The last chance of her prime came while she was
living at 29 rue de Faubourg St. Honore; it was there, in that house whose like
cannot be found outside Paris, shaded by enormous trees and looking as though
nothing ever disturbed it, that she was loved by a poet, Pierre Reverdy.
Thoughts of marriage certainly did more than cross Gabrielle’s mind. Reverdy
certainly loved her deeply, too. Would she relieve a poet’s poverty? Make a
happy man of that unquiet spirit? Not a chance. Could Gabrielle have
guessed at the existence of another
person, then unknown to every one including himself, a Reverdy thirsting for
the absolute and drawn to solitude as a martyr to his stake? She had no inkling
of it, nor the somber joy that impelled him to run away: ‘To run away nowhere, that’s
what we need, underneath it all . . .There is an inexpressible thrill in
running away.’ From this it will be clear that Gabrielle was resolutely playing
a hand she had lost from the start.
A provincial transplant . . . ‘at once somber and solar.’ His hair was
black, that crow-like gypsy hair, his skin olive, his speech flinty, his voice
resonant: Reverdy talked as passionately as herself. Speech must have been one
of the luxuries they refused themselves the least, those two. Neither tall nor
slender, he was not attractive in the ordinary sense of the word. He was in
other ways, though. The striking thing about him was his strange ability to
metamorphose anything in a few words. And then, the depth of his eyes. It was
that, most of all, that appealed, the black light of Reverdy’s eyes.
He was the grandson of a craftsman and son of a wine grower- more than enough to
tempt Gabrielle into trying to connect past and present. To a degree Reverdy
was the speech and kin and hair and, in some vague way, the childhood of the
Chanels. Her brothers –Alphonse the bold, who often came to Paris, and Lucien,
the gentle Lucien, whom she had just gratified with an allowance as generous as
the one bestowed earlier on Alphonse –
had the same gift of gab, a sort of rhythm found at the heart of any peasant
speech, wherever it may hail from. And like them, Reverdy was never happier than
when he was working with his hands. If we add that he cherished the tyrannous memory of a vineyard at the foot of
Montagne, Noire, overlooking the Bas Languedoc, the extreme southern fold of
the Cevennes range, a pink earth gray-streaked in winter, green in summer, and
utterly detached from the world; if we take into account the keen sorrow he
felt when –sometime around 1907 – the wine crisis forced his father to sell the
property in which he had invested all he owned, then we are abruptly reminded
of Chanel senior, eternally dreaming of vines he never possessed.
At last Gabrielle was living with a man of her own breed, as deeply marked by
the hazards of the soil as her own people. By uprooting the Reverdy’s from
their homestead, the wine slump had first made Pierre into a city boy unable to
forget what he had lost, and then into a boarder at a school in Narbonne, are
recluse enduring desperate days. His horror of the boarding school; scarred him
as with a hot poker. If ever Gabrielle told him about Aubazine or Moulins, how
easy the conversation must have been for them.
Reverdy was extremely proud of the master craftsmen from whom he descended, his
wood-carving grandfather and his stonemason uncles, who carved for churches –
and Gabrielle claimed to be first and foremost a craftsman. And how he talked
about his father! A free-thinker and ardent socialist, Reverdy Senior had
brought up his children to be atheists: ‘I am only a shadow of that man,’ said
his son. ‘Never have I met a mind so flexible and wide, coupled with such a
violent and generous temperament, always breaking out of the frame . . . He was
my model!”- something else Gabrielle could be more than ordinarily sensitive
to. What had she done, from Vichy to Paris, but break out of frames? Life would never offer her a man better fitted
to understand her.
Later, much later, when the time of loneliness came, and rancor, and lies were
hurled into the faces of the people she talked to like an angry refutation of
the things they had been, the poet’s name alone seemed admissible to her and worthy
of being associated with hers. After Boy, Reverdy. Apart from those two,
nobody.
Until the last years of her life Chanel like nothing better than to compare
Reverdy, impecunious and unrecognized, with the poets of his generation whose fame
or fortune struck her as hideously unjust. What were they all, what was Cocteau?
‘A fake,’ she would say in a rage-choked voice, ‘a fake versifier, a
phrase-maker, a nobody. Reverdy: he was a poet, I mean a clairvoyant.” Woe to
anyone who tried to tell her otherwise. Some names simply drove her wild.
Valery . . . .She called him everything in the book: ‘A person who lets himself
be covered with honors, the shame of it! They stick them on him everywhere.
Like on a Christmas tree. Now they’ve got him on the front of the Trocadero, I
ask you! Hollow, pitiful lines. What trash! On the Trocadero, I ask you! To her
it was an unpardonable insult that words by Paul Valery should have the honor
of being engraved on a public building – even worse, on her Trocadero. “Don’t give
me that rot! I tell you it’s a scandal.’ She raged herself hoarse and jerked at
her necklaces as though she would break them. She shouted that it was time people
learned the truth. That was 1950. She never got over it. Twenty years later she
was attacking the president of the Republic. Someone had better tell him, she
said, that he didn’t know the first thing about poetry. The anthology he had
perpetrated was meaning less, because Reverdy wasn’t in it. She would repeat:
‘Meaningless, you hear me? Absolutely. What was Pompidou trying to get? The
Academie? Who’s going to read it anyway? Schoolboy stuff.’ How to stop her? In
the end people left her to her temper.
She owned the complete works of Reverdy in their first editions, and nearly all
his manuscripts. Among the other treasures a copy of Cravates de chanvre with an original watercolor on every page, and
every stroke at once so spontaneous and so exact that one is immediately aware,
leafing through the book, that one is looking at the work of a master. It
became impossible to see Reverdy
except through Picasso’s vision of him. For it was he, one evening, who
illustrated that unique copy just for him: ‘For Reverdy I made the
illustrations in this book, with all my heart,’ says the dedication, and it is signed
by Picasso. A priceless object, which Chanel sometimes kept locked in her safe
but more often left out within reach. When people said, ‘Some day somebody is
going to steal tat from you,’ she would answer, ‘Of course they are, Beautiful
things are meant to change hands.” And when she would give some booklover
permission to spend a day in her library, he would come away reeling . . .In
every one of Reverdy’s works, in every manuscript, words of love and affection,
year after year from 1921 until 1960, the year of his death. In Les Epaves di ciel, ‘To my very great
and dear Coco with all my heart until is last beat. . . .
That she had a hard time adjusting to Reverdy’s ambivalences one can readily
conceive. Gabrielle could not help feeling that his long sojourns at the
Faubourg and sudden escapes to Monmartre, his obsessive interest in her and the
dark delight he took in running away from her were somehow contradictory. That
habit he had of proclaiming his hatred for all ties. The fascination of silence
in this brilliant talker, and of asceticism in this man so sensitive to luxury that
he called it ‘an ambitious spiritual necessity’ . . .One constantly felt a
protest rising within him which he didn’t even bother to hide, and saw, in his
eyes, that conflagration Aragon had been so struck by, ‘that fire of anger unlike
any I ever saw.’ It was enough to drive one mad. You never knew which was
strongest in him, his contempt for money or his love of good living, his
conviction that happiness was a snare and a delusion, ‘a meaningless word which
has become encrusted in the human mind like an inoperable cancer’ or his
confidence in the human heart that you suddenly tripped over in mid-sentence. One
was forced to question whether, with him, love might not have been joyless. Gabrielle
was dazed. As, for example, when Reverdy, wanting to finish with the myth of
happiness once and for all, asked, ‘What would become of dreams if people were
happy with their real lives?’ A day came, later, when he proved that ‘the most
durable and solid link between beings is the barrier.’ Then she would accuse him
of being unhappy on principle, and indulging
in his disenchantment. If he was unhappy it was because he didn’t want to be.
Come, now . . .happiness existed. Even though her whole life proved the
contrary, everything she had known as a child, the bad blood between her
parents, the failure of her life with Boy, and even though she had as little faith
in happiness as he, Gabrielle not exerted all her strength to deny it. They tore
each other apart, agonizingly . . .
Such strange years, engendering so many different explosions. The fireworks of
the Arts Deco, the shock of the first surrealist exhibition, the earthquakes of
the Black Revue, added to the stupefying nakedness of Josephine Baker, and The
Gold Rush, creating a permanent alliance between Charlie Chaplin and the French
Intellectual.
But no one seems to have recognized how important a part Gabrielle played in those
years – a fleeting and barely outlined image in this theater of the unpredictable.
A long year, a lost battle. This can be summed up the final months of Gabrielle’s
sole literary romance. It was 1924. There were one of two truces with Reverdy
but not enough. After that, the temptation of God was decidedly stronger and there
was no more room in the poet’s life for anything but exile, solitude, and a
sort of supreme heroism of absence, the unique source of his inspiration.’
Poetry is in what is not. In what we feel the lack of. In what we would like there
to be.’
(Weave and hang between World
and self
the net of silent words
In every corner of the black room.)
That was where Reverdy was heading.
So Gabrielle bowed out.
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