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Gertrude Stein, though she stood apart from the 1920s set, having been in Paris since 1903, was among the first great female collectors of modern art. As patrons in America, Katherine Dreier and the Cone sisters were not far behind her. The Cones were distant cousins of Stein, and Etta Cone had typed the manuscript of Stein’s first book, Three Lives. At Stein’s home at 27, rue de Fleurus, crammed with paintings and sculpture, many of the new arrivals rubbed shoulders with the older established expatriates and some of their French colleagues too. Any given salon might include Virgil Thomson, Hemingway, Pound, Duchamp, Cocteau, Picabia, Matisse, T.S. Eliot (on visits from London), Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Robert McAlmon. And Picasso, of course, whom Stein’s friend Nelly Jacott called ‘a good-looking boot-black’.
In the early days, Picasso had exhibited his work in a little furniture shop; and Leo and Gertrude Stein had been able to pick up Matisse’s Femme au Chapeau for 500 francs from the dealer Vollard. Things were changing fast, though. Daniel Kahnweiler, the great pioneer modern art dealer, had set up shop in Paris a couple of years before the First World War. Ignoring Picasso’s advice to become a French citizen (he was married to a Frenchwoman but had already done national service in his native Germany and didn’t want to have to go through it a second time, especially with a war looming), Kahnweiler had his effects sequestered at the outbreak of war and all his pictures were auctioned off – notably most of the Cubist work painted between 1911 and 1914. When he returned to Paris soon after the war, his former artists except Juan Gris had become ‘too successful to have need of him’, Stein tells us. Certainly the three other great Cubists, Picasso, Braque and Léger, had begun to be seriously collectable by this time, though the prices asked for their work remained low compared to the levels they subsequently reached.
Hemingway quoted Gertrude Stein, whose family-derived income was comfortable but not great, with a respect born of admiration: ‘ “You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,” she said. “It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode … and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.”’ But not all the new arrivals treated Stein with particular reverence. The poet, artist and film-maker Charles Henri Ford called her ‘Sitting Bull’, while John Glassco wrote that she
projected a remarkable power, possibly due to the atmosphere of adulation that surrounded her. A rhomboidal woman dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap, she gave the impression of absolute irrefragability; her ankles, almost concealed by the hieratic folds of her dress, were like the pillars of a temple: it was impossible to conceive of her lying down. Her fine close-cropped head was in the style of the late Roman Empire, but unfortunately it merged into broad peasant shoulders without the aesthetic assistance of a neck; her eyes were large and much too piercing. I had a peculiar sense of mingled attraction and repulsion towards her. She awakened in me a feeling of instinctive hostility coupled with a grudging veneration, as if she were a pagan idol in whom I was unable to believe.
As backdrop and inspiration to all the artistic activity that was going on, there was the city itself. The writer Malcolm Cowley has observed:
Prohibition, puritanism, philistinism and salesmanship: these seemed to be the triumphant causes in America. Whoever had won the war, young American writers came to regard themselves as a defeated nation. So they went to Paris, not as if they were being driven into exile, but as if they were seeking a spiritual home. Paris was freedom to dress as they pleased, talk and write as they pleased, and make love without worrying about the neighbours. Paris was a continual excitation of the senses.
And if you were lucky enough to be working for an American publication as a correspondent and were paid in dollars, all the better.
How close to all of this were Peggy and Laurence? Given that they were caught in an unsatisfactory marriage and expecting their first child, it is understandable that they had little time to immerse themselves fully in the cultural life of the time; but there seems to have been no profound connection at all, other than through parties and jaunts through the bars and bistros of the Quartier Latin. They were generous hosts – though Peggy secretly resented the amount of money spent on entertaining – and the guests came largely because of the prospect of free food and drink.
Although Laurence’s slim output of work shows the influence of the Surrealists, he was never seriously involved with them, and Peggy had yet to show any hint of the interest in modern art that was to define her life later. She had as yet no conscious sense of purpose. If Laurence told her, as she attests he did in order to humiliate her, that ‘I was fortunate to be accepted in Bohemia and that, since all I had to offer was my money, I should lend it to the brilliant people I met and whom I was allowed to frequent,’ his remark at least planted another seed – but it took time to grow.
The Vails’ money set them apart, but they did not hold salons like Stein or Barney, nor did they patronise the arts. They lived in the grand Hôtel Lutétia, far from the Left Bank. Peggy did make friends within the artistic community, and might have become more involved with that world earlier in her life had it not been, paradoxically, for the presence of her husband, who partly facilitated and partly inhibited her entrance to it. She had not forgotten the lessons and the principles instilled in her by her teacher Lucile Kohn, but she was handicapped by her lack of confidence, something which Laurence was at pains to undermine anyway, on account of his own sense of inadequacy and inferiority, which stemmed from a similar source to Peggy’s: parental neglect.
That they saw themselves as doyens of artistic life, however – Laurence more so than Peggy – is clear from contemporary observations of them during the 1920s. The contradictions in Laurence’s character – charm and intelligence struggling with petulant egotism – are noticeable too. Matthew Josephson remembered that
A few Byronic figures loomed among us; they owned private incomes and showed no great urge or haste to fill many volumes with their written words. Laurence Vail was such a one, who wrote and also painted a little, but more often and more seriously seemed bent on painting the Left Bank of the River Seine red … With his long mane of yellow hair always uncovered, his red or pink shirts, his trousers of blue sailcloth, he made an eye-filling figure in the quarter. Moreover he was young, handsome, and for all his wild talk, a prince of a fellow; whenever he came riding in, usually with a flock of charming women in his train, he would set all the cafés of Montparnasse agog.
Laurence literally ‘knew everyone’; and even if he didn’t, would buy him a drink. His vivacious sister, Clotilde, who resembled Laurence in appearance as in high spirits, would usually be one of his café-crawling party, a band of Dionysiacs gathering followers at one bar or another.
Marriage to Peggy curtailed Laurence’s freedom; she knew it, she was jealous of his company, and yet felt unable to satisfy him. So they took it out on one another. They were caught in a vicious circle which it would take a long time yet to break. Meanwhile, their incompatibility invaded every part of their lives. Laurence says that he tried to teach Peggy about the things which interested him, but as she had a perfectly biddable mind and profited happily from the education of other male companions, his allegation that ‘she knew nothing when I met her and doesn’t know much now’ is more a reflection of the failure of their relationship than of her. The sharpness of his tongue didn’t help. He was particularly unsparing about Florette. Once, flirting with his mother-in-law at dinner, he tickled her playfully. ‘Shush,’ she is reputed to have replied, ‘Peggy will see, Peggy will see, Peggy will see.’ Florette’s mannerism of repeating things threefold is exploited in Murder! Murder!:
Without waiting for outside encouragement the door caves in. Is it the mistral? The police? No, it is Flurry, my mother-in-law, paying an informal morning call.
‘What’s this about murder, ’bout murder, murder …’
Agitatedly, Flurry proceeds to make herself at home. Having flung one of her two extra cloaks on a chair, she places the other one on the bed. Then, having removed the cloak she wears, she puts on the lighter of the two extra cloaks. Then, having found the lighter one too light …
And so on in a similar vein. Shortly afterwards, Laurence goes on to mock Florette’s meanness, and writes of her ‘large, flabby face … All the woes of Israel seem to be assembled on her dark face.’
After a visit late in the year from Peggy’s sister Hazel, who was already divorced from her first husband and about to marry number two, a London-based American journalist called Milton Waldman, the Vails took a house on the Riviera for the winter of 1922–23, where Peggy became ill and spent her time re-reading Dostoevsky. The fighting continued. Peggy was always able to use her money as a stick to beat Laurence with; indeed it was her only defence, and whenever he wanted to be generous with her money (since he had relatively little of his own) it gave her a perverse pleasure to frustrate him. This time it was over a loan of $200 to their friend the writer and art critic Robert Coates, to enable him to return to the United States.
Peggy was well aware of the power her money gave her, and she used it throughout her life, often cruelly, to bolster her low self-esteem and to help her stand up to the sexism which many of her men displayed. Often generous in important matters, she was nearly always – but by no means consistently – mean in the little things. This was a trait acquired from her forebears, which she could no more help than the shape of her nose or her weak ankles. But at this period she might have felt a sense of justification. It was she who paid for most of their expenses. Now she purchased a second-hand Gaubron from ‘one of my cousins in the automobile business’. The car wasn’t up to much, but they hired a chauffeur and Laurence learned to drive, which immediately caused him to fall in love with fast cars. They returned to Paris in the New Year, exchanged the Gaubron for a new Lorraine-Dietrich, one of the most expensive marques available, and welcomed Peggy’s older sister, who had come over from the States to be with her for the birth of her child, now only two months away. Benita was horrified at Peggy’s manner of living.
In the following month, April, the family crossed the Channel to London. It had been decided that the baby, who had been given the provisional nickname ‘Gawd’, should be born outside France to avoid the later risk of French national service should it turn out to be a boy. Peggy and Fira Benenson found a house to rent in Holland Park, while Benita and her husband Edward, joined by Florette, took rooms at the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly. Florette had been kept in ignorance of the pregnancy until now, to minimise the chance of her making too much of a fuss over the imminent arrival of her first grandchild.
Michael Cedric Sindbad Vail put in his appearance on 15 May 1923. Peggy nursed him for a month, until her milk gave out. A month later, she and Laurence were back in Paris with their little boy for the 14 July celebrations – a three-day binge for Laurence – which featured a drunken attack by Malcolm Cowley, Laurence and others on the unfortunate patron of the Rotonde. Once the partying and the vandalism were over, the Vails took a house in Normandy for the summer. Peggy missed Benita, who had returned to New York, but they had a constant stream of visitors, including Man Ray and Kiki; Harold Loeb; Clotilde and her latest lover; the poet Louis Aragon; and, on one occasion, James and Nora Joyce, en route to visit their daughter Lucia, who was attending a boarding school on the coast.
Their rootless life continued. Sindbad (as he came to be called – the name was Laurence’s choice), attended by an English nanny called Lilly who, Peggy noticed, had a magnetic effect on men, went with them. They travelled back to Capri in the autumn, where Laurence got into yet another fight, with a new lover of Clotilde’s, broke a policeman’s thumb and was sent to jail for ten days. Laurence’s bad behaviour, exacerbated by alcohol, continued throughout his life until age mellowed him; but he behaved, as far as one can judge, worse during his marriage to Peggy than at any other time. He constantly longed to get a reaction out of her, but she maintained an almost glacial and calculated indifference. It was however an indifference that extended to almost everything about her, as if she were watching life rather than participating in it; and though such an attitude was a fashionable pose at the time, Peggy was like a sleeping beauty, waiting to be woken up by the right stimulation. Laurence wasn’t her Prince Charming.
The Vails spent the winter in Egypt with just Lilly and Sindbad in attendance, and while Peggy followed the prevailing fashion and collected large numbers of pairs of earrings, a habit she never abandoned, Laurence bought himself brightly patterned bolts of cloth in the souks and had coats-of-many-colours made up. He also indulged himself, with Peggy’s consent, in a night with a Nubian belly-dancer who, he told her later, wore white underwear and ‘had a very high bed. When he could not climb up to it she took him under the armpits and lifted him up like a doll.’ She also gave him crabs, which not unnaturally horrified Peggy.
Apart from Laurence’s habitual tantrums and Peggy’s quibbling over money, this seems to have been a relatively happy period for the couple. Leaving Sindbad in a hotel with Lilly, they explored Upper Egypt before returning to Cairo and, again leaving Sindbad and Lilly, travelling to Jerusalem. Peggy had responded enthusiastically to ancient Egyptian art and architecture, but in Jerusalem she was repelled by the sight of Orthodox Jews at the Wailing Wall: ‘It mortified me to belong to my people. The nauseating sight of my compatriots [sic] publicly groaning and moaning and going into physical contortions was more than I could bear, and I was glad to leave the Jews again.’ In the New Year they returned at last to Paris, successfully smuggling in all the wares they had bought, together with a gigantic rag-doll stuffed with four hundred illegal Turkish cigarettes.
Owing to the arrival of Sindbad, the rooms at the Lutétia were now too small, and Peggy, whom motherhood suited when it suited her, had already promised Laurence ‘a girl next time’. The family moved to a rented apartment on the boulevard St Germain, at the heart of the Left Bank, appalling their aristocratic landlord by shifting all his good Louis XVI sofas, tables and chairs into a back room and replacing them with fashionable rustic French furniture. They stayed for six months through 1924, holding another round of wild parties, though this was seldom to Peggy’s liking. She was scared that some of the guests (Laurence, it will be remembered, tended to invite all and sundry) might make off with the silver, and she hated having to clean up people’s vomit the following day, or to change the sheets on her bed after someone else had made love in them. On the morning after she would purge the apartment, Lysol bottle in hand. Insult was added to injury by the fact that at the time Peggy scarcely drank; there can be nothing more boring to a non-drinker than a drunk, and she found herself frequently surrounded by them. For similar reasons, the long nights idling on the terraces of bars bored her to sleep.
Florette, back in Paris to hover over her daughter and grandchild, attended one or two of these parties, and on the whole enjoyed them, though she became enraged when Kiki once drunkenly called Man Ray ‘a dirty Jew’, and made her feelings known. By now she had made friends with Gertrude Vail, but the two women’s attempts to lure their married offspring back into the wealthy fold of the American colony in Paris came to nothing, though in the years to come Peggy accepted annual presents of either a fur coat or a new car from her mother, and noted gratefully that Florette was ‘forever putting money into trusts for me’.
Laurence encouraged Peggy to continue to shop at Poiret’s, and in 1924 she bought herself a flowing dress in Oriental style that she liked so much, now she had got her figure back after her pregnancy, that she wore it again and again. To go with it she had Stravinsky’s fiancée, Vera Sudeikin, design a golden turban. Man Ray took a series of photographs of her in it, which she adored. Except as a little girl, Peggy never looked more attractive. So pleased was she by the dress that she ordered one for Mary Reynolds too. Mary had by now become a good friend, and was a frequent guest at the Vails’ parties. She was enjoying a wild sex life, partying all the time, but such pastimes were soon to be brought to a halt by a closer encounter than hitherto with someone she already knew – Marcel Duchamp. Mary had been unable to get home after a party and spent the night with Duchamp, who generally disapproved of her way of life, but the next day, out of cash and unable to bring herself to ask him for more than 10 francs towards the fare she needed for a cab home, she called on Peggy to rescue her.
Throughout his life Duchamp was an éminence grise. Aged thirty-seven in 1924, he had returned to France a year earlier after three sojourns in the United States (he first visited New York in 1915), but though he aligned himself with the Surrealists, his work remained independent, and he was never a member of any specific artistic party. As much a theoretician as an artist, he had long since abandoned obviously creative work for chess, of which he was a master. Ascetic and essentially solitary by nature, his life would be bound up with Mary’s until she died, and his aesthetic influence on Peggy was to be profound.
In 1924 the cultural life of Paris was enriched when the Comte de Beaumont initiated a ballet series at La Cigale in Montmartre, producing work by Stravinsky, Milhaud, Honegger and Satie among others, with decors by Picasso, Ernst, Picabia and Miró. Peggy liked ballet, especially as a backdrop to socialising, but she was never much of a one for the performing arts, and the couple grew restless. She had her hair bobbed, which occasioned another outburst from Laurence, and then later in the spring another visit to Europe from Benita and Edward provided a welcome means of escape for a time. Peggy, with Florette in tow, joined her sister in Venice.
She had been there three times before on her trips through Europe with Laurence. Equipped with a little knowledge of her own, she proceeded to act as the family guide. At the end of spring she returned to Paris to find that Laurence had had an affair. His mistress had a baby nine months later, but Peggy reports that they never discovered whether it was Laurence’s doing or, rather improbably, Robert McAlmon’s, or – a welcome possibility – the woman’s husband’s. Peggy forgave Laurence, but the fighting went on as relentlessly as ever. Once, when they were staying at his mother’s flat, they yelled at each other so loudly that Clotilde came in from the next room, immediately took her brother’s part, and told Peggy to get out of the apartment. ‘I was so upset,’ said Peggy, ‘I began rushing around the flat as I was, quite naked.’ The situation was saved by the appearance of Gertrude, who said, ‘This is my apartment, not Clotilde’s, and you are not to leave.’
Restless still, the Vails set off for another holiday, with Clotilde, Lilly and Sindbad, heading first for the Austrian Tyrol. They would spend the row-ridden summer partly with Laurence’s family and partly with Peggy’s. They went hill-walking with the Vails, which Peggy loathed, played tennis and swam. When they joined Peggy’s family poor Benita, still on her European tour with Edward, showered affection on Sindbad; her own attempts at having a child had ended in a series of miscarriages.
Finally shedding their various relatives, Peggy and Laurence made their way back to Venice with Lilly and Sindbad, and here there was a lull in the storm. Laurence knew the city well, as his father had often painted there. Throughout their relationship Peggy had a high regard for Laurence’s intelligence – something she always generously and unreservedly admired in others, thinking as she did so little of her own – and, as she responded positively to the city herself, so she responded to what he taught her about it: ‘Laurence knew every stone, every church, every painting in Venice: in fact he was its second Ruskin. He walked me all over this horseless and autoless city and I developed for it a lifelong passion.’ They started to buy antique furniture for the home they hoped they would some day have – among other things, a thirteenth-century chest, which would end up immured in a country cottage in England. Peggy conceived the idea of buying a palazzo, but was prevented from doing so because her capital remained locked in trusts. Sindbad became rather a bore when Lilly fell ill and Peggy had to look after him ‘every day instead of on Thursdays, as was my habit’.
From Venice they went to Rapallo, where they played tennis with Ezra Pound, who lived there and who had become a friend of sorts; but the place bored Peggy, and the rows with Laurence resumed. On one occasion he smashed a tortoiseshell dressing set that she had acquired after what she calls ‘months of bargaining in the Italian fashion’. Dressing sets were important to Peggy: as a child she had bought an ivory set in Paris, which had long since disappeared, and this one had been intended to replace it. Many years later, in Venice after the Second World War, she herself smashed some tortoiseshell: an anonymous male friend, wishing to patch up a quarrel he’d had with her, brought her a tortoiseshell box as a peace-offering. ‘As she took it from him,’ Maurice Cardiff recalls, ‘she remarked that if it was genuine it would be almost unbreakable. Putting her theory to the test she hurled it onto the marble floor where it predictably shattered.’
Having spent New Year in Rapallo they set off early in 1925 in a leisurely way for Paris. Peggy was pregnant again, her new baby expected in August. As they drove along the Provençal coast they came across a hamlet called Le Canadel, on the Corniche des Maures towards Cap Nègre. It was an enchanting place, and they decided that it was here they would like their home to be. As luck would have it, a tiny, primitive hotel was for sale nearby – La Croix Fleurie, which had artistic associations, since Cocteau had used to spend his winters here with his lover Raymond Radiguet. It was irresistible anyway: ‘a nice little white plaster building in the Provençal style. It had a double exterior staircase ascending to a balcony which gave access to three spacious rooms … The wing consisted of one large room with a huge fireplace and three French windows that reached to the high ceiling and gave out on a lovely terrace with orange trees and palms, forty feet above the sea.’ There may have been no telephone or electricity, but there was a mile of private beach. Impetuously they bought it, but then got cold feet about the price. They managed to wriggle out of the ensuing difficulties and got the sum reduced by a third, provided that they undertook never to use the house as an inn; and they were obliged to repudiate the right to call it La Croix Fleurie.
They returned to Paris in triumph, but as the house would not be ready for them to move into until the summer, when Peggy was expecting her baby, they put off moving until the autumn. In the meantime Peggy decided to visit Benita in New York. Laurence, by now immersed in writing what was to become Murder! Murder!, did not at first want to go, but was persuaded to join her. With them they took a selection of flower collages by Mina Loy to sell.
Mina had arrived in Paris at the turn of the century, and had returned there in 1923 after extensive travels and a chequered, romantic and sometimes tragic life had taken her to South America, Florence, Berlin and New York. Born in London in 1882, she was a highly talented poet – published in the Little Review and by McAlmon’s Contact Editions – as well as a designer and painter. Having very little money, she had to work hard to make a living without compromising her creativity. Her latest idea had been born of frequent visits to the Parisian flea-market, in those days more a place of genuine wonder than it is today, but still only if you could see the potential beyond the junk. Mina had a superb eye, and one of her aims was to train her two daughters, Fabi and Joella, to develop their own. ‘One had to buy the real thing, a piece of old lace,’ she explained, ‘or something funny, but nothing from a department store.’