Metro Stop Paris Page 5
What a beautiful view from a beautiful hill. The problem for centuries was that nobody knew what to do with it. There had been a convent here in the seventeenth century but neglect had allowed it to fall into ruin. The same fate awaited the makeshift military barracks erected here during the Restoration. Napoleon III set up a terrace at the summit from where he could admire what progress his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, was making in demolishing and remodelling the city His uncle had planned in 1810 a vast palace for his son, the King of Rome. It would have been larger than Versailles and would have flattened most of the hill, a truly imperial project. Unfortunately, the forces of Europe were allied against him and he managed to do no more than pull down the shacks, dig a few holes and build some sections of the planned outer walls, which his successor promptly dismantled.
During the decades that followed a few intrepid hunters would clamber up the hill to kill a rabbit. In 1823 there was a mock battle and a firework display at the top to celebrate the Due d'Angouleme's capture of the Spanish fort of Trocadero, a campaign that was already forgotten by the end of the year; only the quaint Spanish name stuck. The poet and writer Paul de Kock has described Sunday picnics he used to have here with his family; they would sit in the grass and eat pâté de veau froid. In the Musée Carnavalet hangs a delightful watercolour by Sigismond Himely which shows a stone quarry on the edge of a field of rye; a visitor sits contemplating a peasant girl on the back of an ass with baskets filled with vegetables. And we are only a couple of miles from the centre of Paris!
What eventually decided the fate of the Trocadero was the westward movement of buildings and people, a movement that would cut through the ancient north-south axis of Heaven and Hell and impose the new east—west axis of the Louvre, the Concorde, the Champs-Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe and La Defense—the Paris you and I know, the Trocadero you and I see.
One of the persons to enjoy the modern Trocadero was Adolf Hitler. "It was the dream of my life to be able to visit Paris," he said on a sunny 28 June 1940. "I cannot say how happy I am that this dream was realized today." A lightning campaign and the death of 150,000 men had made the trip possible. The Trocadero, the outing lovingly recorded on celluloid, was one of the highlights of the Ftihrer's visit.
In the 1930s Nazi Germany developed an absolute fascination for Paris. Paris—that is, the visual image of Paris—corresponded so well to the Nazi ideal of spectacle and power, the "triumph of the will" to borrow the title of Leni Riefenstahl's famous film of the Nuremberg Rally. Look at that terrace of the Trocadero: it puts you in mind of Riefenstahl's Nuremberg, no? One does not have to possess enormous aesthetic sense to notice that the architecture and paintings of Italian Futurists, French Surrealists, German Nazis and Russian Socialist Realists all had something in common. Call it modernism, if you will. A single theme runs through them all, that of a Prometheus unchained, man breaking out of the walls that had imprisoned him, man born again: the triumph of the will, the creative burst. This virile message put Christian art on the defensive.
Paris responded in style to the new pagan times. Unable to be capital of the industrial world, she strove to be capital of the artistic world. She was more than successful. Crowds had flocked to her World Expositions, all of them held at the foot of the Trocadero. The Trocadero was designed for these big shows. Thirty-two million people visited the 1889 Exposition, carrying home the little models of the new Eiffel Tower; fifty-one million came to Expo' 1900 — that is more than seventeen times the entire population of Paris, a figure that has only once been exceeded in the history of the world since (at Osaka, Japan, in 1970). As a result, many artists and literary figures decided to make a second home in Paris. Especially important among these aesthetic migrants were the British and, later, the Americans.
There was also the German component. How Berlin enjoyed watching Josephine Baker dance nude on their stages, singing "Mon pays, c'est Paris." German cabarets in the 1930s were filled with French song; Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier had their imitators in Berlin. Huge choral groups and girly reviews made a nice complement, a mirror image, to the troops out on the streets in Berlin; but they were also an idealization of the Paris that Ludendorff's armies had not reached in 1918. At the end of the 1930s Goebbels's film industry produced Bel Ami, which showed Paris to be a welcoming place, a living spectacle of perpetual gaiety; in one scene, the song "The Harmonica Invites Us To Dance" is performed right in front of the Hôtel Meurice—just where General von Choltitz set up his headquarters in August 1944. Looking at the Trocadero you can see how, with its terrace and the museums and theatres on either side, and the Champ de Mars beyond, it has been built for the big parade, the spectacular dance.
That was the culture Hitler represented. He arrived to an empty Paris in the early hours of 28 June 1940. He insisted on having two artists accompany him, his architect, Albert Speer, and his principal sculptor, Arno Breker. The accounts left by these two men closely corroborate each other. The filming of the event—high sweeping cameras which, every now and then, zoom into the Fiihrer's black Mercedes with the two artists sitting behind him—come up to the highest Nazi standards. Every detail that demonstrates the triumphant will of the Fiihrer, the beauty of the occasion, is brought to the fore. At one point the car passes a group of confused gendarmes (they are described by both Breker and Speer) who can think of nothing better to do than salute the Fiihrer. The cameramen obviously like roundabouts; they give them a chance to show off their equipment. This is done with great éclat as Hitler is driven up to the terrace of the Trocadero (though the car is actually driven the wrong way round the roundabout). On his approach a lone French worker, symbolic of the defeat, is observed in the corner of the frame.
SO THERE IS Hitler, there the palace, there the commanding hill. But the story that needs to be told on this pagan terrace, its stones devoted to the triumph of the will, is of a more human dimension; it is a story of love and passion that developed under the shadow of Hitler's dictatorship. Those stones on Trocadero Hill contain the memories of a man and a woman who lived not far from here.
Dr. Otto Rank was one of the great heretics of the psychoanalytic movement. His writings about human will and the artistic act had got him into trouble with his master, Sigmund Freud, in Vienna. Rank claimed that the cause of human anxiety lay not in sex (the libido) but in the experience of birth. Replacing Freud's explanatory metaphor of the Oedipal myth with the metaphor of the expulsion from Paradise, he overthrew the patriarchal schema of the Freudians — the murder of the father and incest with the mother—with an idea that reinstated the mother-child bond as the model of all relations. "Im gegenteil! Die Mutter! On ze contrary, ze mozer!" Rank exclaimed to the American Psychoanalytical Association in Atlantic City when outlining his new book, The Trauma of Birth. This was in early June 1924 during his first trip overseas since the First World War. He was received as an emissary of Freud. "He was the very image of the scholarly German student," said Jessie Taft, who would become a much needed friend in the years to come.
At the time Rank also thought of himself as an emissary of Freud. But within months the discord was set in motion. Rank never really understood what had happened to him; he was Sigmund Freud's adopted son; since 1905 he had recorded the minutes of the weekly meetings in the Professor's house and taken long midnight strolls through Vienna's empty streets with him afterwards; he had been an instigator of the secret Committee which reviewed membership of the International Psychoanalytic Association and expelled recalcitrants; he was one of Freud's intimates, indeed his most intimate. In 1925 the tables were turned: it was "little Rank" who was under attack.
He was baffled. But the sniping went on for years. He was not a theoretician, he said. "I haven't anything to 'teach' and can't have any kind of a 'school'—not even an undogmatic one," he protested to Jessie Taft. The Americans, he said, were trying to create a "struggle to match my theory against the Freudian when I haven't got one." Rank's two central ideas, that a child's fi
rst anxiety was a consequence of birth and that therapy should be set a definite time limit, could certainly be traced back to Freud. The problem was one of emphasis. Those who minimized the role of the libido—Fliess, Jung, Adler and Rank—would be purged. The way this was done—through the public "revelations" of a dissenter's "neurosis"—bore a certain comparison to Nazi and Communist tactics.
The point is not made lightly; there really was a parallel. The rise and fall of psychoanalysis followed the same curve as that of the other great ideological poisons of the twentieth century It reached its peak in the 1940s, then gradually fell off. Psychoanalysis, just like Communism, received a second wind in Paris with the student riots of 1968, only to collapse under its own weight in the decades that followed. One hundred years after its birth psychoanalysis has few strongholds left in the world; one is Paris.
The glory of Otto Rank is that he realized that something was fundamentally wrong with the movement as early as the 1920s, which is when he migrated to Paris. The therapist should be humble and not pretend that his knowledge was pure science; on the contrary, it was pure art. "I never try to cure," he once remarked. Instead he tried to confront the patient with his neurosis; help the patient realize that the source of his anxiety was the very source of his creativity. "Will therapy," as Rank called it, allowed the patient to realize his full potential as an integrated, creative being. Unlike Freudian analysis, which could go on forever, Rank limited therapy to six months; an "end-setting," claimed Rank, forced the patient to crystallize the inner will conflict. Like the artist who works within the borders of his canvas to enhance a portion of experience, like the poet who transcends his own complaint about the poverty of language, Rank sought, in the analytic hour, to seize the patient's love, anger, pain or joy and demonstrate that these were the very forces that made him creative. To Freud's claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living," Rank replied, "the uncreative life is not worth living." Rank was the "midwife," as he described himself, attending upon a "rebirth."
By 1926 it was no longer possible for Rank to continue practice in Vienna. There was a last painful scene at 19 Berggasse, where Rank had first met the Professor twenty-one years before. "So quits!" wrote Freud to his colleague in Budapest, Sandor Ferenczi (who was himself constantly subjected to Freud's personal slights). "On his final visit I saw no occasion for expressing my special tenderness; I was honest and hard. But he is gone now and we have to bury him."
Rank arrived in Paris that April. Psychoanalysis in Paris had already found a patron in the immensely wealthy Princess Marie Bonaparte, a direct descendant, as everybody knew, of Napoleon I's brother Lucien and a descendant also, through her Jewish mother, of the founder of Monte Carlo's gambling casino—as few people knew. "I went to Vienna in 1925 to undergo analysis by Professor Freud," as she put it. "I thus had the occasion to make the acquaintance of his family." Most practitioners in Paris before the Second World War were foreigners and their patients were also drawn largely from the artistic immigrant community. A therapist of special note was the Polish-born Eugenie Sokolnicka who, in the 1930s, became André Gide's analyst before she committed suicide. But it was Rank, working through the American community, who gave the movement a serious note. After several changes in residence, in the summer of 1927 he eventually acquired his magnificent corner apartment at 9, Rue Louis-Boilly, just opposite the impressionist Musee Marmottan and less than a quarter of a mile from the Trocadero. How appropriate: Rank was the painter of souls and an impresario of human personality. American writers and artists flocked to his handsomely furnished consulting room. He charged them five dollars an hour, three times the going rate in New York.
"I DON'T REMEMBER how I found out that Dr. Otto Rank was living in Paris, on the boulevard Suchet," wrote the American novelist Anaïs Nin in her journal on 7 November 1933. Slim, languid Anaïs Nin with her startling oriental eyes was nervous. "I impulsively decided to ring Rank's doorbell," she continues. "By sheer accident, it was he who opened the door. 'Yes?' he said in his harsh Viennese accent, wrapping the incisive, clean French word in a German crunch. He was small, ark skinned, round faced; but actually one saw nothing but the eyes, which were beautiful. Large, dark, fiery. With my obsession for choosing the traits which are beautiful or lovable, and wearing blinkers to cover what I do not admire or love, I singled out Rank's eyes to eclipse his homely teeth, his short body"
It was one of the encounters of the century, initiated within a few months of Hitler's rule in Germany, though few would know what actually transpired until the unexpurgated diaries of Anaïs Nin were published in the 1990s.
Anais Nin and Otto Rank made an improbable couple. Otto Rank was born "with hair complete," in April 1884, into Vienna's poor Jewish quarter of Leopoldstadt on the east side of the Donau Canal. He and his elder brother, Paul, both hated their father, Simon Rosenfeld, an artisan jeweller who was frequently drunk. Paul was put through law school while Otto worked in a machine shop until he met Freud in 1905. Rank's ideas about willpower and artistic creation were born out of his own isolated adolescence, spent at night reading Schopenhauer, Ibsen and Nietzsche—works that "brought him to the brinks of ecstasy and despair." Music, which Freud hated so much that he could not even support the presence of musicians in a café, was defined by Rank in his adolescent diary as "not the image of an idea but the image of will itself." He adopted his name from the "Dr. Rank" in Ibsen's A Doll's House, the sympathetic old man who befriended Nora. In private circles Rank also adopted the name "Huck" from Mark Twain's Huckle- berry Finn; in contrast to Tom Sawyer, who pursued an elaborate, bookish strategy to free slaves, Huck was direct, emotional and practical with his pal Nigger Jim.
Briefly, there was nothing scientific about "Huck" Rank's upbringing. He was an artist to the core, and this showed in his first book, The Artist, completed before he was twenty-one. It so impressed Sigmund Freud that he was hired on the spot as his personal secretary; it was Freud who put him through the Gymnasium and University, ironically while Rank was already sending out directives to fellow psychoanalysts throughout the world.
Rank's poor health—he had suffered rheumatic fever as a child-had kept him away from Armageddon during his military service in the last years of the war. In 1917 he had been posted in Cracow, then in Austrian Galicia, where he met his beautiful and talented Jewish bride, Beata Tola. In 1919 she gave birth to their daughter, Helene. Beata would herself become an accomplished psychoanalyst. But she was no socialite and gradually, in the 1920s, she withdrew from Rank's life. She lived with her husband behind the Trocadero at Rue Louis-Boilly But in the autumn of 1933 they were on the point of divorce.
Could "Huck" be the sympathetic old man to Anaïs Nin? It was not exactly the role she sought in him. They came from such totally different worlds, though there was in Nin that soul—"an angel pattern externally while internally diabolical"—urging her to live her creations. Anaïs Nin was born in Paris in 1903 with a silver spoon in her mouth. Her father was a Spanish composer and playboy, Joaquin Nin, her mother a Danish singer, Rose Culmell. Just before the outbreak of war the mother and Anais's brothers moved out to New York because Joaquin had deserted the family for another woman. But it was Joaquin whom Anaïs loved, incestuously so. In the 1920s she was back in Paris. Around the father developed over the next two decades a network of husbands, lovers and occasional man friends that would include most of the American artistic community as well as wide sections of Parisian high society.
One might say that her life between the wars reads like a great Parisian novel; but actually her life was the great Parisian novel, for many of the American authors who followed her culled their books from the story of Anaïs Nin. "Draw a chart!" she told her lover Henry Miller who was working on a new novel. "We always attain beautiful heights, wrestling with the immense load of ramifications." Yet it was all so complicated! Anaïs was in need of a psychoanalyst.
At the moment she rang Otto Rank's doorbell her network spread outwards from hot to cold
like our bright solar system with its planets and circling moons. In the centre radiated the Father taking "joy out of his silly little cunt chasing"; Anaïs travelled between the planets but her life still depended on Father's warmth, a fact that she resented; she was determined "to make him suffer before he made me suffer."
Further afield revolved her husband, Hugh Guiler, a wealthy Bostonian who had married her in Havana, Cuba, when she was twenty; he worked for National City Bank in Paris and he provided his wife with homes: a sizeable house in Louveciennes, to the west of the city, and various apartments in Paris, according to the season. There was also his parents' home at Forest Hills, outside New York. Hugh commiserated with his Scottish friend, Donald Killgoer, about their spouses' infidelities; Anaïs knew that if she suddenly confessed everything, "Hugh would twist his hands, as Donald did, until the bones cracked, and rave as Donald did, and curse me, and try to kill me;" but Anaïs was not the confessing kind.
Further out still was one of the major planets, the Brooklyn refugee Henry Miller, a system all of its own. He was at this time "staying in a pimp-and-whore Hôtel in Montmartre" but he had just agreed "to move to whatever Hôtel I [Anais] chose." She found what she thought was a modern, attractive hotel—again behind the Trocadero—at 26, Rue des Maronniers; she only later found out that it was very well known for "temporary alhances and well-kept mistresses;" but at least it was comfortable. Anaïs spent much of her energy trying to get Henry's first novel, The Tropic of Cancer, published; her chief link here was Rebecca West who kept a posh place in London and cultivated relations with the grand London literary agent A. D. Peters. But nobody seemed to appreciate Henry's efforts; Rebecca told Anaïs that she wrote better, and that is what Anaïs thought, too. Caresse Cosby, who ran a press in Paris, was also a promising link—particularly inviting because of her large property out at Ermenonville, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's old haunt about an hour's drive from Paris. Henry talked to himself as he tapped at his typewriter, "writing about dung, ulcers, chancres, disease. Why?" Henry was driving poor Anaïs to despair.