Paul Morand - Venices

1921

ANOTHER HALT at this Venice railway station “which terminates at nothing, upon a large tank of shadow and silence” ( Ouvert la nuit ); thus begins “ La Nuit turque ”, which I completed yesterday.

That day, I continued my journey as far as Stamboul, travelling on a brand new Simplon-Express, the train with which the Allies intended to depose the old Orient Express, planned by Wilhelm II as the first section of his “ Bagdadbahn ”.

On terra firma, the trenches were being filled in, the children of Venice were fishing in the shell craters, and frogmen from the Arsenal were helping re-float the Austrian torpedo boats that had sunk or become silted up.

It was a Venice still drowsy after its wartime slumber…

In La Fausse Maîtresse , Balzac had written: “The carnival in Venice is no longer worthwhile; the real carnival is happening in Paris.”

That was true, too, of the 1920s.

It is not my intention to describe the Paris of those days; my purpose here is merely a tête-à-tête with Venice, the tempo of these pages being that of the ebb and flow of life on her shores.

Everything that took place in Paris during my years of absence confirmed the changes in social behaviour that had begun in 1917. A generation of people had returned from the war, disenchanted by the past and curious about the future, and about those who tried to explain it and unveiled the new world to them, providing them with a geographical assessment of their unexplored dwelling place, our planet. If my Nuits and Rien que la Terre were well received at the time, it was due to circumstances rather more than to the author: success is frequently nothing more than a man’s confrontation with the age in which he lives.

What is art, if it is not that which constitutes each age?

Quite unconsciously each one of our books seemed to be saying to everything that happened before the war: “This will help to bury you.” In every age, the fallow deer have moaned about the ten-pointer stags; all of a sudden, we were experiencing that miracle, repeated regularly since 1798, of not having anyone in front of us; our fathers and grandfathers had decamped and were fading into memory; everything was empty, wide open and available. We never knew that long period of youthful revolt, that stretches from the romantics to the post-1968 Leftists: “Advance or perish.”

It was a kind of instant, total freedom, a path that chance had unblocked and which one then discovers is — in every domain — bare, just as much in the art of Picasso and the dance of Massine, as in the parties thrown by Étienne de Beaumont (in his town house in the rue Masséran, situated, ironically, between the noble faubourg and Mont-parnasse) — parties that were described by Raymond Radiguet and that put the Persian balls of the pre-1914 era firmly back into the Musée Grévin. The public threw itself into the avant-garde with such passion that not only was there no rear-guard, but there were no troops either.

How did I come to find myself hurled from among the front ranks of the Ancients, how had a youth spent among the anchorites fitted me for the avant-garde? I still wonder. Was it the surge of the new generation carrying me along in its wake? Our publishers’ hysterical greed for publicity was never more than a turbo engine that exploited the force of a tide that launched talents as different as Montherlant or Breton into prominence.

What a stampede! Every snob wanted to be a part of it, to experience this new adventure and to belong to the perimeter of this literary Kamchatka of which Baudelaire speaks. The old generation asked for mercy and praised us to the skies, offering us reviews, honours, friendship and the hands of their daughters at comical lunch parties at which we were flanked at table by academicians who promised us the moon; most of them loathed us, just as people have always loathed those who come after them. “What should we think of you, Maître?” asked the members of Les Six of their senior, Maurice Ravel, who wittily replied: “Loathe me.” (They did nothing of the sort, incidentally; their loathing stopped with Wagner.)

For those of the pre-1914 era, we were insurgents, hungry for blood, members of a new sect of Carnivores who were derisively turning the Establishment upside down, forerunners of those “Barbarians” whose coming Barrès had long predicted; we took over Marinetti’s restaurant, howling at the death of Venice and making fun of the gondolas, “those idiot’s see-saws”; along the Champs-Élysées, Max Jacob and Cocteau called out to the children: “Hurry up and play, little casualties of the next war!” Literature’s old guard protested about this Proust “whose budding groves prevailed over the groves of the sacrificial heroes”; the “Wooden Crosses”7 denounced Le Diable au corps in which the poilus are cuckolds.

Jean Cocteau, 1934

Today those “ années folles ” shock us because of the number of victims they bequeathed us — the suicides, the hopeless, the deserters, the failures. How many Picassos may have been left behind! “I have cut through tradition like a good swimmer crossing a river”; what Picasso did not add was that Hans, the flute player, was followed when he swam by rats who, in their case, drowned.

Jean Cocteau, who had moved on from his Venetian poems of 1909, took risks which for anyone else would have been perilous; he always landed on his feet again. More acclaimed than ever, having acquired a new public and created a second youth for himself, he was everywhere at once; he couldn’t miss the bus because he ran in front of it; he was at the forefront of everything, the spiciest of metaphors on the nib of his pen, and because of his sarcastic turn of phrase he adopted a high-pitched voice; with his questioning chin, his gimlet-like expression and his fingers weaving in and out, he lived his life “at full tilt”. To have taken a rest would have blunted his talents. Electric sparks hissed from Cocteau-le-Pointu from all sides. Going down the Henri III staircase after visiting him in the block of flats in the rue d’Anjou where his mother lived, you felt foolish, retarded, stiff-jointed and slow-witted; only he was able to sleep as he danced, on the tips of his toes.

At the other extreme, confident of their genius and determined to flee from le Tout-Paris and its poison, Saint-John Perse (at that time known as Saint-Léger Léger), who was back from China, and Giraudoux held firm, deaf to all else but the very personal tones of Éloges (1911) and Provinciales (1908).

But the bell had tolled for them too; in their own way they would be induced to live in and occupy “the positions that had been relinquished”, as the recent official communiqués used to put it.

Here is an example: Round about the mid-1920s. A dinner-party at the home of Erik Labonne, in the flat in which he still lives in avenue Victor-Emmanuel; four young men on the staff of the Foreign Office, who had become friends while taking the competitive entrance examinations (even though they had sat their exams on different dates): Giraudoux, who was forty-four years old, Alexis Léger (Saint-John Perse), Erik Labonne and I, who were all thirty-five. Philippe Berthelot, our director, our boss and our friend, had just experienced one of those terrifying reversals of fortune which destroyed the end of his life; from now on it would be a matter of consolidating our administrative positions without him, and of maintaining continuity; let no one imagine us as over-excited young men eager to be in command; we had been through the war and had learnt how to control ourselves; we were simply obeying a “duty to be ambitious” ( Stendhal ). All of a sudden, we had become orphans; the great generation of French diplomacy — the Cambon brothers, Paléologue, Jusserand — had recently disappeared; between it and ourselves, there were only civil servants.