Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [37]
In Paris, you are on easy terms with the past. I would nod to Apollinaire, a favorite poet, as I went by 202 boulevard Saint-Germain, where he lived after coming back wounded from the front in World War I. I liked going by the Jesuit-style Église de Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, set back from the boulevard, where Apollinaire was married, with Picasso as witness. On my way to Nancy Mitford’s I would go by 120 rue du Bac, a handsome house from which Chateaubriand set off every afternoon to visit Madame Récamier. Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, George Sand, Madame de Staël, Voltaire, Wagner (he finished Die Meistersinger in Paris) were among the friendly neighborhood ghosts.
It is often said, and with some reason, that Parisians are not hospitable to the foreigner. But what an abundance of generosity and hospitality came my way! I remember Picasso rummaging through the indescribable chaos of his vast studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins to try and dig up some drawings I wanted to publish. (He found them, I gave them back, and he never could find them again.) Fernand Léger lined up his recent work for me and asked which canvases I liked best. Pleased with my choice he whacked me jovially across the back: “You’re a good girl, you have a good strong stomach.” Matisse received me with all the books he had illustrated meticulously opened out so that he could explain in each case what problems he had solved, and how. The admirable, austere Nadia Boulanger (who taught so many American composers, beginning with Aaron Copland) invited me to her icy apartment on the rue Ballu to hear her latest protégé. The composer, Francis Poulenc, a bulky pear-shaped figure, was droll beyond words and yet indescribably poignant as he accompanied himself on a small upright piano and sang the soprano solo—that of a woman desperately trying to hold on to her lover—from his La Voix humaine. President Vincent Auriol took me on a tour of the Palais de l’Élysée after a press conference to point out the famous Gobelin tapestry. And I remember the ultimate Parisian accolade: a great French chef, the late René Viaux of the restaurant in the Gare de l’Est, named a dish after me.
A few years after my Pont Royal days I was starting my own art magazine, L’Oeil, in a minute office at the back of a cobbled courtyard on the rue des Saints-Pères. It was sparsely furnished—no pictures yet. The wall behind me was painted a shade of blue I like particularly, the color of a package of Gauloise cigarettes. When Alberto Giacometti came by for a chat, I said a bit apologetically that it must seem odd—an art magazine office with no art around. “Not at all,” he answered, looking at me across my desk. “You are a personnage sur fond bleu, that’s all you need.” (Giacometti characteristically tried to discourage us from running an article on him in the first issue. “It will ruin the chances of your magazine. No one will buy it if it shows my work.” Naturally, we paid no attention.)
For the magazine, we needed good writers and got in touch with a young English art critic whose weekly column in the London Sunday Times was indispensable reading if you wanted to know not only what was going on in England but on the Continent as well. It was clear that, unlike many critics, he loved art; he wrote about it with informed enthusiasm, and he wrote in crystalline prose. There was not a dull phrase to be weeded out in translation (French translation did wonders for some of our German, Dutch, Italian, and English-language contributors) and, what is more, he knew France and the French language very well.
We corresponded. He sent in his articles—on time. We met. Our conversations centered on ideas for features and deadlines. I had the intense seriousness of the young and the harassed, and I was producing a monthly publication on a shoestring as thin as the one Man Ray wore in lieu of a tie. In private life both of us were programmed, to use computer language, in other directions. Unlikely as it seems, I had no idea that while