ‘Helen demanded of her a response and always before that response was ready. Their pulses were differently timed. She could not go so fast and Helen’s exhausted nerves could no longer wait.’

  Meanwhile Leo Stein had chosen to settle in Europe; he spent some time in the Florentine household of the American art connoisseur Bernard Berenson, but Berenson found him a tiresome bore and said he was ‘for ever inventing the umbrella’ – that is, had no sensibilities. Leo had hoped to become an art historian, but was discouraged by Berenson and went to Paris to reconsider his life. Over dinner with the musician Pablo Casals he suddenly decided he himself was ‘growing into an artist’. He rushed back to his hotel room, took off all his clothes, sat in front of the mirror, and began to draw himself. The result pleased him enough to send him off to the Louvre to sketch statues, and he enrolled as an art student at the Académie Julien, an institution favoured by aspiring Americans who could not get into the École des Beaux-Arts. Deciding that he needed a studio but abhorring the idea of a search, he consulted his uncle Ephraim, an expatriate American sculptor, who recommended 27 rue de Fleurus, a house in a quiet side-street near the Jardin du Luxembourg, on the northern edge of Montparnasse. Leo inspected it, found that there was a good studio adjacent to the garden pavillon, and rented both the studio and the two-storey pavilion itself.

  He settled into rue de Fleurus during the early months of 1903, hanging the few pictures he had dared to buy, mostly Japanese prints. Gertrude joined him for a holiday in North Africa and Spain, then, when the autumn came, agreed to live with him in Paris. ‘She said,’ writes Leo, ‘she could stay there only on condition of a visit every year to America. I said she’d probably get used to it, but Gertrude is naturally dogmatic and said no, she was like that, and that was like her, and so it must be. That year she went to America for a visit and thirty-one years later she went again. No one really knows what is essential.’

  At rue de Fleurus, the studio now became the living room, and a servant was engaged to look after brother and sister, who ate and slept in the pavillon. They quickly found that, thanks to having economised by setting up house together, funds from their shares in the family business in the USA were fast accumulating in the bank. They began to spend the spare money on pictures.

  Gauguin, Cézanne and Renoir featured in their early purchases. Leo quickly showed himself perceptive of what was worthwhile among recent painting; he was one of the few people who had so far recognised the achievement of Cézanne (then nearing the end of his life) and virtually the only one able to write and talk articulately about it. Gertrude reported the purchases in the folksy style of letter she pre
ferred at this date: ‘We is doin business … We are selling Jap prints to buy a Cézanne … Leo … don’t like it a bit and makes a awful fuss about asking enough money but I guess we’ll get the Cézanne.’

  In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude describes how they acquired their first Cézanne from the Paris dealer Vollard:

  It was an incredible place. It did not look like a picture gallery. Inside there were a couple of canvases turned to the wall, in one corner was a small pile of big and little canvases thrown pell mell on top of one another, in the centre of the room stood a huge dark man glooming. This was Vollard cheerful. When he was really cheerless he put his huge frame against the glass door that led to the street … Nobody thought then of trying to come in …`

  They told Monsieur Vollard they wanted to see some Cézanne landscapes … Oh, yes, said Vollard looking quite cheerful and he began moving about the room, finally he disappeared behind a partition in the back and was heard heavily mounting steps. After quite a long wait he came down again and had in his hand a tiny picture of an apple with most of the canvas unpainted. They all looked at this thoroughly, then they said, yes but you see what we wanted to see was a landscape. Ah yes, sighed Vollard and he looked even more cheerful, after a moment he again disappeared and this time came back with a painting of a back, it was a beautiful painting there is no doubt about that but the brother and sister were not yet up to a full appreciation of Cézanne nudes and so they returned to the attack. They wanted to see a landscape. This time after even a longer wait he came back with a very large canvas and a very little fragment of a landscape painted on it …