Roald Dahl - My Uncle Oswald

We took Stravinsky first. Yasmin walked right in on him while he was working at the piano on Pulcinella . He was more surprised than angry. “Hello,” he said. “Who are you?”

“I have come all the way from England to offer you a chocolate,” she said.

This absurd remark, which Yasmin was to use on many other occasions, disarmed completely this kind and friendly man. The rest was simple, and although I longed for salacious details, Yasmin remained mute.

“You might at least tell me what he was like as a person.”

“Sparkling bright,” she said. “Oh, he was so sparkling bright and so quick and clever. He has a huge head and a nose like a boiled egg.”

“Is he a genius?”

“Yes,” she said, “he’s a genius. He’s got the spark, the same as Monet and Renoir.”

“What is this spark?” I said. “Where is it? Is it in the eyes?”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t anywhere special. It’s just there . You know it’s there. It’s like an invisible halo.”

I made fifty straws from Stravinsky.

Next it was Picasso’s turn. He had a studio at that time in the rue de la Boétie and I dropped Yasmin off in front of a rickety-looking door with brown paint peeling off it. There was no bell or knocker so Yasmin simply pushed it open and went in. Outside in the car I settled down with La Cousine Bette , which I still think is the best thing the old French master ever wrote.

I don’t believe I had read more than four pages when the car door was flung open and Yasmin tumbled in and flopped onto the seat beside me. Her hair was all over the place and she was blowing like a sperm whale.

“Christ, Yasmin! What happened?”

“My God!” she gasped. “Oh, my God!”

“Did he throw you out?” I cried. “Did he hurt you?”

She was too out of breath to answer me at once. A trickle of sweat was running down the side of her forehead. She looked as though she’d been chased around the block four times by a maniac with a carving knife. I waited for her to simmer down.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re bound to have one or two washouts.”

“He’s a demon!” she said.

“What did he do to you?”

“He’s a bull! He’s like a little brown bull!”

“Go on.”

“He was painting on a huge canvassy thing when I went in and he turned round and his eyes opened so wide they became circles and they were black and he shouted ‘ Ole ’ or something like that and then came towards me very slowly and sort of crouching as though he was going to spring. .

“And did he spring?”

“Yes,” she said. “He sprang.”

“Good Lord.”

“He didn’t even put his paint-brush down.”

“So you had no chance to get the mackintosh on?”

“Afraid not. Didn’t even have time to open my purse.”

“Hell.”

“I was hit by a hurricane, Oswald.”

“Couldn’t you have slowed him down a bit? You remember what you did to old Woresley to make him keep still?”

“Nothing would have stopped this one.”

“Were you on the floor?”

“No. He threw me onto a filthy sofa thing. There were tubes of paint everywhere.”

“It’s all over you now. Look at your dress.”

“I know.”

One couldn’t blame Yasmin for the failure, I knew that. But I felt pretty ratty all the same. It was our first miss. I only hoped there wouldn’t be many more.

“Do you know what he did afterwards?” Yasmin said. “He just buttoned up his trousers and said, ‘Thank you, mademoiselle. That was very refreshing. Now I must get back to my work.’ And he turned away, Oswald! He just turned away and started painting again!”

“He’s Spanish,” I said, “like Alfonso.” I stepped out of the car and cranked the starting handle and when I got back in again, Yasmin was tidying her hair in the car mirror. “I hate to say it,” she said, “but I rather enjoyed that one.”

“I know you did.”

“Phenomenal vitality.”

“Tell me,” I said, “is Monsieur Picasso a genius?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was very strong. He will be wildly famous one day.”

“Damn.”

“We can’t win them all, Oswald.”

“I suppose not.”

Matisse was next.

Yasmin was with Monsieur Matisse for about two hours and blow me if the little thief didn’t come out with yet another painting. It was sheer magic, that canvas, a Fauve landscape with trees that were blue and green and scarlet, signed and dated 1905.

“Terrific picture,” I said.

“Terrific man,” she said. And that was all she would say about Henri Matisse. Not a word more.

Fifty straws.

MY TRAVELLING CONTAINER of liquid nitrogen was beginning to fill up with straws. We now had King Alfonso, Renoir, Monet, Stravinsky, and Matisse. But there was room for a few more. Each straw held only one-quarter cc of fluid, and the straw itself was only slightly thicker than a matchstick and about half as long. Fifty straws stacked neatly in a metal rack took up very little room. I decided we could accommodate three more batches on this trip, and I told Yasmin we would be visiting Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel, and James Joyce. All of them were living in the Paris area.

If I have given the impression that Yasmin and I were paying our visits more or less on consecutive days, that is wrong. We were, in fact, moving slowly and carefully. Usually about a week went between visits. This gave me time to investigate thoroughly the next victim before we moved in on him. We never drove up to a house and rang the bell and hoped for the best. Before we made a call, I knew all about the man’s habits and his working hours, about his family and his servants if he had any, and we would choose our time with care. But even then Yasmin would occasionally have to wait outside in the motor car until a wife or a servant came out to go shopping.

Monsieur Proust was our next choice. He was forty-eight years old, and six years back, in 1913, he had published Du Cóté de chez Swann . Now he had just brought out A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs . This book had been received with much enthusiasm by the reviewers and had won him the Goncourt Prize. But I was a bit nervous about Monsieur Proust. My enquiries showed him to be a very queer duck indeed. He was independently wealthy. He was a snob. He was anti-Semitic. He was vain. He was a hypochondriac who suffered from asthma. He slept until four in the afternoon and stayed awake all night. He lived with a faithful watchdog servant called Céleste and his present address was an apartment at No. 8 bis rue Laurent-Pichet. The house belonged to the celebrated actress Réjane, and Réjane’s son lived in the flat immediately below Proust, while Réjane herself occupied the rest of the place.

I learned that Monsieur Proust was, from a literary point of view, totally unscrupulous and would use both persuasion and money to inspire rave articles about his books in newspapers and magazines. And on top of all this, he was completely homosexual. No woman, other than the faithful Céleste, was ever permitted into his bedroom. In order to study the man more closely, I got myself invited to a dinner at the house of his close friend Princess Soutzo. And there I discovered that Monsieur Proust was nothing to look at. With his black moustache, his round bulging eyes, and his baggy little figure, he bore an astonishing resemblance to an actor on the cinematograph screen called Charlie Chaplin. At Princess Soutzo’s, he complained a lot about draughts in the dining-room and he held court among the guests and expected everyone to be silent when he spoke. I can remember two incredible pronouncements he made that evening. Of a man who preferred women, he said, “I can answer for him. He is completely abnormal.” And another time I heard him say, “Fondness for men leads to virility.” In short, he was a tricky fellow.