What Am I Doing Here? (10 page)

But Howard's pictures have always been, more or less, erotic — and the more erotic for being inexplicit. He seems incapable of starting a picture without an emotionally charged subject, though his next step is to make it obscure, or at least oblique. Yet is not all erotic art – as opposed to the merely pornographic – oblique? Descriptions of the sexual act are as boring as descriptions of landscape seen from the air – and as flat: whereas Flaubert's description of Emma Bovary's room in a
hotel de passe
in Rouen, before and after, but not
during
the sexual act, is surely the most erotic passage in modern literature.

 

H
er glass of neat vodka sat on the white damask tablecloth. Beyond the smear of lipstick, a twist of lemon floated among the ice-cubes. We were sitting side by side, on a banquette.

‘What are you writing about, Bruce?'

‘Wales, Diana.'

The lower lip shot forward. Her painted cheeks swivelled through an angle of ninety degrees.

‘Whales!' she said. ‘Blue whales! . . . Sperrrm whales! . . . THE WHITE WHALE!'

‘No . . . no, . Diana! Wales! Welsh Wales! The country to the west of England.'

‘Oh! Wales. I
do
know Wales. Little grey houses . . . covered in roses . . . in the rain . . . '

 

I
t was snowing hard the afternoon I went to see Nadezhda Mandelstam. The snow melted off my coat and boots and made puddles on her kitchen floor. The kitchen smelled of kerosene and stale bread. On a table there were sticky purple rings, a vase full of begonias, and dried grasses left over from the lightness of a Russian summer.

A fat man in spectacles came out of the bedroom. He glared at me as he wound a grey scarf around his jowls, and then went out.

She called me in. She lay on her left side, on her bed, amid the rumpled sheets, resting her temple on a clenched fist. She greeted me without moving.

‘What did you think of my doctor?' she sneered. ‘I am sick.'

The doctor, I assume, was her KGB man.

The room was hot and cramped and strewn with clothes and books. Her hair was coarse, like lichen, and the light from the bedside lamp shone through it. White metal fastenings glittered among the brown stumps of her teeth. A cigarette stuck to her lower lip. Her nose was a weapon. You knew for certain she was one of the most powerful women in the world, and knew she knew it.

A friend in England advised me to take her three things: champagne, cheap thrillers and marmalade. She looked at the champagne and said, ‘Bollinger!' without enthusiasm. She looked at the thrillers and said,
‘Romans policiers!
Next time you come to Moscow you must bring me real TRASH!' But when I pulled out three jars of my mother's Seville orange marmalade, she stubbed out the cigarette and smiled.

‘Thank you, my dear. Marmalade, it is my childhood.'

‘Tell me, my dear. . . ' She waved me to a chair and, as she waved, one of her breasts tumbled out of her nightie. ‘Tell me,' she shoved it back, ‘are there any grand poets left in your country? I mean grand poets . . . of the stature of Joyce or Eliot?'

Auden was alive, in Oxford. Weakly, I suggested Auden.

‘Auden is not what I would call a grand poet!'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Most of the voices are silent.'

‘And in prose?'

‘Not much.'

‘And in America? Are there poets?'

‘Some.'

‘Tell me, was Hemingway a grand novelist?'

‘Not always,' I said. ‘Not towards the end. But he's underrated now. The early short stories are wonderful.'

‘But the wonderful American novelist is Faulkner. I am helping a young friend translate Faulkner into Russian. I must tell you, we are having difficulties.

‘And in Russia,' she growled, ‘we have no grand writers left. Here also the voices are silent. We have Solzhenitsyn and even that is not so good. The trouble with Solzhenitsyn is this. When he thinks he is telling the truth, he tells the most terrible falsehoods. But when he thinks he is making a story from his imagination, then, sometimes, he catches the truth.'

‘What about that story . . . ? ' I faltered. 'I forget its name . . . the one where the old woman gets run over by a train?'

‘You mean
Matryona's House?'

‘I do,' I said. ‘Does that catch the truth?'

‘It could never have happened in Russia!'

On the wall across from the bed there was a white canvas, hung askew. The painting was all white, white on white, a few white bottles on a blank white ground. I knew the work of the artist: a Ukrainian Jew, like herself.

‘I see you've got a painting by Weissberg,' I said.

‘Yes. And I wonder if you'd mind straightening it for me? I threw a book and hit it by mistake. A disgusting book by an Australian woman!'

I straightened the picture.

‘Weissberg,' she said. ‘He is our best painter. Perhaps that is all one can do today in Russia? Paint whiteness!'

 

M
adeleine Vionnet is an alert and mischievous old lady of ninety-six with eighty-six years of practical experience in the art of dressmaking. Her couture house on the Avenue Montaigne shut its doors in 1939, but at the mention of her name her former clients will sigh as if recalling the Golden Age. To historians of fashion she is a legend. They have acclaimed her ‘The Architect of Couture': its only true creative genius. And when she announces flatly, ‘I am the best dressmaker in the world and I
feel
it, too!' – there are valid reasons for believing her.

Her name never attracted the publicity – or the notoriety – of Chanel. She never pandered to the fashionable world and, I suspect, believed herself superior to it. She even maintained the word ‘fashion' was meaningless to a true dressmaker. Yet she is probably the woman who, around 1900, rescued other women from the tyranny of the corset. She is certainly the inventor of the bias-cut, which transformed the course of modern dressmaking. And she insisted that women remain women when other couturiers would have their clients resemble boys or machines.

The association of haute couture with the very rich makes it suspect for many people. But for Madame Vionnet, who once was penniless, couture is not a minor art. Like the dance it is an evanescent art, but a great one. She sees herself as an artist on the level of, say, Pavlova. She was single-minded in the pursuit of perfection, and even her exemplary common sense is tinged with a streak of fanaticism. The workmanship of her house was unrivalled. No one knew better how to drape a torso in the round. She would handle fabric as a master sculptor realises the possibilities latent in a marble block. Like a sculptor, too, she understood the subtle beauty of the female body in motion, and knew that graceful movements were enhanced by asymmetry of cut. She wanted the body to show itself through the dress. The dress was to be a second or more seductive skin, which smiled when its wearer smiled. Madame Vionnet demanded of her clients that they be tall, have proper breasts and hips, and move easily. She could then match their beauty with her skill — and the result would be a partnership.

Today she lives in the Seizième Arrondissement, in a street top-heavy with apartment buildings from the Belle Epoque. The facade of her house is adorned with swags of fruit and metal balconies in the heaviest bourgeois taste. Once through the door, however, you enter a world of aluminium grilles, sand-blasted walls, mirror glass and sleek lacquer surfaces: an interior as clean-cut and unsentimental as Madame Vionnet herself.

‘I have nothing old in my house. Everything is modern. I did it all myself.'

Like a Vionnet dress, this is spareness achieved expensively. When she moved here in 1929 the rooms were quickly purged of meaningless ornament. Even the sepia family photographs were ripped from their frames, sandwiched between sheets of plate-glass, and hung on walls that were otherwise free of pictures.

Squares of natural parchment line the salon. ‘Each one a sheepskin!' she laughs. ‘You see, I am a shepherdess.' The room is said to be the most exceptional art deco interior in Paris to have survived - with its owner – intact. There are fur-covered sofas, chromium chairs upholstered in white leather and tables of scarlet lacquer, the colour of Buddhist temples in Japan. The fireplace is of sheet copper, silvered. On it stands a photo of the Parthenon: a talismanic photo, for Madame Vionnet has always turned to Classical Greece for inspiration. Her portrait, resting on an easel, was painted by Jean Dunand, the ‘lacquer master' of the 1920s. The face is made from a mosaic of the minutest chips of eggshell.

This refinement was the reward of a long struggle. Her father, Abel Vionnet, came from the Jura but earned his living at Aubervilliers on the outskirts of Paris. He was an octroi: that is to say, like the Douanier Rousseau, he was an internal customs officer who levied tolls on saleable goods as they passed along the highway. His wife deserted him: he and his daughter became inseparable.

The Vionnet family owned a farmhouse in the Jura ‘with a stream where I could swim', but Madeleine did not see it until she was sixteen. She had been anaemic in Paris, and relatives suggested mountain air as a cure. ‘But I was bored in the mountains. Papa had to come and fetch me again . . . ' Nevertheless, the Jura heritage has probably marked her character. The Jurassiens are a people apart. They have a fiercely independent turn of mind, and a history of rebellious and nonconformist attitudes. In the nineteenth century, the watchmakers of the Swiss Jura combined exquisite craftsmanship with practical Anarchism, and influenced all the great revolutionaries of the day. In Madeleine Vionnet the sense of excellence is there - and perhaps a touch of the anarchist.

The wife of one of Abel Vionnet's friends worked as a seamstress in a
maison de couture,
and at the age of ten Madeleine left school to join her. She got special dispensation to take the leaving exam a year early, and never wavered in her determination to succeed. She became ill but recovered. She married at eighteen, but divorced and her child died. She went to England — and she can still break into English at will — where she worked for Kate Reilly, who dressed the late-Victorian court in costumes of voluminous richness. She returned to Paris and was befriended by Madame Gerber, one of three sisters who ran the house of Callot Soeurs, which, with Worth and Jacques Doucet, formed the triumvirate that dominated fashion in France. Madame Gerber demanded the most exacting standards. Madame Vionnet confesses she owes all her later success to her, and keeps a photo of this forlorn-and-determined-looking woman constantly by her.

In 1900, ladies of fashion were still encased in a heavy armature, and would balance half an aviary on their heads. High-boned collars strangled them. Pointed shoes crippled them. The corsets that squeezed their waists into hour-glass shapes also snarled up their intestines and disturbed their health. But Isadora Duncan was dancing with bare feet, flapping breasts and trailing draperies . . .

‛Quelle artiste!'
says Madame Vionnet with an expansive gesture and backward shake of the head.
‛Quelle grrrande artiste!'

One couturier noticed a princess on a public bus. In a short time, fashionable ladies would burst from their prison.

Madeleine Vionnet was a leading liberationist. She claims the distinction of being the first dressmaker to discard the corset, while working for Jacques Doucet in 1907: ‘I have never been able to tolerate corsets myself. Why should I have inflicted them on other women?
Le corset, c'est une chose orthopédique
. . .'

Certainly, she always believed that no woman can be beautiful if she is constricted. And from 1901 onwards she designed seductive peignoirs or tea-gowns: clothes to collapse in before the ordeal of dressing for dinner. Her models wore sandals, even went barefoot, and she plainly intended that women should adopt the
déshabillé
style in public as well.

Credit for suppressing the corset, however, usually goes to Paul Poiret, the designer who grafted the paraphernalia of
The Thousand and One Nights
onto everyday dress. Perhaps a misunderstanding of this crucial point of fashion history stems from Madame Vionnet's estimation of Poiret: ‘Monsieur Poiret was not a
couturier.
He was a
costumier . . . très bien pour le théâtre!'

With this neat dialectic distinction, she succeeds in equating his clothes with fancy dress.

Her own couture house opened in 1912. She shut it during the War, went to Rome, and returned to Paris at the close of hostilities. She induced Galeries Lafayette to back her, and in 1923 reopened in sumptuous premises on the Avenue Montaigne. The richest women in the world flocked to her: she never went to them.

‘I was a dressmaker,' she says. ‘I believed in my
métier.
I chose my friends for their brains, for their real worth and for no other reason. Monsieur Léger was a friend. Whenever he was tired of painting, he liked to come and watch me cut . . .

‘No. I was never
mondaine.
I never dined in restaurants and, when I went to the theatre, I went alone. I have never cared to dress myself well. I was short . . . and I hate short women!'

Among the few clients she would consent to see was the Italian-born Duchesse de Gramont: ‘Ah! She was a real model. Tall and lovely. When I was designing a dress, I had only to ask her to come and try it on . . . and I knew
exactly
where it was wrong!'