Planus (13 page)

It was a good thing I had a strong head for drink, for naturally I gave myself up to many excesses, though I am not ashamed of them and am ready to start all over again. There was only one period that I am not in the least proud of, and that was during the First World War, when I returned to Paris; I was always half-seas- over and ready to fly into a temper at any moment. It is true I did not eat every day, for, though I met people at every step who were willing to stand the one-armed man a drink, no one ever invited the poet to lunch. Besides, at that time Paris was rotten, full of vile
nouveaux riches
, and there was plenty to make one's blood boil. It lasted only one year, but it was a terrible year. Fortunately, there were plenty of boozers to be found, especially in Montparnasse, including Modigliani, who recited passages of the
Divine Comedy
in the middle of the street, criticizing Dante severely, and before long the two of us were inseparable. We drank like lunatics, and it appals me to think of the amount of booze we put away. Unhappily,

Modigliani had a manager, a more or less epileptic Polish poet by the name of Leopold Zborowski, who was not afraid of killing his golden goose by shutting the artist up in a maid's room, where the painter was supplied with an easel, canvases ready on stretchers, a profusion of oil paints, clean brushes and a naked woman (the model Modigliani desired), while the alcoholic was supplied with ten bottles of white wine, two different aperitifs, and a litre of rum, all of the finest brands. In the evenings he was let out like a wild beast from its cage, and poor, inspired Modi hurtled out of doors and made whoopee in the streets or in the cafe terraces, a 20-franc piece or a 50-franc note in his pocket. Although the diabolical Zborowski was not afraid of committing this crime in order to make his fortune, he was afraid of the shells which Big Bertha was firing on Paris, and he had only one desire — to hop it. But, as Modigliani did not want to leave Paris at any price, Zbo was shrewd enough to take his painter to a quack who warned Modi that, if he went on drinking like that, he would be dead within three months. Perhaps the doctor was right. Modigliani gave up drinking on the spot and allowed himself to be led away to the Midi by Zborowski and his household. He did not drink. He was to be seen walking amongst the crowd on the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, his face like a death's head and his beautiful eyes fixed at the bottom of their hollow and tar-black sockets. I was appalled when I met him again one day. He was no more than a shadow of his former self, he was at the end of his tether. Manifestly he was missing his alcohol. As I was making a film I was not short of money, so I gave him one thousand francs to go and get drunk with at once. It was all I asked for and I would have gone with him, for I, too, was beginning to weary of my regular work at the studio. But Modigliani did not want it, he refused the money, and less than six months later he was dead, of a brain tumour so they said. I will relate some other time the horrible circumstances of his death. Today, I would like to relate our most delightful drunken adventure.

'To hang the bottles in the water. It's hot.'

So Modigliani stood up and went to negotiate the loan of a ball of string from the owner of the laundry-boat.

We lowered the bottles into the water and from time to time fished one up and drained it to the dregs, after shouting a stentorian 'Cheers!' to the old washerwomen who were beating their linen, each kneeling at her tub.

Laundresses have the gift of the gab and the old women were not slow in replying, laughing and taunting us with obscene words and gestures, and we answered, going one better, brazenly and in good humour, drunkenness sharpening our wits and spurring us on, till, at a certain moment, Modigliani offered a bottle to the ugliest of the old bags on condition she would allow him to kiss her on the lips. Egged on by the whole pack of them, the unsuspecting Modigliani started trying to walk over the water to reach the old witch of his choice and sank to the bottom. The thing was so startling and unexpected that everybody burst out laughing, but, naturally, Modigliani could not swim, so I took a header into the water to save him. When I had grabbed him by the hair I found myself in great difficulties, having only one arm. However, a vigorous kick brought me to the surface and the owner of the laundry-boat, who had jumped into his rowing-boat, fished us out. The old harpies booed and jeered and kicked up a hullabaloo while our clothes were drying out on board, the owner ticked us off and Modigliani, naked as a baby and as handsome as John the Baptist, emptied the bottle he had been clinging on to all this time and talked of repeating his exploit. In the end, we were kicked off the boat. It was high time. The alcoholic was becoming violent and the old beauty queens were ready to lynch us.

'Are you coming, Amedeo?'

Then his rage turned against me, for Modigliani had a horror of his Christian name.

I should like to conclude my reflections on gluttony with this unique anecdote, for I have too many tales to tell, one's eating and drinking companions are generally
bons vivants;
talkative, easygoing, tolerant, laughter-loving and generous, they know how to enjoy everything. And I can state from experience that the worst excesses of gluttony are excesses of abstinence, a cure that is worse than the disease, as anchorites know only too well, for the gnawing pangs of hunger often distract them from prayer and a true spirit of humility. But I, who have no faith, who have often gone hungry and thirsty and today know how to do without everything, even smoking and drinking, I can certify that poverty is a great spiritual force on condition one is really divested of everything. Once, I spent seven days in bed in my attic in the rue de Savoie. I had nothing to eat or drink, not even a smoke, and I was so disgusted at having come out of the war alive that I had sworn not to go begging to anyone, and never to go out again unless a miracle happened. It was in June 1916. I lay there in my hovel, having made the vow and waiting for the miracle. And the miracle happened, and what a miracle! A heavy tread clumping up the seven flights of stairs. A loud knock on my door. It was the postman with a registered letter and he made a sour face because I didn't have a sou to give him as a tip. The envelope he handed me contained a banker's order for one hundred thousand francs and, at the Gomptoir d'Escompte on the rue Bergere, neither the cashier nor the manager would tell me who had sent it. They were acting on instructions. I learned, however, that it came from New Zealand, although I did not know a soul there, and it was not until 1926 that I finally found out (and then only because of a chance meeting with one of the lady's ex-pupils, on board a transatlantic liner) that an old maiden lady, Mile Y. Soubeiran, teacher of literature at the Academy for Young Ladies in Bovril, New Zealand (Oceania), had read a poem of mine—only one, and I do not even know which one it was—and had been the author of the miracle. Nor could I even thank this soul-sister, for the old Frenchwoman had died in exile. I acquired a photograph of her grave in the Antipodes, and I never open a bottle without drinking a toast to her. Plenty of old tarts benefited from this miracle for, afterwards, I could never meet one of them at night on the Champs-Elysees without inviting her for a noggin and a good tuck-in, and these toothless old hags, cooing and deadly boring, would tell me the story of their lives. Each was a bigger liar than the last. The first was La Goulue, who was prowling round the
Figaro,
trying to catch a glimpse of her son who worked there. I could write a book about the things La Goulue told me that night. But, one never knows.. ..

Such, in essence, was the tale told me by a former Queen of Paris, not to mention the stories, when I prompted her, about Toulouse- Lautrec, the Prince of Wales, lion-taming, nights at the Moulin- Rouge and the Tabarin, and Valentin-the-Boneless, Grille-d'Egout, who was a notary clerk during the day etc. etc. She spoke without rancour, without a word of bitterness, she who was reduced to begging now and held in the palm of her grubby hand an open packet of chewing-gum.

'You understand, huh? It's for appearance' sake,' she confided in me, laughing. 'Here, give me a hundred sous for the first metro. Be a pal.'

'Wouldn't you like me to take you to Saint-Ouen by cab?'

'And what do you think my man would say to that, eh?'

Many things have been written about her, but not this.

It does not require a great deal of talent, but a love for what is real.

And a feeling for life.

It is not existentialism, that false step that does not want to be a goose-step, in spite of Heidegger, in spite of Husserl. But Schopenhauer, the last classical philosopher, was already warning: 'Beware the professors of philosophy. They have no originality and no talent, and their schools are schools of platitudes. . . .'

One cannot speak of these things, bringing well-known people into my story, without at once taking on the air of a Pharisee! However, that is not my role. I am not comparing myself to others. If I have introduced the names of certain of my contemporaries and given them a merely passing role which has not pleased them, it is because contemporaries are public figures and, as such, part of the climate of the times.

It is not my ambition to write, but to live. I have lived. Now I write. But I am not a Pharisee who beats his breast because he puts himself into a book. I put myself there along with the others and by the same right as the others. A book is also life. I am just a clot. And life goes on. And life starts all over again. And life carries everything along with it. I should like to know who I am. . . .

Adrift at sea, I often asked myself: if I put the sea into a bottle, is it still the sea or is it just a bottle of dirty water? Putting life into a coffin — is that death? No, it isn't, is it? A thousand times no! It is a redoubling of life, an explosion, a blinding flash, a teeming of such vehemence that, if the marble cracks under the internal pressure and is exposed, split, scattered, and disappears into anonymity, then bundles of verse are unguent-bearers, phosphorescent pills, pemmican for the atheistic explorer, millions of polar years (the pole-star changes every 26,920 years!). The Thing is not the Faith, and religious Observances are not Salvation. Consider Teeth : alive, they masticate, and dead — they bare themselves. And that is Laughter. It is God. It is Life. It is Grimace. It is not Condemnation, but one more chance. . . . Luck. Thank you for letting me try it. All is in all. And where does vice begin in one's conscience, or sin, sainthood, crime, innocence, fear, strength, guilt, glory ... or evasion?

Here, then, is my dirty linen : Second Deadly Sin : LUST (
Fornicatio
). According to the parable of the Evangelist: 'The first shall be last and the last first' (Mark x: 31). The last love is the same as the first, the same pure heart and tranquil soul", the same smile, but transfigured by a passion whose flame smoulders under the cinders after thirty years of conjugal life (when I was there!). The poet cried : 'I wrote my first poems out of youthful enthusiasm, my second out of love, and my last out of despair. The Muse entered my heart like a golden- tongued goddess, and fled from it like a pythoness, uttering cries of woe!' As for myself, the moment I met my latest love, it was the lightning-stroke, and I wrung the Muse's neck so as never to hear her cry out, whine and torment me. The pole-star of my life had shifted.

Love she who loved you from the cradle to the grave; The only one I love still loves me tenderly, Her name is death — the dead one. . . . Ecstasy or torment! And the rose in her hand is the healing rose.

Fall down, white roses, you insult our gods,

Fall, white phantoms, from your blazing heaven : —

3)

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Fourth Deadly Sin : WRATH
(Ira).
The scandal of it is that, nowadays, one can no longer be angry, for the apathy is universal now that war and murder have become automatic, thanks to the machine-man, the patented, officially registered but irresponsible machine-tool. What a mess! I have killed. Thousands of men have killed millions of other men from the heights of the skies, and been as unconcerned about it as if they were joy-riding in a taxi.

(Dedicated to Our Saviour of Armies and to His priests in national uniform, bishops, popes, pastors, rabbis who invoke His name on both sides of the firing line! Enough of this hypocrisy, we've had enough. . . .)

Fifth Deadly Sin: ENVY or VAINGLORY (
acedia, id est anxietas seu taedium cordis, et conodoxia, id est jactancia seu vana gloria
). This is Mr Everybody, the man in the street, the perfect citizen of a democracy, the man who wears mass-produced clothes, eats mass-produced food, kisses by the clock and owns a little 5 h.p. car with a registered licence-plate. He is undistinguished and indistinguishable in every way. He votes. It was Gogol who identified him as the latest personification of the Devil, who tries to pass himself off as your fellow-creature, your brother. He is the cuckold of the twentieth century! He is universal, he says. And that is the danger.

Watch out, Blaise, there is a lot of talk of making a United States of Europe and a Soviet of the East, and they will not want any more free citizens of the world, like you.

Sixth Deadly Sin: SLOTH (
Otiositas
). The Sit-in Strike; sprawled on the grass, leaning back against the embankment, one watches the water flowing past through a curtain of poplars whose millions of leaves are like the frame of a screen that is empty of all but the summer sky, the infinite sky. I have slipped off my jacket and the fingers of God, which are counting the hairs of my head to see if there is one missing, creep down under my collar. They tickle, so I twitch my shoulders and let myself fall back. It is the exact opposite of struggling with the Angel who suffocates you with his stifling-hot wings. My neck is held in a shaved armpit, cold, diamond-like, with no smell, unless it be the smell of a gem. Contemplation.