12
The War Bans the Bizarre
Even during the war, the upper echelons of French
society, with whom Arthur had always passed his time, still
dedicated much of theirs to leisure. The nobility was no different
from other classes in being made up of various elements—including
from intermarriage with the grande bourgeoisie—and was
neither an assimilated nor a homogenous group. Yet while no longer
retaining much power, they nonetheless retained much of their old
sense of exclusiveness and still enjoyed great status. Conferring
prestige and receiving deference from those around them, they
confirmed the existence of a social hierarchy at whose apex they
had remained.
Arthur was a haut bourgeois imbued with the
idea that work was commendable. However, with no need of money, and
having transformed his work ethic into an almost existential need
for experience, he was also one of the few from the upper classes
unconventional enough to live with his mistress. In addition, he
was sufficiently forward thinking that he found subservience in a
lover ultimately unrewarding. Gabrielle was compellingly
unsubservient. And despite her lack of education (perhaps
“cultivation” is a better word, as there were so few women in this
period who had much of a formal education to speak of), her
outstanding natural intelligence was clearly a match for Arthur’s.
Gabrielle was the only woman he had ever met who appeared to be his
equal. And yet, however strong his love and admiration for her,
these feelings had done little to curb his prodigious appetite for
women.
In the first flush of their affair, Arthur’s need
for conquest was temporarily held in check, but it wasn’t long
before his compulsion had asserted itself once again. As for
Gabrielle, she apparently felt reassured in the belief that she was
Arthur’s only real love. Saying she felt no jealousy, she even
asked him who his other lovers might be. But Arthur’s tastes ranged
wide, and he laughed and told Gabrielle that her knowing would only
make his life more complicated than he had already made it.1
In addition to these private “complications,”
Gabrielle’s lover managed his fleet of ships and his now enormous
coal interests and ceaselessly shuttled between the front, Paris
and London. Yet whatever his work-related absences or the brief
spells in other women’s arms, Arthur always returned to Gabrielle,
his most significant companion.
By the beginning of 1916, when the war showed no
sign of ending, Arthur’s experiences had stimulated his interest in
a more political role. Accordingly, in March, he requested
permission to resign his intelligence service commission in the
hope of being taken on as a liaison officer instead. He had made it
his business to become acquainted with both politicians and senior
commanders in the French and British armies. Perhaps with a nudge
from someone high up, the British War Office wrote to the commander
in chief of the British army in France saying that Arthur wished
“to go to Paris in order to carry out his ordinary business. It is
probable that this . . . may involve his participation in French
political affairs. In these circumstances it would be very
inadvisable for him to retain his . . . commission and the status
of a ‘British Officer on leave.’”2 It appears that there were also more
personal reasons for Arthur’s resignation of his commission.
Working in such a stressful occupation near the battlefields of the
front—and the death of his friend Hamilton-Grace, for which he held
himself responsible—had reduced him to a state of emotional
exhaustion. “His health broke down and he had to resign his
inter-pretership in the field” was how a commentator would put
it.3 Either Arthur himself, or a doctor,
had recognized that in order to recover, he must take a job away
from the front.
Arthur’s chaotic times and privileged background
had made him a worldly skeptic who, until the war, had pretty much
done what he wanted. He had, after all, described himself to
Gabrielle as a cheerful pessimist whose dictum “One does not have
to hope in order to undertake” had enabled him to sign up for
active service without much conviction. Yet the appalling suffering
and loss of life he had witnessed had not reduced Arthur to a state
of bitterness and demoralization. Instead, his religious faith had
provoked in him a renewed sense of hope. Ironically, this change
was to set in motion a series of grievous results.
For the moment, however, Arthur did believe in a
future, and in a utopian spirit away from the front, he set out to
write a book. He often showed Gabrielle what he was writing.
By the end of that year, 1916, Gabrielle was
becoming more self-reliant. Her business was so prosperous she
chose to return all of the three hundred thousand francs Arthur had
invested in her salon at Biarritz. And if his frequent absences
were not only on war business, Gabrielle by no means languished at
home. If her comment “I was my own master, and I depended on myself
alone,” made later in conversation with Morand, was made with some
defensiveness in relation to Arthur’s absences, it was also
increasingly the case. There was no question of Gabrielle’s
sincerity when she declared that Arthur “was well aware that he
didn’t control me.” This, of course, was part of her attraction for
him. And yet with regard to supporting her ventures, this was the
point at which Arthur made that melancholy statement to Gabrielle
referred to in the prologue to this book. Characterizing the
problems men and women faced when trying to devise new ways of
relating to one another, he said: “I thought I’d given you a
plaything, I gave you your freedom.”4
The year 1916 saw the twin disasters of Verdun and
the Somme. Verdun, the longest battle of the war, gained no
advantage for either side and was responsible for more than half a
million casualties. The Battle of the Somme was notorious for its
first-day British casualties of 58,000, one third of whom lost
their lives. One liaison officer, for whom the romance of war had
long since disappeared, felt it was nothing more than “a dreary
massacre, a stupefying alternation of boredom, fatigue and
fear.”5 In February 1917, Jacques-Emile
Blanche said to his friend the writer André Gide:
Huge portentous things are happening above our
heads, through the branches of the trees in my garden which fall
under Olivier’s axe, and will replace coal in the winter 1917–18.
Boy [Arthur] Capel, our friend, the great coal importer, mobilized
by England and France at St Dominique Street [the Ministry of
Defense], the man our tomorrow depends on . . . said to Rose, “Have
your cook come up, I will make her understand her duty. From next
month onwards things will be very difficult. Stock up. Do without
what is not absolutely necessary. Around June, it will be almost
famine. As for next winter, even if peace is signed, you will have
to stay in bed and suck your thumb.6
The effects of the Russian Revolution were now
playing out their relentless course; on March 15, 1917, Tsar
Nicholas II abdicated. In early April, to the great relief of the
Allies, America at last entered the war, and on April 26, Lenin
arrived in Russia to agitate more unrest. Then, with the second
October revolution, Russia withdrew from the conflict. Meanwhile,
the French commander in chief, Robert Nivelle, had argued for a
massive onslaught on the German lines, which was to bring about a
French victory in forty-eight hours. Many high - ranking officials
disagreed, but the prime minister insisted.
The massive attack on the German positions was
eventually supposed to link up with the Allied forces. From the
beginning, the plan was dogged by delay and information leaks, and
by the time the battle was launched, the Germans had had plenty of
time to prepare their defenses. The offensive was an unmitigated
disaster for the French, who suffered 187,000 casualties. On the
western front, the slaughter was appalling. Thousands died every
day, and the people of France were in a poor state of morale.
Arthur had been appointed to the new Allied War
Coal Commission, but he was also unofficially liaising between the
British and French politicians and the military. In addition, by
the spring of 1917, when the Allied position had never been more in
doubt, he published Reflections on Victory, in which he was
confident of just that. To many, this looked misguided. While
respecting the move toward democracy, Arthur abhorred the
centralizing state. In its place he proposed a “Europe-wide
Federation, giving full autonomy to every corporate body, region,
people and race.” This federation could be seen as a forerunner to
the present-day European Union and indeed was recognized as such by
one of those later to become one of its architects.7
Reflections on Victory was reviewed in
serious journals, and despite Arthur’s antifederal critics, the
book broadened his reputation within the circles of power. Those
who had known him only as a rich playboy-businessman—made even
richer by the war—now looked at him with more discernment.
Few, however, shared Arthur’s optimism. The war had
become a crushing burden, leaving many incapable of enthusiasm for
anything. Even with the long-awaited arrival of the American troops
in Paris, “the crowd, especially the women, were weary, every spark
gone; wanting only the quickest possible end to this dreadful
war.”8 The catastrophic failure of the
Nivelle offensive proved the last straw for some, and French
soldiers now mutinied, refusing any longer to go over the top to
certain death. The mutinies weren’t quelled till the end of May, by
the new commander in chief, Marshal Philippe Pétain.
While the slaughter continued at the front, in
Paris in that May of 1917, the Ballets Russes gave the premiere of
a new work, Parade, in aid of war victims. It was the only
Ballets Russes work put on in Paris during the conflict and was by
invitation only. Diaghilev’s carefully chosen audience consisted of
a selection of society figures, prominent experimental musicians
and artists, and a good number of the bourgeoisie, who he
knew liked the frisson of dabbling in the avant-garde. Diaghilev
also invited Gabrielle.
However much bolstering and covering up had been
necessary during the growth of industrialism in France, prewar
Belle Epoque society had muddled along, shoring up the old social
structures and attitudes. The Belle Epoque had clung to its belief
in the value of permanence and tradition, which in turn depended
upon an overriding belief in the idea of authorities. For years
before the war, a number of artists had reacted to this hypocrisy
by searching for a language to express their sense of alienation
from the modern world. Now, as the war dragged on, the initial
belief of the population that a secure world would survive the
hostilities was physically and metaphorically being smashed to
smithereens. Diaghilev’s new ballet mirrored aspects of this
instability, and was to strike yet one more blow at the certainties
of the past.
The ballet was young Jean Cocteau’s brainchild, and
he provided the scenario and libretto. Léonide Massine was
choreographer; the ungovernable and cheerfully eccentric Eric
Satie, initially distrustful of Diaghilev—“Will he try to screw me?
Probably”9—was persuaded to write the music; and
Picasso, already the most famous modernist painter, agreed to
create the sets. These became a cubist cityscape with high-rise
blocks of flats. But the most radical elements were two figures (a
French and an American manager) costumed as larger than life-sized
cubist sculptures.
While the audience’s response was nothing like that
of the first night of The Rite of Spring, it was still one
of shock, and the crowd became raucous in its disapproval. In part
this was because, aware of what was going on at the front, the
audience expected something soothing and patriotic. Instead what
they got was an unconventional experiment. To many, it was an
exercise in “banality and superficiality,”10 and some of the audience made their
way toward the stage, yelling for the curtain to be lowered. A
horse appeared wearing a cubist mask, cavorted about, then danced,
knelt down and bowed. “The audience clearly thought the dancers
were mocking their protests and completely lost their heads; they
yelled, ‘Death to the Russians!,’ ‘Picasso’s a Boche!,’ ‘The
Russians are Boches!’”11
This was the first ballet ever to be set in the
present. In addition, its witty and apparently lighthearted romp
through popular culture—the circus; the music hall; the ephemera of
everyday life, including fashion, advertising and the cinema—had
never before been used as the subject matter for ballet. However,
under the guise of frivolity, Parade’s aim was in fact a
serious one: an attack on the old authorities.12 Those in the audience who were
already embracing avant-garde fashion, popular music and a wider
social range of people, believing they were just as worthwhile as
the traditional elites and high culture of their parents,
understood the ballet’s subversion and applauded.
Parade wasn’t a great ballet, but it was a
seminal artistic work. As the first to push modernism to center
stage, it made it part of mainstream artistic culture.
Parade’s creators were not only intent on dragging art down
from its high-culture pedestal; they believed they had revealed the
essential, simple artistic beauty of the mundane and the
everyday.13
Once again, Gabrielle’s presence at an avant-garde
event was appropriate: Cocteau’s ballet was at one with her own
path. (Their friendship was almost inevitable.) Borrowing from
workaday wardrobes and using modest materials, Gabrielle was the
designer then showing that a democratization of fashion was
possible. And while her daring hints at classlessness were at first
taken up only by a wealthy clientele, as time went on, her simple
designs and “modest” materials would be transferred from the salons
to the streets. All over France, and abroad, women would be able to
copy Gabrielle’s styles, allowing more of them than ever before to
take part in the game of fashion.