Meryle Secrest Page 6
“He is a dreamer,” she wrote, “a man who lives only in books although the necessities of life force him to untiring efforts.” Mondolfi was married with children of his own. “He gives 12 or 13 hours of lessons a day and in spite of it, his head is in the clouds. Very good-hearted, very discerning … He strives for good but does not always find the right road.” Still, she would not judge him. “I love him very much, admire him even more and owe him my deepest gratitude. He was my friend during some sad times … and the one who pushed me towards teaching. To him I owe whatever peace of mind I have found.” Her frank evaluation of Mondolfi’s influence does not mention that he was a leading spiritualist, another strong point of contact. He was at the house so often one is led to posit that he was the ideal companion she had never found. Loving him, she loved his children. His son Uberto became Dedo’s best friend and constantly there as well. Eugénie called him her “extra” child, perhaps expressing a more or less conscious wish.
Despite his years managing a bank in Tunis, Papa had been permanently scarred by the disasters of losing a wife and the Garsin business collapses. In 1886, after Clémentine’s death, he also moved in with Eugénie and stayed there until his death ten years later. As an influence on Dedo he presents a mixed blessing. One thinks of his easy charm, his delicious manners, his facility with languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, and some English. One thinks of his enormous erudition. There is also the fact that he was emotionally fragile, “an embittered, irascible old man, suffering from a persecution mania,” Jeanne Modigliani wrote, someone capable of believing that he was being conspired against by a gardener. How many irrational outbursts, how many explosions of rage Dedo may have witnessed, cannot be known.
What is known is that Isacco was an important influence on Dedo’s intellectual development until he was twelve. He had more time for him than his harassed mother, and they would take long walks along the harbor while Isacco gave full rein to his passion for abstract speculations about history and philosophy from which his grandson may have extracted some snatches of meaning. Isacco, who was a great chess player, may have taught it to Dedo, or recited passages in Dante, or sung Italian ballads, and saw to his religious education, preparing him for his bar mitzvah. Perhaps he taught him, as it is said, “Tova toireh mikol sechoireh”: “Learning is the best merchandise.” His other grandsons, Emanuele and Umberto, found such subjects intensely boring. They sensibly preferred sailors, soldiers, ships, and guns; but in Dedo, Isacco had found a kindred spirit.
Although he appeared infrequently, Amédée Garsin is another figure who had a direct influence on Dedo. His name crops up often in “L’Histoire de notre famille” because he was Eugénie’s favorite sibling. He was “so gentle, so delicate and so agreeable. He was a comrade. He understood me.” When he did well in school she was delighted. Whenever he was ill—a bout with typhoid left him with a lesion on one lung—she panicked. She lived for his letters, and if she did not hear from him was full of anxious foreboding.
A photograph of Amédée Garsin as an adult shows him as dark-haired, with a broad forehead, deep-set eyes, and a neat moustache and goatee. Born in 1860, he was thirteen when the family crash came. He finished his studies at business school and was apprenticed at a young age. Like Clémentine, he was short and slim. But, unlike other Garsins, he had an effortless ability to make money. Jeanne Modigliani wrote that whenever Uncle Amédée arrived for a visit in Livorno, “his passage always left behind a breeze of fantasy, generosity and warm enthusiasm.” Thanks to him, Emanuele went to the University of Pisa and became a lawyer. Umberto took his engineering diploma at the University of Liège. Amédée took as much interest in them as if they had been his own sons, and since he never married, in a way they were. The handsome young uncle, who arrives loaded down with presents and slips money into people’s pockets, demonstrated how a successful actor deals with life. “[The show] is often enacted … for the promotion of the actor’s interests and those of his family, friends and protégés,” Luigi Barzini wrote in The Italians. “How many impossible things become probable here, how many insuperable difficulties can be smoothed over with the right clothes, the right facial expressions, the right mise-en-scène, the right words?” Everyone wanted to look well off even, or especially, if they were not. The art of appearing rich, Barzini continued, “has been cultivated in Italy as nowhere else.” Nonskilled workers who achieved their first steady jobs spent their money on superfluous and gaudy purchases. “Apparently the things they want above all are the show of prosperity and the reassurance they can read in the eyes of their envious neighbors. Only later do they improve their houses, buy some furniture, blankets, sheets, pots and pans. The last thing they spend money on is food. Better food is invisible.”
An undated photograph of Uncle Amédée Garsin (image credit 3.3)
Amédée was rich, except for all the times when he was not. According to Margherita he made and lost three fortunes. There were factors at work here that she failed to understand: his reckless indifference to money and the way he seemed compelled to gamble it away. In that respect, Amédée Garsin was following a long tradition that reached its apogee in the eighteenth-century gaming salons of London, Paris, Bath, and elsewhere. Throwing money away was aristocratic. Throwing money away showed just how limitlessly rich you were. The daredevil coolness involved was admired, then as now, as evidence of manliness and superior breeding. A talent for acting; the cultivation of seigneurial indifference to money—such lessons were not lost on Dedo.
Uncle Amédée did not pay for Margherita’s schooling because she did not have any. In the Garsin family, women were not completely ignored—they might be allowed to study, so long as it did not interfere with their roles as wives and mothers—but in all essential ways this was a family that was all for its sons and neglected its daughters. Women stayed in their assigned places, as Clémentine did. Eugénie also accepted these limitations until circumstances forced her to do otherwise. She went from being a liability to being a financial asset and acquired the confidence that accompanied her new status. She was lucky. She had male support and recognition, not just from Mondolfi, for the gifts she would continue to explore, translating Gabriele d’Annunzio’s poetry into French and writing novels and short stories under a pen name. Her essays on Italian literature were good enough for an American professor to buy and publish—under his own name, of course. If she was ahead of her times her sisters, lacking the same emotional support and validation, were floundering. Unmarried, they shuttled from house to house, feeling stifled, unappreciated, and blocked, taking refuge in a kind of neurasthenia common to intelligent women who have caught a glimpse of a wider world and then been barred from entering it.
The young Amedeo was being brought up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty. On the one hand there was the Modigliani heritage of palatial rooms, servants, meals, and the homage due to the reigning monarch of such an establishment. On the other, there was the reality of the cramped little house on a back street, the scramble for money, the menial chores, and the social status they nevertheless felt was their due; one sees it in the defiant tilt of Eugénie’s head. The result seems to have been, for the Garsins, an intensified love of learning for its own sake. Books were Dedo’s companions. He lived among them, especially Les Animaux peint par eux-mêmes, a book on animals illustrated by Gustave Doré. Dedo would spend hours embellishing the original plates with his own color schemes, presumably to general approval.
Amedeo Modigliani, caught telling a joke to Giovanni Fattori, grand old man of the Macchiaioli school of Italian painting, with Fattori’s wife (image credit 3.4)
Commentators on Modigliani’s life believe he showed no interest in art until he was fourteen. This seems implausible, since histories of artists demonstrate that, like musicians, they begin exploring their talents early in life. Modigliani’s brother Umberto told June Rose, one of Modigliani’s biographers, that Dedo drew from childhood; lacking paper he would take over the wa
lls and, presumably, floors as well. His happy ability to improvise on anything and everything, including china and furniture, bears witness to a natural gift. Photographs of the period, requiring that the sitter remain motionless, give one little clue to temperament. A school picture of about 1894 shows Dedo in a group with eight youngsters, all wearing a military-style shirt with button trims, belts, and dark pants. Dedo, hands at his sides, stands at attention, his face a blank. But there is a later photograph, blurred and undated, that is a revelation. Dedo has been caught telling a joke; his eyes dance with mischief and quicksilver charm. In the hunt to find the real person the smile is a minor but revealing clue. As for Eugénie, she knew Dedo was intelligent, probably spoiled as well. She wondered what kind of personality lay inside the chrysalis. “Perhaps an artist?” she wrote with prescience. Dedo was eleven.
The year before, in 1894, Dedo had entered his first school, the Ginnasio F. D. Guerrazi (grammar school), where Eugénie’s friend Rodolfo Mondolfi taught. A boy who is not in school and goes on exploratory walks with his grandfather soon knows the map of a town like the back of his hand. Livorno, or Leghorn, would have been a rewarding discovery in Modigliani’s childhood, but there is not much left of the old town nowadays. Livorno suffered heavy damage during World War II and has largely been rebuilt since. One imagines it as once like Marseille, a twisting network of streets leading off the old port. Livorno had been a major port on the Ligurian Sea since the sixteenth century and rose to prominence after Pisa, its Mediterranean neighbor twelve miles to the north, silted up. On the one hand it developed as a center for shipbuilding and heavy industry; on the other, as a tourist attraction, with massed banks of flowers along the promenades. Somehow Modigliani’s birthplace on the via Roma has escaped destruction and is now a museum. There is a large synagogue, established in the sixteenth century. There is also a Protestant cemetery with tombstones bearing such names as Lockhart, Murray, Ross, and Lubbock.
Pisa and Livorno have a long and romantic history as magnets for a British colony of writers and poets. Tobias Smollett, who wrote Humphrey Clinker at nearby Antignano, died in Livorno in 1771 and is buried at the Protestant cemetery. Early in the nineteenth century it was fashionable for the British literati to explore the Ligurian coast in yachts, a vogue that was adopted with enthusiasm by Byron, who was eternally restless and wealthy enough to build his own. In pursuit of picturesque views and the perfect sailing waters the British poet wandered up and down the Ligurian coast, renting one spacious villa after another. In the summer of 1822 he and his entourage were ensconsced in a villa in Montenero, a hilly suburb of Livorno that could only be reached by a funicular, with spectacular views over the Mediterranean. There Byron was joined by Leigh Hunt, poet, journalist, and critic, with whom he was engaged in launching a new magazine. Hunt, his wife, and six children settled in for a long visit, there to be met by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had moved to Italy with his family and was living further up the coast in an unused boathouse at San Terenzo. Shelley was then working on his last major poem, “The Triumph of Life.” He was twenty-nine years old.
The via Vittorio Emanuele, one of the central shopping streets in Livorno at the turn of the twentieth century (image credit 3.5)
Early in July 1822, Shelley set sail in a new boat, the Ariel, built for him by Byron, fast and luxurious but an open craft with no deck. He made the fifty-mile trip to Leghorn in about seven hours, and stayed for a week. Then he, a friend, Lieutenant Edward Williams, and an eighteen-year-old cabin boy set out on the return journey. There was a violent storm. The boat capsized and all three were drowned. Their bodies washed up on the beach at Viareggio ten days later and were cremated on the spot, with Byron in attendance. Shelley’s partially decomposed body was recognized by a book of Keats’s poetry that was found in his pocket.
The port of Livorno, from a postcard sent by Modigliani to Paul Alexandre (image credit 3.6)
Shelley had written an elegy, “Adonais,” the name he gave to Keats, who had died of tuberculosis the year before at the age of twenty-four. Shelley’s lengthy poem mourning the loss of a great poet ends with a curiously prophetic stanza:
[M]y spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
“I am borne darkly …” Judging by a photograph of the Ginnasio F. D. Guerrazi student body presumably taken the year Dedo entered it (1897–98), the grammar school boys, ranging in age from ten to about fifteen or sixteen, were either split into small groups or in one large class, with individual curricula depending on their rates of progress. A report card for the same academic year shows that Dedo was studying the standard humanist subjects: Latin, Greek, and French, in addition to Italian, with courses in geography, mathematics, history, and natural history. Students were being graded on gymnastics, but that part of Dedo’s report card is blank. In fact, the boy in the picture, squeezed between classmates in the front row, had already had his first serious illness.
Sometime in the summer of 1895, when he was eleven, Dedo developed a chest pain so sharp and persistent that it hurt to breathe. Perhaps he also had a moderate fever and a dry cough. Perhaps his lungs were filling with a clear fluid. The diagnosis was pleurisy and he was put to bed, a tape wound tightly around the lower part of his chest. Dedo slowly recovered, but Eugénie wrote in her diary that his illness gave her “a terrible fright.” She might have known, or guessed, that this illness was an ominous sign.
During the next two or three years, Mené obtained his law degree, Umberto acquitted himself well at the University of Liège, and Margherita, aided by her mother, showed promising signs of becoming a scholar herself. Laure had taken up writing and translating. Gabrielle stayed with friends for awhile and then returned, but was in a stubborn mood. Eugénie wrote in the early summer of 1897, “Gabrielle neglects almost everything”—by that she meant her sister’s household duties—“to give herself up to orgies of piano playing.” It would seem Gabrielle had conceived the ambition of becoming a professional musician, and “in order to run after an impossible ideal, the poor child neglects to make herself useful. I have not the slightest influence over her; she flares up at the smallest word and even accused me once of deliberately trying to make her unhappy.” Dedo’s grandfather had died the year he went to school. Eugénie wrote, “My poor father had suffered greatly before dying. But he … left this world where he had so many blighted hopes with a serenity that comforts me, and makes me think his death was a deliverance.” Meanwhile, two years after his attack of pleurisy in 1895, the thirteen-year-old Dedo had passed his bar mitzvah and was ready to launch himself into life, or so his fond mother believed. That year, Dedo did not do well in school, but then, he had hardly bothered to study. The year before, he had decided on his future career. She wrote in July 1896, “He already sees himself as an artist.” He was now twelve years old.
Not enough is known about Laure and Gabrielle to explain their sad eventual fates. In 1915, the year Gabrielle committed suicide by throwing herself from the top of a staircase, Laure was admitted to a mental hospital. The situation is complicated by the fact that, in the nineteenth century, calling a woman insane was often a convenient way of getting rid of her. A sense of frustration was seen as a perverse refusal to be happy, arguing with a husband a sacrilege, and rebelling against her natural roles as dangerous. As Michelle Perrot wrote in A History of Private Life, excuses of this kind were enough to lock up obstreperous women in mental institutions because of “a private tragedy or family conflict of which the physician was the sole judge and arbiter.” Adèle Hugo and Camille Claudel, for instance, were “apparently … confined as a result of arbitrary de
cisions on the part of families intent on safeguarding the reputations of two famous men.” It is worth remembering that, in France, women could not vote until 1944 and in Italy, until 1945.
One has to believe that whatever troubled Laure and Gabrielle was not understood and dismissed if only because the insurrection of daughters, sisters, and wives was a taboo subject. Eugénie’s account omits all such speculations. Laure is hopeless, an introvert and a dreamer. Gabrielle, who ought to be helping them, is embarked on the ridiculous ambition to become a pianist. As for Margherita, despite Mené’s loyal references to his pretty sister, she does not appear as attractive in photographs and did not marry. She is competing with three brilliant brothers, one of them ill so often that her mother can hardly think of anything, or anyone, else. And Eugénie was always prepared for the worst. She had seen too many people die not to view life through a prism of rage and loss. In 1891, when Dedo was seven, she wrote a poem that would seem to be the response to some kind of business disaster in her brother Amédée’s life. He may even have been sent to prison. She called the poem “Fierce Wish”:
I wish to proclaim the Kingdom of Force:
To hang a Jew on every tree
To loose from prison every thug,
To flay every person of virtue.
To snatch from Aunt Eugenia the pious Amedeo
Who today soothes her every pain
And compels her to smile sometimes.
To drive all kindness from the earth,
To duck every abstainer in a wine-vat,