Metro Stop Paris Page 7

  And so it seemed. Neither Freud nor his adopted son would survive the new war more than a few weeks. Freud's death had been expected. After another gruelling experience of surgery which cut out most of his lower jaw, Freud took an overdose of morphine on 23 September 1939 and died in his new, pretty English home. Rank had been having trouble with his kidneys, liver, gall bladder and had had major dental surgery— "you may wonder what is left," he quipped to Jessie Taft, "the good old colon... had been troubling me years ago . . . I know I am sick." His eyes were giving up, but here he had been lucky to find a second pair in the person of Miss Estelle Buel, a Swiss American who had become his secretary—and in July 1939 his second wife. They had driven leisurely across the country and had decided on a new life in California. But that was not to be. Back in New York in mid-October he wrote once more to Jessie Taft: "I remember the old story of the man whose execution was set for Monday morning and who on his way to the gallows remarked, 'This week does not begin too well!'" On Friday, 28 October, while dining out with Estelle, he complained of a sore throat; the fever rose; he was admitted to hospital; his daughter Helene was there, as was Estelle. Death came at 8.30 that Monday morning, after he had breathed a last word in German: "Komisch" (comical? strange? peculiar?—Rank, fifty-five years old, carried the joke to his grave).

  Anais, in Paris, cured her disenchantment with Henry by involvement with a Peruvian, Gonzalo More, who wooed her in Spanish. But the war caught up with her, too. She returned with a thousand other artist migrants to New York. "Now I see that the extraordinary was in my own vision," which of course was what Paris had been for them all. It was February 1940 and Nin was renting an apartment on Washington Square West. "I thought about Otto Rank, and wondered how he was." So she called: "When I telephoned this morning I could not believe the voice that told me he had died of a throat infection." She could not believe it "because of his vitality and love of life." "Did Rank die not knowing perhaps how much or how deep was his gift, how vivid his human presence?"

  Hitler's armies were on the move that May: Holland, Belgium, France: "Impossible to think of anything else, to feel anything else." The machines had taken over. Paris was empty when the Fiihrer arrived under the morning sun for his show at the Trocadero, the Eiffel Tower shrouded in mist before him and the modern grey walls of the Trocadero rising on either side—like the thighs of a woman giving birth.

  4

  MONTPARNASSE

  AT THE EXIT of métro stop No. 4, Montparnasse, silvery escalators seem to climb into nowhere, their glazed-eyed passengers looking all astonished; bare grey concrete walls reach upwards into space; the floors of the wide corridors are so shiny that you will be afraid to tread on them for fear of falling; and the whole area is enclosed by great glass panels supported by steel. Step outside and there is a kind of medieval fair, a cour des miracles, fitfor Fellini. A barrel-organ is playing as children jump on the merry-go-round and the fast-food shop serves Popcorn, Crepes and Barbes a Papa—lord knows what the Boissons are. On one side are the ecrivains publics, described by Louis Sebastien Mercier in his "pictures" of eighteenth-century Paris: they write love letters for your loved one, business letters for your tax inspector and curt letters for your avocat if you are seeking a divorce. They come from another age when few knew how to read and write—the mirror of our times. Not a block from here, in a narrow, rural street, there once lived a sculptor whose extraordinary work stretched, like the station at Montparnasse, as much into the past as it reached forward into the future.

  Paris was divided up into twenty quartiers in 1702; the boundaries have shifted several times since then, but the number has always remained twenty. But the veritable quartiers of Paris, as opposed to the administrative arrondissements, are something else. From the heights of the black skyscraper is a very clear view of what these natural, living quartiers actually are. The old Latin Quarter of the university, to the north-east, is obviously one. The Marais, on the opposite bank of the Seine, stands out as another. The wealthy Seizieme, stretching out from the Trocadero, forms an evident quartier; as does the Septième on the Left Bank with its two main poles of attraction, the Eiffel Tower and the Invalides. The Americans who came to live in Paris in the 1920s came to the area at your feet, Montparnasse, and called it "The Quarter"—they lived in the "pimp-and-prostitute hotels" of Le Madison, Le Royal, Le Foyat and the Hôtel de Nice. They enjoyed the jazz in the cafés of the Dome, the Coupole, the Select and the Closerie des Lilas. 'A good many of my friends camped in Montparnasse," wrote Silvia Beach, owner of the American bookshop Shakespeare and Company. "They had only to cross the Luxembourg Gardens." And that surely is the point: Montparnasse is not, and never has been, a real quartier.

  The area of Montparnasse, the Quatorzieme Arrondissement, is divided into two distinct sections: one is basically an extension of the old Latin Quarter, the other is built up on the rural fields that stretched down to Hell, the old Barriere d'Enfer. The north-eastern zone, lying around the Carrefour Vavin—the intersection of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnasse—is merely a prolongation through the Luxembourg Gardens of the Latin Quarter, where Sylvia Beach kept shop; indeed, Montparnasse was created by students expelled from the university by Catherine de Medici in the sixteenth century. The remainder of the Quatorzieme was, up until the First World War, largely open country.

  A remarkable amount of what the Americans — the "Crowd" as they called themselves —saw in the 1920s is still standing. The old Gare Montparnasse, which was located on what is now a large square in front of the tower, has obviously made way for this outdated vision of the future constructed in concrete, glass and steel. But what the eyes of 2001 actually see is not very different from what was here in 1901. At the turn of the last century the built-up zone of the Carrefour Vavin was poorly lit at night, even along the major boulevards. Down Boulevard du Montparnasse from the station through to the crossroads of Avenue de l'Observatoire there would have been a few glimmers of light like beacons on a deserted moorland. Those of the Dome, a café on the Carrefour Vavin, would have lit up the corner of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the narrow Rue Delambre, which was a hideout for rag pickers and tramps; the few shops along that street were lit by acetylene lamps. La Closerie des Lilas, further on, was lit by bright white globes which made it seem a haven from the menacing darkness that surrounded it.

  It was here, in the spring of 1905, that the poets Paul Fort and André Salmon launched their review, Vers et Prose, involving readings and popular music, a modest start to the legendary café life which exploded with the arrival of the Americans after the First World War. Why did the Americans—Ernest Hemingway, John Rodrigo Dos Passos, Robert MacAlmon, Kay Boyle, to mention the most famous—appear in such numbers? The decline of the franc against the dollar made living in Montparnasse very cheap and an ideal escape from their Prohibitionist homeland. They liked to call themselves the "Lost Generation," the disillusioned victims of the war, though few of them had served under the flag during the war and many of them became household names in their twenties. "I can't think of a generation less deserving of this name," admitted Sylvia Beach.

  Beyond "The Quarter" the second, rural Montparnasse spread southwards. There was a bird market by the municipal cemetery on Boulevard Edgar-Quinet. Poor immigrants from Brittany, many of whom could not speak French, populated the area; it remains to this day a "Little Brittany." Nearby, in the food markets, animal trainers played with their singing dogs and dancing goats, sword swallowers and fire-eaters attracted a gaggle of giggling children—the same sort of crowd you find today in front of the Gare Montparnasse. Fields stretched all the way down to the Fortifications. Every day along the provincial roads herds of mules and goats would be driven up and down to the Luxembourg Gardens; one old herdsman was famous in the quarter for his goat cheeses that he flogged from door to door. The houses had a quaint, pastoral look and each one of them had their stables.

  It was the stables that attracted the artists.
The old artists' colony at Montmartre was getting expensive and overcrowded; Montparnasse's stables, which lost their purpose as the car replaced the horse, were easily converted into art studios. New technology was having an effect here, too. Photography was forcing painters to explore new styles and this revolution in the plastic arts would eventually feed into music and literature: Montparnasse was where the world's Modernism was born.

  It is ironic that the man who invented Modernism should have made his home among the goats and herdsmen of this old rural Montparnasse. He was never seen in the cafés of the Carrefour Vavin. Neither Sylvia Beach nor Ernest Hemingway mentioned him in their memoirs of "The Quarter." Antoine Bourdelle lived in another universe—and it was he who, with his antique visions, changed the way we look at the world.

  BORN IN 1861, he was of the first generation of artists to be raised since childhood in the civilization of photographs—mountains of photographs that are today preserved in the archives of the Musee Bourdelle, his former studio. The building is barely a hundred yards from that railway station with its outdated vision of the future. Follow the underground passage to Place Bienveniie—another of those Parisian jokes*—and you will come out in an area that displays every form of architecture invented since the eighteenth century. Rue Antoine Bourdelle, the former Impasse du Maine, is just a few paces down on your left.

  Before you go into the museum, have your lunch—Parisian bangers and mash—at the little rural bistro at the end of the street; you will love the girl who serves you while the general atmosphere will make you think you are in some isolated café on the limestone plateaux of south-western France. In the museum a number of Bour-delle's photographs are on display. You can see how he learned to sculpt from photographs taken in faraway Athens, Florence, Rome, and even in the jungles of India and South East Asia; Bourdelle's collection is like that of an exotic explorer. You discover how he photographed his male and female models, and distorted them into fantastic shapes: every major movement of the young twentieth century—Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Picasso and Matisse—is to be found in Bourdelle's creative interpretations of his huge photograph collection.

  Bourdelle has a photograph of the poet Jules Tellier. To model his bust he examines the photo and, he reports in a letter of 1905, "I pick up the clay with my naked soul and make the profiles of this face move." You can see how he photographed himself at work. You will discover the enormous amount of preparation he put into each statue, some of them taking ten years or more to complete. Above all, these photographs give you an idea of the smell, sound and sight of his studio when the twentieth century dawned—wooden turntables rotate on iron wheels, pulleys creak as a statue is hauled into place, the dust of marble settles on the parquet flooring, in a corner you can see Bourdelle in his indigo blue costume labouring away at a detad in his statuary; students in white blouses try their hands amid piles of decorative stone; and who is that young woman model looking so contemporary but born over a century ago? You want to touch her. Bourdelle did not drink; he did not go to the cafés. He had two wives, but he does not seem to have been a womanizer. Bourdelle just worked, and worked, and worked.

  Cutting stone was in his veins. "Four gods taught me everything," he wrote. His father was a carpenter who kept an imposing house overlooking the River Tarn at Montauban. "From him I acquired the sense of architecture," said the son. It was the most important feature of his work, whose construction he was always contrasting to the individual, momentary passions cast by his master, Auguste Rodin. Rodin's Gate of Hell "is not made to be used as a gate," complained Bourdelle. Everything Bourdelle designed stood, like his father's solid home, on sound foundations. "Architecture is the interior of sculpture, and its form, to be worth something, must simply extend from it," taught Bourdelle. Giacometti and Matisse counted among his pupils.

  His second god was an uncle, a "Herculean stonemason" from whom he learned "to listen to the rock" and follow its direction and turns "according to the advice of the stone itself." For Bourdelle had the greatest "respect for the beautiful material" and, in this, resembled Michelangelo, who, by just looking at a rock, could see the statue within it. "What I mean by sculpture is what one obtains by removing something," Michelangelo had written in a statement Bourdelle liked to quote. The photographs of Michelangelo's works, many dating from the 1870s, in Bourdelle's collection prove what an influence the Italian was: it accorded so well with the music of his stonemason uncle. Matisse would call it the "colour" of the stone.

  The two other deities in Bourdelle's pantheon were his grandfathers. There was a weaver on his mother's side who introduced him to the fabric of colour; this is found in the many hundreds of paintings and sketches Bourdelle made when preparing the field for his sculptures. Among the most exquisite were his watercolours of centaurs— half human, half horse: dancing, fighting, dying, coupling and praying—obvious precursors of Matisse's dancers and of the Cubists' compositions of movement and surfaces. On the father's side was a goat herder. The family came from the Causses, a dry rugged plateau to the north of Montauban where the rocks were interspersed with box hedge and juniper and the principal inhabitants were goats. Bourdelle's work would remain a reflection of his childhood sight of rocks sculpted by the wind; the goat tracks through the rough land organized "my capricious thoughts and threaded them together as one." Rodin's work lacked that kind of structure; Bourdelle's work grew out of the unified world of the south-western peasant, a world of ancient pathways and solid architecture which he brought to the city as a student of the École des Beaux-Arts in 1884. He set himself up in the rural quarter of Montparnasse, among the goatherds, at 16, Impasse du Maine, and remained there for the rest of his life.

  "I am like Socrates," he told the students who used to gather in his studio, "I give you birth through your soul." He was the kind of sculptor who would have pleased Dr. Otto Rank—indeed, Rank would have seen Bourdelle's work in the theatres he attended. He would not have seen Bourdelle's Aphrodite or the Birth of Beauty, a 1924 coloured stucco composition which decorated the Opéra House of Marseille—here one can recognize, as in many of the photographs he took of his works, the head of Bourdelle himself rising above the dancers who attend the delivery But Rank used to go to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, where there was a display of Bourdelle masterpieces. "Oh, my sweet bacchanalia of earth," writes Bourdelle on the birth of his sculpture in 1910, "I have taken in my hands a little of your trembling flesh, removed from your side. I knead it, impatiently, I mould it at night, I mould it into my dreams, this piece of the clay's flesh." Bourdelle was so sensual. He believed that every one of his sculptures carried an inner elan—he was consciously Bergsonian. He could capture, like Rodin, one critical moment. But he went further than Rodin by following the eyes of his peasant ancestors out into an architectural landscape of universal, eternal truths. This is what opened the way to the Modernists of Montparnasse.

  Bourdelle was, in less than two years, exasperated by the neoclassicism of the École des Beaux-Arts, on Rue Bonaparte. "I have had enough! I can't understand anything about all these systems of prizes and competitions," he wrote in early 1886 to his master, Alexandre Falguiere—an academic sculptor whose dull République triomphante crowned the Arc de Triomphe in 1886. For more than a decade Bourdelle eked out a living on Impasse du Maine, producing some fabulous though generally unremarked works for Paris's art salons. After the shock of his mother's death in 1888 he started producing his lifetime series of Beethoven busts —Beethoven with Long Hair, Beethoven with Short Hair, The Mask of Tragedy and so on—which had only the vaguest reference to Beethoven's physical appearance; they were designed to show the tumult of the composer within. "Music and sculpture are the same thing," explained Bourdelle, who thought of himself as a suffering Beethoven of sculpture. With a few of his friends, including his neighbour, the old Communard Jules Dalou, he exhibited in the cellar of La Closerie des Luas in 1891 where he met the poet Paul Verlaine, "staggering drunk, dressed in rags, his neck w
rapped in a huge red scarf"; his eyes were like those of "the changing skies of autumn where the clouds are swept along by the wind": Bourdelle would attempt to sculpt those clouds in stone.

  This was just before he was engaged by Rodin in 1893 to be hispraticien, a job that could go so far as executing the Master's work. Bourdelle reshaped Rodin's Bourgeois de Calais and he transposed to marble or stone several of Rodin's famous works, such as Le Purgatoire and Orphe'e. In some cases he had contributed to the conception of the statue; it was, for instance, Bourdelle who recommended to Rodin that his statue of Balzac, which was erected at the Carrefour Vavin in Montparnasse, be draped in a vast cloak—a favourite Bourdelle technique for suggesting movement: Bourdelle's collection of photographs include several of himself, his wife and various models dressed up in sheets. Rodin had opened the breach with the academic neoclassicists of the École des Beaux-Arts by bringing life and an intensity of passion to his statues through a play of light and shadow. Bourdelle widened the gap yet further by providing an architecture of angular surfaces, furrowed grooves and lines that would shoot out in a way that would convey both solidity and action.