Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I am quite prepared to believe anyone who describes him differently from the way I knew him, and this is why. In the first place, I could know only one side of his being (a brilliant side) - you see, I was in my turn simply a strange, no doubt not very comprehensible twenty-year old woman, a foreigner; in the second place, I myself noticed a big change in him when we met in 1911. He was somehow completely darkened, emaciated.

     In 1910 I had seen him very infrequently, only a handful of times in all. Nevertheless he wrote to me throughout the winter. That he was composing poems he did not say.

     As I now understand, he was most struck by my ability to divine people’s thoughts, to see other people’s dreams, and other minutiae, to which my friends were well accustomed. He kept repeating: “On communique.” He often said: “Il n’y a que vous pour réaliser cela.”

     In all probability, we both failed to understand one essential thing: everything that happened then was in the nature of a prologue to our lives - his a very short one, mine very long. The inspiration of art had not yet burned out, had not transfigured these two existences; this must have been the bright easy hour before dawn. But the future which, as we know, throws its shadow a long way ahead of itself before it enters, was rapping at the window, lurking behind the torches, cutting across dreams, and terrifying the dreadful Baudelairean Paris hiding nearby. And the divine spirit of Modigliani only flashed out from behind a cloud. He was completely different from anyone else on earth. His voice somehow stayed in one’s memory. I knew him to be a pauper, and it was incomprehensible how he lived at all - as an artist he had attained only the shadow of recognition.

     He lived then (1911) in the Impasse Falguière. He was so poor that in the Luxembourg Gardens we always sat on a bench, not on the seats you had to pay for, as would have been normal. He never complained about this flagrant penury, nor about the flagrant absence of recognition. Only once in 1911 he said that the previous winter had been so hard that he could not even think about those nearest to him.

     He seemed to me to be surrounded by a dense ring of loneliness. I do not ever remember seeing him acknowledge anyone in the Luxembourg Gardens, or even in the Quarter, where everyone knew everyone else. I never heard from him the name of a single friend or artist, and I never heard him make a joke. I never once saw him drunk, and he never smelt of wine. Ohviously, he started drinking later, but already hashish figured in his stories. At that time he had no obvious girl-friend. He never told stories of his previous affairs (which, alas, everyone does). With me he never spoke of anything gross. He was always polite, but this not a consequence of upbringing, but of an elevation of mind.

     At this time, he was engaged in sculpture and used to work in the courtyard below his studio; in the deserted cul-de-sac the tapping of his chisel was audible. The walls of his studio were hung with portraits of an unbelievable length (from floor to ceiling, as it seems to me now). I have never seen reproductions of them — did they survive? He called his sculpture ‘la chose’ — it was exhibited, apparently, in the ‘Independents’ of 1911. He asked me to go and see it, but did not speak to me at the exhibition because I was not alone, but with friends. At the time of my great losses a photograph of the work given to me by Modigliani also disappeared. At this time Modigliani was crazy about Egypt. He took me to the Louvre to see the Egyptian section, and swore that everything else — ‘toute la reste’ — was unworthy of attention. He drew my head in the headgear of the Egyptian queens and dancers, and appeared to be completely possessed by the great art of Egypt. Obviously, Egypt was his last passion. Already he was becoming so original that looking at his canvasses was to be reminded of nothing else. Now this period is called Modigliani’s ‘Periode Nègre’.

 *     *     *

     He used to say: Les bijoux doivent être sauvages’, (referring to my African beads) and drew me in them often.

     He took me to see ‘le vieux Paris derrière le Panthéon’ at night, by moonlight. He knew the city well, but all the same we once got lost. He said: J’ai oublié qu’il y a une île au milieu.’ (l’Ile St. Louis).

     About the Venus de Milo he said that beautifully built women — those worth modelling or drawing — will always appear awkward in clothes.

     In the rain (it is often rainy in Paris) Modigliani used to walk about with a huge, very old umbrella. Sometimes we used to sit under this umbrella on a bench in the Luxembourg. A summer rain fell, nearby slumbered the Vieux Palais à l’Italienne, and we recited Verlaine together — he knew Verlaine by heart — and we were glad that we both remembered the same things.

     I have read in some American monograph that Modigliani was probably greatly influenced by Beatrice H (1), the same who called him ‘perle et pourcine’. I can — indeed I feel obliged to — testify that Amadeo was quite as enlightened long before his acquaintance with Beatrice H — i.e. in 1910. And a lady who calls a great artist a swine is hardly likely to enlighten anyone.

     The first foreigner to see Modigliani’s portrait of me at my home in the Fontahny Born in November 1945 said something to the effect that I can ‘neither remember nor forget’ as a well-known poet has said of something quite other.

     People older than we showed us which allée of the Luxembourg Verlaine walked to ‘his’ restaurent to dine with a horde of admirers from ‘his’ cafe, where he held forth daily. But in 1911, it was not Verlaine who walked along this allée, but a tall gentleman in an immaculate frock-coat and a top-hat, wearing the order of the Légion d’Honneur, and our neighbours whispered, ‘Henri de Régnier!’ This name meant nothing to either of us, Neither did Modigliani want to hear anything about Anatole France (as indeed of many another celebrated Parisian). He was glad that I didn’t like him either. And Verlaine existed in the Luxembourg only in the form of a monument which was unveiled that same year. About Victor Hugo, Modigliani said simply: ‘But Hugo is just declamatory.’

     Once, no doubt through a bad arrangement, I called for Modigliani and found him out. I decided to wait for a few minutes. In my hands was a bouquet of beautiful roses. The window over the locked gates of his studio was open. Having nothing to do, I began to toss flowers into his studio. I left without seeing Modigliani. The next time we met, he expressed bewilderment that I had been able to get into a locked room when he had the key. I explained how it had been. “It can’t be,” he said, “they lay so beautifully.” At nights Modigliani loved to wander about Paris, and often hearing his footsteps in the sleeping silence of the street I went over to the window and watched his shadow through the blinds, lingering beneath my window.

     The Paris of those years was already referred to in the twenties as ‘le vieux Paris et Paris d’avant guerre’. Fiacres still flourished more than any other form of transport. The drivers had their taverns which were called ‘rendez-vous des cochers’ and my young contemporaries, soon to be killed on the Mama and at Verdun, were still alive. All the left-bank artists except for Modigliani were recognised. Picasso was as famous then as he is now, except that one spoke of ‘Picasso and Braque’. Ida Rubinstein played Salome, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had become a smart tradition (Stravinsky, Nizhinsky, Pavlova, Karsavina, Bakst).

     We know now that Stravinsky’s fame has not remained confined to the year 1910, that his genius has become the highest musical expression of twentieth century man. We did not know that then. On June 20th, 1910, ‘The Firebird’ was produced; on June 13th, 1911, Fokine produced ‘Petrushka’ for Diaghilev.

     The laying of new boulevards across the living body of Paris (described by Zola) was still not completed (Boulevard Raspail). Werner, a friend of Eddison, pointed out to me three groups in the Taverne de Panthéon, saying: “Those are the Social Democrats, and those are the Bolsheviks, and those are the Mensheviks.” Women were trying (with varying success) to wear trousers (jupes culottes) or almost swaddling their legs (jupes entravées). Poetry was in a state of total neglect, and was bought only for the illustrations of more or less famous artists.

     I already understood then that French art had swallowed up French poetry.

     René Guille preached ‘scientific poetry’ and his so-called students (with enormous reluctance) visited the Metro.

     The Catholic Church canonised Joan of Arc.

‘Ou est Jeanne la bonne Lorraine
Qu’Anglais brûlèrent à Rouen?’

     I remembered these lines of Villon’s immortal ballade when I looked at the statuettes of the new saint. They were in extremely doubtful taste and they started to be sold in the kiosks of the Church porch.

 *     *     *

     An Italian working man stole Leonardo’s ‘Giaconda’ to restore it to its homeland, and to me (already in Russia) it still seemed that I was the last to see her.

     Modigliani was very sorry that he couldn’t understand my poems and suspected that there were hidden marvels in them, and these were only the first hesitant experiments (for instance in ‘Apollo’ 1911). Modigliani openly laughed at the Apollonian style in art (‘World of Art’).

     It struck me that Modigliani found beautiful only a manifestly ugly person, and insisted on this very firmly. I thought even then that he did not see things as we did.

     In any case, what in Paris is known (with sundry sumptuous adjectives) as ‘la mode’, Modigliani simply didn’t notice.

     He drew me from nature, in his house, and these drawings he presented to me. There were sixteen of them. He asked me to have them framed and hang them in my room at Tsarskoe Celo. They perished in the Tsarskoe house in the first years of the Revolution. The only one to survive has less of his future manner than any of the others.

     More than anything else we talked about poetry. We both knew a lot of French poems: Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarmé, Baudelaire.

     Later, I met the painter Alexander Tischler, who loved and understood poetry just as Modigliani did. This is a great rarity among painters!

     Modigliani never read Dante to me. Perhaps this was simply because I didn’t know Italian at this time. Once he said to me:
“J’ai oublié de vous dire que je suis juif.” He said at once that he was born near Livorno, and that he was twenty-four (in fact he was twenty-six).

     He said he was interested in aviators (pilots as we’d say now), but when, he got to know one of them, he was disappointed: they turned out to be just sportsmen (what did he expect?).

     At that time the first light aeroplanes (like stacks of book shelves, as everyone knows) circled round my rusty and lop-sided contemporary, the Eiffel Tower (we were both born in 1889). It seemed to me like a gigantic candlestick forgotten by giants in the capital of the dwarfs. But this is already a little Gulliveresque.

 *     *     *

     … and all around us raged the recently victorious Cubism, something which had remained quite alien to Modigliani.

     Mark Chagall had already brought his enchanted Vitebsk to Paris, and about the boulevards of Paris in the guise of an obscure young man strolled a not-yet-risen star - Charlie Chaplin (the ‘Great Mute’ as they called the cinema then, still magniloquently holding its peace).

 *     *     *

     ‘But far off in the north’ in Russia, there died Lev Tolstoy, Vrubel, Vera Kommissarevskaya; the symbolists declared themselves to be in a state of crisis. And Alexander Blok prophesied:

‘Oh, if you knew, my children, you,
The cold, the gloom of the coming days.’

Three whales, upon which the twentieth century has camped - Joyce, Proust and Kafka - did not yet exist as myths, though they were alive as men.

 *     *     *

     In the years that followed, whenever I asked recent arrivals from Paris about Modigliani, convinced that such a man must shine, the answer was always the same: we don’t know, we’ve never heard of him. (2)

     Only once, H C Gumilyov, when we were going to see our son together - for the last time - upon my mentioning Modigliani’s name called him a ‘drunken monster’ or something of the sort, and said that in Paris there had been some sort of clash between them because Gumilyov had spoken Russian in some company or other, and Modigliani had protested. And each of them had exactly three years to live.

     Modigliani was scornful of tourists. He considered that such ‘travelling’ was a substitute for real action. He constantly carried ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’ around in his pocket; this book was then a bibliographical rarity. He told me how he went into the Russian Church on Easter Day to see the procession of the Cross, as he loved sumptuous ceremonies. And some ‘probably very important personage’ (probably from the Embassy) made the sign of the cross to him. Modigliani, it seems, did not understand what this meant.

     It seemed for a long time that I would never again hear anything of him. But I heard a great deal of him!

 *     *     *

     At the beginning of the NEP period, when I was a member of the directorate of the Writers’ Union, we used to meet in the study of A N Tikhonov (at 36 Mokhovaya Street, Leningrad - the office of ‘Vsyemirraya Literatura). At this time postal relations with the rest of the world had just been re-established, and Tikhonov received many foreign books and periodicals. During the meeting, someone handed me a copy of a French art journal. I opened it and saw a photograph of Modigliani. A cross. There was a long obituary article; I learned from it that he was one of the great twentieth-century artists (I remember they compared him with Botticelli), that there were monographs on him in English and Italian. Later, in the 30s, Ehrenburg told me a lot about him; he dedicated a poem to him in ‘Stikhi o Kanunakh’ and had known him in Paris after I did. I read about Modigliani also in Carque’s book ‘From Montmartre to the Latin Quarter’ and in the boulevard novel in which the novelist confuses him with Utrillo. I can say with confidence that this hybrid bears absolutely no resemblance whatever to the Modigliani of 1910-11, and that what the author has done belongs to the order of illicit enterprises.

     But quite recently Modigliani has become the hero of a rather vulgar French film, ‘Montparnasse 19’. That is very bitter!

Bolshevo - 1958
Moscow - 1964

Ian Robinson - Untitled