This pleasantly creepy little number should be a favorite of those among you with a gothic turn of mind.
The original can be found here.
Now, about Marie Laurencin, the artist to whom Apollinaire dedicates this poem.
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein describes hearing of her for the first time as “a mysterious horrible woman called Marie Laurencin who made noises like an animal and annoyed Picasso,” only to discover that she was, in fact, a lovely young woman, and an interesting one.1
Before I go on, permit me to say the past is a bit old-fashioned. It fidgets between two misunderstandings: hopelessly outdated quaintness and Golden Age ideal. In the case of Apollinaire and Laurencin, the gossipy scholar perks up her ears. The great critic and poet, in love with the bisexual painter! Pre-war Paris! The salon of Gertrude Stein! Juicy tidbits to come! Yet what on first mention excites interest as a tragic, doomed romance of mythological figures must become, on further acquaintance, as unpleasant and complicated as the doomed romances of all the damaged people one already knows.
Laurencin was a respected artist in her own right. She had studied with Picabia and Braque and was known as the only woman in the Cubist crew. First, though, she had trained in porcelain painting at Sévres, where the rococo designs sail right over the badlands of kitsch and alight in a realm of multicolored splendor. Possibly that training helped set her work apart. Her paintings demonstrated delicacy and an exceptional willingness to be feminine and decorative in the midst of a self-consciously virile artistic movement. “Why should I paint dead fish, onions, and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier,” goes a quote frequently attributed to her.2 This insistent prettiness only increased as her career went on and her palette shed all connection to Cubism. Her work seemed to grow ever younger, fresher, dreamier.
These later works, in a style of her own that others labeled “nymphism,” have as their subjects arrangements of marble-white girls, alone or together, as friends or lovers or companions, in (and often partially out of) pretty dresses. I quite honestly, at first, felt bored looking at them. Such vapidity! But their faces lingered in my mind. They are reduced to two startling ink-black eyes, eerie vacancies in all that white, and a sensuous neat mouth done carefully in several shades of pink to give fullness and lustre, in a setting otherwise as colorless and reduced to symbol as an ancient Cycladic head. Look longer, and the ambiguous, blank expressions of her subjects begin to invite interpretation. Are they fearful? Sad? Would they rather not tell? Some look serene, others troubled. Sometimes (I can never help thoughts like this) I imagine drawing small vampire fangs on them—I think they would not be out of place.
Her diaphanous, extremely restricted palette of pale colors and her Fauvist brushstrokes, meanwhile, establish a mood of abstract reverie. This ethereal vision was the backdrop for Diaghilev’s ballet Les Biches, for which she designed sets and costumes. She also did portraits—including of Jean Cocteau and Coco Chanel, who loathed hers—and illustrated books including Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
In short, she was much more than as she is portrayed in Henri Rousseau’s remarkably unflattering double portrait, “La Muse inspirant le poète” (“The muse inspiring the poet”), which is to say, merely Apollinaire’s muse. (Repulsive word, that, when applied to anything more mortal than a Greek divinity.)
She and Apollinaire did inspire each other, and in several ways they were similar. Each was of illegitimate birth, raised by a single mother who supported them still. (They were each living with their mothers when they took up together, and neither mother approved the match). He wrote poems to her, including this one, and wrote appreciatively about her painting, admiring the distinct femininity of her vision. She wrote poems too and painted him several times, surrounded by friends, including Picasso and Stein, or alone.
But he was a drunk, and he hit her.3 She was bound to get fed up. She had other options, and in fact, she had them the entire time she was with him. She left him in 1912, with the aid of her lover Nicole Groult, the couturier and sister of designer Paul Poiret, but soon married a German baron and found herself exiled to Spain from France, as a German national, during the First World War. Alas, out of the frying pan and into the fire: her husband also got drunk, ill-tempered, and violent, and spent most of his time away from her. After divorcing, she never married again and mostly (but not entirely) kept to women lovers.
When Apollinaire died, it was beneath the painting she had made of him and his friends. When she died, she was buried near his grave, with his love letters placed over her heart.
Well. What do we do when we discover that an artist whose work we admire regularly slapped around his lover?
First, we should, if we have not already done so, stop the worthless habit of revering artists. The genius of an artist is separate from the person. Genius does not inhabit their entire being. When they are on the toilet, they do not toilet with genius. When they slap their girlfriends, genius is not involved. Their genius is alone within itself, and the person who hosts it must be remembered to be a person with all the dandruff and poor choices that mark a human life.
Second, it is worth the bother to condemn the violence. It says to anyone suffering it that it is wrong, what’s being done to you, no matter if done by a person of genius. That is always worth saying.
Third, however, we must consider that the art itself, unless its actual matter depends upon or extends that violence, may be innocent of the charge.4
Art does have a life separate from its creator. Eventually the artist’s life recedes, the worms sup, sins and good deeds alike dissolve, until all that is left is hard matter that will not erode: if one is lucky, one poem, one painting, one anecdote, a passing witty remark. Beyond this is the oblivion of the completely digested.
As an example of the separation of Art and artist, take the work of Apollinaire’s close friend Picasso—another, to use a common phrase of my husband’s, “ocean-going shit.” In his work you can see the encounter with non-European art transforming European art. You can see the evolution of his use of color, composition, the back and forth of abstraction and figure, ideas of geometry, of simplification and symbolism, the flow of those showoff drawings made of a single line. Picasso certainly used his practice of art to exploit the women in his life, but Art used Picasso to expand its boundary.
When I discovered Apollinaire had done these things, I was disappointed in him as a man.5 But as a poet, he wrote “Zone.”
Writing “Zone” does not give him a pass for behaving like a lout. Neither does behaving like a lout negate the achievement of “Zone.”
In the case of living artists, cutting the abusive ones off from adulation, money and fame may force a reckoning and be worth it. Yet is anything gained by trashing the best that the dead have managed to produce in their chaotic lives? Is there no moral value in bringing into being such good art? If we insist on having only art by stainless saints, we will also have to trash Marie Laurencin.6
I would never tell a person that they must read Apollinaire against their own moral revulsion. We all draw our own lines. If it turns your stomach, then there’s no helping it. Unlike Hannah Gadsby, though, I personally don’t reject Picasso’s work because Picasso was a jerk. Those ceramic owls really get me. (This is not a joke. I learned a lot from those owls.) And discovering Apollinaire had been a brute has not removed my admiration of his poetry.
What can I say? Of either of these men?
Was he a prick or was he a genius? The answer is undeniably yes.
This description, according to Stein, came from Picasso’s girlfriend, the artist and model Fernande Olivier, who disliked Laurencin intensely. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which despite the title was written by Stein in the voice of her lifelong partner, had further to say about Laurencin in the following long passage. (The text is now in the public domain.)
Everybody called Gertrude Stein Gertrude, or at most Mademoiselle Gertrude, everybody called Picasso Pablo and Fernande Fernande and everybody called Guillaume Apollinaire Guillaume and Max Jacob Max but everybody called Marie Laurencin Marie Laurencin.
The first time Gertrude Stein ever saw Marie Laurencin, Guillaume Apollinaire brought her to the rue de Fleurus, not on a Saturday evening, but another evening. She was very interesting. They were an extraordinary pair. Marie Laurencin was terribly near-sighted and of course she never wore eye-glasses, no french woman and few frenchmen did in those days. She used a lorgnette. She looked at each picture carefully that is, every picture on the line, bringing her eye close and moving over the whole of it with her lorgnette, an inch at a time. The pictures out of reach she ignored. Finally she remarked, as for myself, I prefer portraits and that is of course quite natural, as I myself am a Clouet. And it was perfectly true, she was a Clouet. She had the square thin build of the mediaeval french women in the french primitives. She spoke in a high pitched beautifully modulated voice. She sat down beside Gertrude Stein on the couch and she recounted the story of her life, told that her mother who had always had it in her nature to dislike men had been for many years the mistress of an important personage, had borne her, Marie Laurencin. I have never, she added, dared let her know Guillaume although of course he is so sweet that she could not refuse to like him but better not. Some day you will see her.
And later on Gertrude Stein saw the mother and by that time I was in Paris and I was taken along.
Marie Laurencin, leading her strange life and making her strange art, lived with her mother, who was a very quiet, very pleasant, very dignified woman, as if the two were living in a convent. The small apartment was filled with needlework which the mother had executed after the designs of Marie Laurencin. Marie and her mother acted toward each other exactly as a young nun with an older one. It was all very strange. Later just before the war the mother fell ill and died. Then the mother did see Guillaume Apollinaire and liked him.
After her mother's death Marie Laurencin lost all sense of stability. She and Guillaume no longer saw each other. A relation that had existed as long as the mother lived without the mother's knowledge now that the mother was dead and had seen and liked Guillaume could no longer endure. Marie against the advice of all her friends married a german. When her friends remonstrated with her she said, but he is the only one who can give me a feeling of my mother.
Six weeks after the marriage the war came and Marie had to leave the country, having been married to a german. As she told me later when once during the war we met in Spain, naturally the officials could make no trouble for her, her passport made it clear that no one knew who her father was and they naturally were afraid because perhaps her father might be the president of the french republic.
During these war years Marie was very unhappy. She was intensely french and she was technically german. When you met her she would say, let me present to you my husband a boche, I do not remember his name. The official french world in Spain with whom she and her husband occasionally came in contact made things very unpleasant for her, constantly referring to Germany as her country. In the meanwhile Guillaume with whom she was in correspondence wrote her passionately patriotic letters. It was a miserable time for Marie Laurencin.
Finally Madame Groult, the sister of Poiret, coming to Spain, managed to help Marie out of her troubles. She finally divorced her husband and after the armistice returned to Paris, at home once more in the world. It was then that she came to the rue de Fleurus again, this time with Erik Satie. They were both Normans and so proud and happy about it.
In the early days Marie Laurencin painted a strange picture, portraits of Guillaume, Picasso, Fernande and herself. Fernande told Gertrude Stein about it. Gertrude Stein bought it and Marie Laurencin was so pleased. It was the first picture of hers any one had ever bought.
Can anyone find an original source? I find it everywhere online, but only ever in English and without a source.
I give you this glimpse into their relationship, again from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The accuracy of the book was attacked after publication by several of the persons described, but no one seems to have questioned how she represented Marie Laurencin. Here we have the story of a party thrown for Rousseau, in which we get the flavor of how things went down. The party is being organized by Fernande Olivier. The group arranges to meet at a cafe, then head up to Picasso’s atelier for dinner. At the cafe, Stein and Toklas spy Laurencin:
As Gertrude Stein and I came into the café there seemed to be a great many people present and in the midst was a tall thin girl who with her long thin arms extended was swaying forward and back. I did not know what she was doing, it was evidently not gymnastics, it was bewildering but she looked very enticing. What is that, I whispered to Gertrude Stein. Oh that is Marie Laurencin, I am afraid she had been taking too many preliminary apéritifs. Is she the old lady that Fernande told me about who makes noises like animals and annoys Pablo. She annoys Pablo alright but she is a very young lady and she has had too much, said Gertrude Stein going in.
There is some scramble on the part of the hostess to get the food together, since her delivery was cancelled, and then all make their way to Picasso’s place.
As we toiled up the hill we saw in front of us the whole crowd. In the middle was Marie Laurencin supported on the one side by Gertrude Stein and on the other by Gertrude Stein's brother and she was falling first into one pair of arms and then into another, her voice always high and sweet and her arms always thin graceful and long. Guillaume of course was not there, he was to bring Rousseau himself after every one was seated.
And then when Apollinaire arrives, it seems clear he takes her out and roughs her up a bit to get her to behave.
I had just time to deposit my hat and admire the arrangements, Fernande violently abusing Marie Laurencin all the time, when the crowd arrived. Fernande large and imposing, barred the way, she was not going to have her party spoiled by Marie Laurencin. This was a serious party, a serious banquet for Rousseau and neither she nor Pablo would tolerate such conduct. Of course Pablo, all this time, was well out of sight in the rear. Gertrude Stein remonstrated she said half in english half in french, that she would be hanged if after the struggle of getting Marie Laurencin up that terrific hill it was going to be for nothing. No indeed and beside she reminded Fernande that Guillaume and Rousseau would be along any minute and it was necessary that every one should be decorously seated before that event. By this time Pablo had made his way to the front and he joined in and said, yes yes, and Fernande yielded. She was always a little afraid of Guillaume Apollinaire, of his solemnity and of his wit, and they all came in. Everybody sat down.
Everybody sat down and everybody began to eat rice and other things, that is as soon as Guillaume Apollinaire and Rousseau came in which they did very presently and were wildly acclaimed. How well I remember their coming. Rousseau a little small colourless frenchman with a little beard, like any number of frenchmen one saw everywhere. Guillaume Apollinaire with finely cut florid features, dark hair and a beautiful complexion. Everybody was presented and everybody sat down again. Guillaume slipped into a seat beside Marie Laurencin. At the sight of Guillaume, Marie who had become comparatively calm seated next to Gertrude Stein, broke out again in wild movements and outcries. Guillaume got her out of the door and downstairs and after a decent interval they came back Marie a little bruised but sober.
Apollinaire’s pornographic writing, influenced by that incredible bore Sade, contains a lot of hideous violence, of course, with murders and beheadings and rapes and the lot. However, I have to say I’ve found it fairly ridiculous, though in places hilarious, and in its methodical ticking down the list of perversions, about as erotically charged as a list of dirty words from the dictionary. I don’t recommend it as the best of his art, not even because of the violence, but because in the end it is pretty tedious.
Personal confessional note: A drunk with whom I had a fling, a painter of no remarkable talent, was not physically violent, but he was verbally abusive, quickly annoying, and I got soon fed up, but not before allowing myself to get shouty and possibly chucking something at him, possibly a notebook, which opened and stopped dead halfway in its parabolic trajectory and fluttered down to the dark wet street between us, thank goodness, as I would have been very much in the wrong if it had actually hit him.
Anti-semitism, as was nauseatingly common in France at the time (and probably at this time), appears in her private correspondence. She was arrested in the purges after the liberation, held at the same camp at Drancy where her friend Max Jacob had died, then released without charges.