Paul Morand - Venices

This is how fate would deal with us in that period when everything seemed to be in limbo and the future was abruptly turning into the present:

With the death of Berthelot, Alexis Léger, who was in the Far Eastern department, would gain direct access to his minister Briand, who was Président de Conseil; Briand was one of those intelligent but lazy men who knew how to make use of other people; Alexis Léger convinced his boss and even Parliament that Berthelot had alienated himself: for over ten years, serving under many ministers, he was to remain the master of French diplomacy; Erik Labonne, however, was a mystic: he had foreseen — almost through revelation, or inspiration, that our colonies in North Africa were overflowing with hidden oil; to begin with, nobody listened to him; with great tenacity he devoted his life to substantiating his beliefs: the results are well known. Here too, it was a case of tabula rasa . As for Giraudoux, he pursued two dreams: to serve in the government of his country, an illusion that was not so much incompatible with his genius, as with his character; it was fifteen years later that Daladier gave him his opportunity, at the Continental, in 1940; his other dream was the theatre: for a quarter of a century — ever since Maeterlinck or Claudel — there had been nobody; when his play Siegfried was acclaimed two years later, French theatres were empty.

And so what was the target of my own aspirations? For my friends, it was their work, their career, or both. All I dreamed of was complete freedom; and yet from a very young age I had been left unsupervised and been given a choice of careers; I had never felt I was being held back at the office, or if I was, only very gently so. So what did I think that total liberation or the sort of independence which only death can supply would give me? I still ask myself this question. Was it the sort of life of a “hippie”, before the term was invented, a journey towards some non-existent happiness, an abandonment to a lethargy which had more to do with illness than with good health? I search my memory trying to recall my state of mind at the time: being on this earth is a unique adventure; I had to make the most of it. To do what? To raise oneself up to man’s estate or satisfy one’s instincts? All of this, and simultaneously. Don’t think about it; forward march, head down! God will look after his own; let’s see what happens.

Two guardian angels, my mother and my wife, having a deep sense of tradition as well as being aware of my best interests, decided differently. A life was something you constructed like a house, according to their way of thinking.

All I longed for was independence, not knowing that it is in short supply. Everything, straight away! Unaware that we pay for being “quick”. How unfair to make us wait! I wanted the whole world, one without end (did I carry within me the seeds of that mania for evasion in which people delight today?). Recognizing that I was not very adept at controlling others and at getting what I wanted, I sought to shape my life as if it were some precious substance, to hew away all rough edges and restore it to all its prismatic power.

Everything was available, everything was waiting to be plucked; everything was; the larger obstacles would await us twenty years later. Another story… The time has not come to tell it.

Those who try to recreate that period of fifty years ago imagine it as some immense Bal des Quat’Zarts, parading before an astonished and uncomprehending Paris; that is to miss the point entirely. We were artists delighted at the acceptance we were given by an increasingly well-informed public. We were living through a veritable springtime of work, research, new inventions and of friendship between the arts; rather like the Impasse du Doyenné at the time of Nerval. Everything moved forward along the same axis, open to the road ahead, in an atmosphere of reciprocity, generosity and true camaraderie. The Muses fraternised; those who had previously been forgotten we restored to their true position: Georges Auric, at the age of fifteen, thought the world of Léon Bloy and used to visit him, Poulenc rescued Satie from the depths of Arcueil, and we brought back Valéry from out of the shadows; the theatre alone continued to snore away on the boulevard. Artists created backdrops for the stage, and Derain painted sets for Massine; Darius Milhaud and I spent the summer of 1920 together in Juan-les-Pins’s only hotel, a small boarding-house for travelling salesmen called the Hôtel de la Gare; Radiguet, in order not to have to return home to the suburbs, would spend the night among Brancusi’s blocks of polished metal; Reverdy wrote his poems in the rue Cambon, while another great artist was busy fitting her clients.

Romanticism had survived for so long that its last vestiges still existed half a century later; it constructed no more lasting temples to its gods, however, than the present age does to its idols of the 1920s; 1970 is still illuminated by the lamps they lit; from Picasso to Kisling, from Proust to Saint-John Perse, from Honegger to Satie, the masters of those days have never had their authority questioned; and Gabrielle Chanel, who dressed the Deauville of 1915 in her jerseys, was still dressing high society of the 1970s in her outfits. They represented the true portfolio of stocks and shares of their day, the real Suez, the real I.B.M. It is a phenomenon that has to do with the athletic qualities of the artists of the heroic age. The boulder has continued to gather pace, and a great number of trees have been felled: yet not one of the geniuses of the 1920s has been dislodged.

It’s a French phenomenon; you only have to transport yourself mentally to the Berlin of the expressionists, the England of Huxley, the Rome of Malaparte, or the New York of the Dial to compare how fortunate Paris was at that time. The other day (1970) I was in New York, in the same Algonquin bar where in about 1925 we used to meet Mencken, George Nathan, the Ernest Boyds, Carl Van Vechten, Walter Wanger and Scott Fitzgerald; seeing nothing but ghosts in the famous “roaring twenties” grill room and dining-room, I observed that whereas the force of the storm and the lust for life had toppled our American friends off their perches, we had been more fortunate or more wise, in this Paris in which Dos Passos used to relate how, after wild nights out, I used to protect him, Cummings and Gilbert Seldes from being beaten up.8

I can see myself opening an envelope from the N.R.F.: it’s my first cheque from Gallimard; I felt pleased, yet at the same time irritated; I had never been paid any salary except by the State; I had the feeling that I was betraying it, not freeing myself from it. Many civil servants, from Maupassant to Valery, have lived in this way, one that was honourable and accepted by everyone, but they had not belonged to the “ grand corps ”,9 the War Office, the Admiralty, the Treasury, the Audit Office, the Department of Transport, the Conseil d’Etat, the Foreign Office, etc…. the schools which trained you for these professions constituted bodies in whose eyes the State was sacrosanct; and the entrance examinations for them (the “Concours”) were a sort of gateway to the top. What did an entrance examination consist of, particularly in those days? A formality, in which one’s popularity rating and a sort of common law were what chiefly mattered; nevertheless, a man who wasn’t “a product of the Concours”, and who had entered these top careers through prefectural channels, through journalism or by political means, was never quite considered as an equal. State salaries were not generous, but this money was something special; it was not other people’s money; nobody had ever touched it; the six louis d’ors granted me each month for ten years were, at least until 1918, newly minted by the Banque de France.